The art of poetry

Question 1

Notions de versification

     La forme poetique

La forrne poetique poeme se divise en strophes (stanzas} et en vers(lines) de longueur variable. Chaque vers est divise par une cesure (caesura}, pause qui separe le vers en deux hemistiches (hemistichs). Lorsque la fin du vers ne correspond pas a la fin d’une sequence grammaticale, on parle d’enjambement (run-on line ou enjambment). A l’inverse, il s’agit d’un vers qui fait coincider grammaire et metrique (end-stopped line). Une strophe de deux vers est un distique. (couplet,ou distich quand le couplet developpe une seule idee coherente ), puisqu’on parle de tercet (tercet), quatrain (quatrain), cinquain (cinquain), sizain (sestet), septain (septet) et huitain (octave). Le vers, selon le nombre de syllabes accentuees qu’il contient, porte le nom de monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter (plus rarement, alexandrine), heptameter et octameter. Le vers le plus courant en anglais est le pentametre iambique (iambic pentameter) : les pieces de Shakespeare I’utilisent abondamment sous la fonne du vers blanc regulier mais non rime. • Rythme et accentuation. La poesie anglophone est detenninee par un rythme (rhythm) particulier fait se croiser rythme naturel de la langue (v. Principes d’accentuation ) le texte doit etre lu a voix haute. A la difference de la poesie anglaise dont l’unite de base est la syllabe, la scansion en poesie anglaise est rythmee a la fois par le nombre de syllabes et le nombre d’accents (stresses ou beats) contenu clans chaque vers. L’unite de base de la scansion anglaise est le pied (foot), groupe de deux ou trois syllabes (parfois le pied peut n’avoir quune seule syllabe) comportant au moins une syllabe accentuee. C’est le nombre et la distribution des syllabes accentuees (/) et non accentuees (x) dans le pied qui determine le type de pied auquel on a. On considere qu’un pied qui s’acheve sur une syllabe accentuee est ascendant (x /, par exemple), alors quun pied qui s·acheve sur une syllabe non accentuee est descendant (/ x /, par exemple ). on parle de pentameter pour un vers de cinq pieds ; de iambic meter pour designer un iambe (un pied du type x. /) ou pour designer la structure d’un vers ou d’un poeme composes essentiellement de ianbes: de meter pour la versification typique de la ballade (v. infra). On distingue deux grands types de mettre en fonction du nombre de syllabes des pieds qui le fondent: le metre binaire (binary meter) correspond a un pied de deux syllabes ; le metre temaire (ternary meter) correspond a un pied de trois syllabes.

Answer 1

x

Question 2

Chaque vers peut etre compose uniquement d’un type de pied specifique, binaire ou ternaire, iambe ou trochee. La repetition d’un type de pied dans un poeme forme la regularite metrique (metrical pattern) du poeme, qu’il s’agit dans un premier temps de reperer, Cependant un poeme n’est pas sauf exception, totalement regulier ; de nombreuses variations et combinaisons sont possibles, par exemple lorsqu’un pied temaire est inclus un metre binaire… Ces effet, c’est dans 1’ ecart entre la structure d’ ensemble (par exemple un poeme en pentametres iambiques) et le detail du vers (par exemple un pied introducteur qui n’est pas un iambe mais une trochee) que glisse la matiere poetique. Chaque variation produit un effet de sens en soulignant (to foreground) une image ou un mot. En particulier, l’accentua naturelle dun mot peut entrer en conflit avec la regularite metrique.Les articles ou verbes auxiliaires ne sont pas generalaement accentues dans la phrase anglaise (v. La structure de la phrase). Lorsque la metrique les met en avant, il s’agit de foregrounding et cela merite commentaire. Par exemple, le vers d’Emily Dickinson “MY life has stood-a loaded Gun”, une fois scande, respecte 1’accentuation naturelle et le rythme de la parole* :
Si un mot doit etre accentue de maniere differente a cause du metre, on parle de wrenched accent. Par exemple, clans la ballade populaire ‘’And I fear, rny dear master’, on a affaire a un metre iambique dont 1’accent metrique tomberait sur la derniere syllabe du dernier mot, ce qui entre en conflit avec l’accentuation naturelle, master. ) .*

Answer 2

x / x / x / x /
My life has stood—a loaded Gun”

Le rythme le plus repandu, car le plus proche de la parole en anglais est un rythme binaire ascendant, l’iambe (iamb. adjectif : iambic, x / ;
x / x / x / x / x /
When I have fears that I may cease to be” (John Keats, sonnet)

b) Le trochee (trochee adjectif :trochaic ) est un rythme binaire descendant :
/ x / x / x /
“Tyger, tyger, burning bright’’ (William Blake ‘The ‘tyger”)
c) L’anapeste (anapest, adjectif: anapestic, xx/ ) est un rythme ternaire ascendant:
x x / x x /
Little Lamb, who made thee’!” (William Blake, “The Lamb”)
Le dactyle ( dactyl, adjectif : dactylic, / x x) est un rythme ternaire descendant peu utilise hors des pieces comiques :
/ x x / x x /
‘Hickory Dickory Dock” (Nursery Rhyme)
d) Le spondee (spondee, adjectif: spondaic, //} est un pied qui contient deux syllabes accntuees consecutives ; il n’est pas utilise de maniere continue comme moyen de souligner un mot ou une idee :
x / / / / / / x
“Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.” (Ted Hughes, “View of a Pig’’) Pig”)
e) Le pyrrhique (pyrrhic, adjectif identique, x x) est un pied de deux syllabes non accentuees; on considere souvent que ce pied est une substitution ou appartient au pied adjacent.
x x / / x x /
“To a green Thought in a green Shade” (Andrew Marvell, ‘’Tite Garden’)

Question 3

Les sons
Il convient de porter une attention particuliere aux schemas des rimes ( rhyme schemes), qui sont utilises a des fins specifiques (ainsi dans le theatre elisabethain un distique rime, rhming couplet, signifie la fin d’une scene), et l’analyse des rimes doit etre liee a une etude de la syntaxe et de 1a grammaire du vers, en gardant a l’esprit qu’une rime peut se trouver a l’interieur du vers: on parle de rime interne (internal rhyme) lorsque le dernier mot du vers fait echo a celui se trouvant avant la cesure.
Il existe en anglais deux types de rimes selon l’accentuation, la rime masculine (masculine rhyme), qui est une monosyllabe accentuee, ou Ia rime feminine (feminine rhyme), rime de plusieurs syllabes dont la derniere nest pas accentuee. La rime la plus courante est denommee true rhyme, lorsque la sequence finale d’une voyelle et d’une consonne est identique dans les deux mots. Les autres types de rimes sont appeles imparfaits : si seule la consonne finale est repetee, il s’agit d’une rime pauvre (half-rhyme) si les consonnes initiales et finales sont repetees on parle de slant rhyme (par exemple let/lit) enfin, la rime pour l’eil ( oeil rhyme) fait rimer deux syllabes similaires d’apparence mais prononcees differemment (par exemple, rough/dough).

Answer 3

Les differents schemas de rimes finales sont les suivants :
a) rime plate : couplet rhymes (AABBCC)
b) rimes croisees : alternate rhyme (ABABAB)
c) rimes embrassees: enclosing rhymes (ABBA CDDC)
rime couee : tail-rhyme (AABCCB)

Question 4

THE CAESURA

Nearly every line of verse of three or more feet contains a rhythmical pause known as the caesura, a name derived from Classical prosody. Some lines may have two or more pauses, but only the more emphatic one is the caesura. Although it is usual for this pause to come near the middle of the line, it may occur anywhere, between feet or within them. Indeed, variety and effectiveness are gained by a constant shifting of the caesura in succeeding lines. As a rule, the caesura coincides with a pause in the sense. If the pause follows an accented syllable, the caesura is said to be masculine; if it follows an unaccented syllable, it is said to be feminine. A caesura is commonly indicated thus 11 .Each of the two segments of a line of poetry so divided is called a hemistich. Note the caesuras in the following lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Feminine caesuras occur in lines 2 and 10; the others are masculine.*

Answer 4

High on a throne of royal state, // which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormusil and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East // with richest hand
Showers on her kings // barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, // I by merit raised
To that bad eminence; // and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, // I aspires
Beyond thus high, // insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heaven; // and, by success untaught,
His proud imaginationsl // thus displayed.
-Milton, Paradise Lost

Question 5

THE ALEXANDRINE
The Alexandrine is a line composed of six iambic feet; it is so called because it was used in Old French poems on Alexander the Great. Although widely used in France, it has never become popular in England. It was used in the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (c. 1300), along with a seven-accent line; occasionally in the miracle and the morality plays; and in Drayton’s Polyolbion (c. 1613). When the Alexandrine was alternated with the seven-accent line, the combination was called poulter’s measure, because in the words of George Gascoigne (1575) the poulterer “giveth twelve for one dozen, and thirteen for another.” Henry How ard, Earl of Surrey, thus illustrates poulter’s measure:

Pope characterized the Alexandrine as “languishingly slow”-
A needless Alexandrine ends the song / That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
-Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Used at the end of shorter-line stanzas, the Alexandrine adds the effect of dignity and serves to join the stanzas in harmonious progression. See the Spenserian stanza and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Answer 5

x

Question 6

BLANK VERSE

The most stately meter in English poetry is blank verse-that is, unrhymed verse written in iambic pentameter measure. As far as we know, the Earl of Surrey (c. 1517-1547) was the first English poet to use it. He borrowed it from Italian writers ~~loyed it in a translation of two books of the Aeneid,) Many other poets followed his example; Maiil6we used it in Tamburlaine in 1589, and his “mighty line,” as it came to be called, set the fashion for Shakespeare and later dramatists. Because of its vigor and majesty, it also became the established measure for English epics and other dignified narrative verse, like Keats’s Hy perion and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

Surrey’s blank verse is a little stiff, adhering closely to the exact iambic movement. Moreover, it is rather consistently end-stopped (a natural pause falling at the end of a line), and hence has the quality of conventional couplets without rhyme. Marlowe’s early verse shows a similar stiffness, but his later verse has considerably more flexibility.
The development of Shakespeare’s drama to full maturity runs parallel to the increasing adaptability of his blank verse, as can be seen in the change from the essentially lyric impulse of Romeo and Juliet to the subtly dramatic movement of speech in Antony and Cleopatra.

With Milton blank verse achieves broad rhetorical variety, partly through the run-on line (the end of a line does not correspond to a natural pause in speech; see eniambment, p. 12) and the changing position of the caesura.

Wordsworth shows a certain Miltonic influence, but adapts blank verse to serve his purpose of more simple and direct communication.

Tennyson elevates it to a new eloquence suitable for the variety of themes with which he concerned himself. The essential naturalness of blank verse has been felt sufficient justification for its continued use by many modern poets. No other set meter in English lends itself so well to the characteristic expression of individual authors.*



Answer 6

x
Sir, I will eat no meat, I’ll not drink, sit;
If idle talk will once be necessary,
I’ll not sleep neither: this mortal house I’ll ruin,
Do Caesar what he can. Know, sit, that I
Will riot wait pinion’d at your master’s court;
Nor once be chastised with the sober eye
Of dull Octavia. Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring!
-Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Of Mari’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.
-Milton, Paradise Lost

And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
-Tennyson, Morte dArthur



When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain.
-Robert Frost, Birches

Question 7

THE RHETORIC OF VERSE

RHYME Words are said to rhyme if the accented vowels have the same sound, if the sounds following those vowels are the same, and if the consonants preceding the vowels are different. Examples are deep sleep, shade-made, orn-forlorn, swallow-follow, snow-flow. Usage allows so-called imperfect rhymes, sometimes referred to as slant rhymes or pararhymes that is, words with slight variations in the accented vowels, such as earth-hearth, heaven-given, love-prove, guest-feast. A rhyme in which only single syllables correspond is called a masculine rhyme, as home–roam; one in which two syllables correspond is called a feminine rhyme, as otion-potion; one in which three syllables correspond is called a triple or multiple rhyme, as tenderly-slenderly. Rhyming words usually come at the ends of lines, but sometimes internal rhymes are used in which the last word in a line rhymes with a word
Rhyme serves a double purpose in a poem-it accentuates the rhythm, and it binds the lines into stanzas or other structural units. The rhyme scheme of a poem or a stanza is indicated by letters of the alphabet, rhyming
lines being designated with the same letter. The rhyme scheme of the stanza quoted above is abcb, with the second and fourth lines rhyming. Two other terms, homonym and homophone, should be noted in connection with rhyme. A homonym (lit., having the same name) is a word pronounced in the same way as another but having a different meaning, origin, and-in most cases-spelling: dear-deer, praise-prays-preys. The homonym may be the basis not only of rhyming but also of punning, as in Donne’s A Hymn to God the Father: “When thou hast done, thou hast not done.” A homophone (lit., having the same sound) is a letter pronounced the same as another: arc-hark, seraph-tariff.

Answer 7

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen;
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken
The ice was all between.
–Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Question 8

ALLITERATION
The earliest English poetry secures its metrical effect by means of alliteration, sometimes called beginning rhyme-or initial-rhyme, as distinguished from end rhyme. The Anglo-Saxon line of verse is broken into two parts, each of which contains two strongly stressed syllables. The third stressed syllable in the line alliterates with the first or the second stressed syllable, or with both. Only identical consonants alliterate, but all vowels alliterate. With this prominence given to stressed syllables, there is considerable freedom about unstressed syllables, both in number and in position. 

Some poets, intrigued by the rhythm of Anglo-Saxon poetry, have tried to reproduce in modern verse the effect of primitive alliteration. Tennyson’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Brunanburh reproduces fairly well the spirit of the original, although he uses short lines instead of the long lines of the original.*

ASSONANCE

Assonance is an agreement of accented vowel sounds preceded and followed by unlike consonant sounds. it is’ a principle of verse in the Song of Roland–the old French epic, and in Spanish poetry. It is found also in early Latin poetry of the Church. In English poetry it appears only as an ornament, but it is capable of interesting if subtle effects. In the first example below, assonance appears mainly in the last words of the lines; in the second it is used throughout the stanza, along with rhyme. *

Answer 8

Never had huger
Slaughter of heroes
Slain by the sword-edge

Such as old writers
Have writ of in histories
Hapt in this isle, since
Up from the East hither
Saxon and Angle from
Over the broad billow
Broke into Britain with
Haughty war-workers who
Harried the Welshman, when
Earls that were lured by the
Hunger of glory gat
Hold of the land.
-Tennyson, Battle of Brunanburh
W. H. Auden has written verse making use of alliteration in the traditional long line.

”0 where are you going?” said reader to rider,
”That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder’s the midden whose odors will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return.”

”0 do you imagine,” said fearer to farer,
”That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?”

-W. H. Auden, Epilogue

Maiden, crowned with glossy blackness,
Lithe as panther forest-roaming,
Long-armed naiad, when she dances,
On a stream of ether floating.
–George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy

Question 9

CONSONANCE
Though consonance generally means the harmony of sounds, as opposed to dissonance, the discord or incongruity of sounds, the word has a specific application to the use of language in poetry: consonance is the recurrence of certain consonants in combination with various vowels and other consonants. The underlined consonants in the lines below illustrate this effect.



ONOMATOPOEIA
Onomatopoeia is said to occur when the sound of a word echoes the sense of the word. There is indeed a small group of genuinely onomatopoetic words, such as murmur, buzz, clang, crack, boom. Coleridge, in the following passage from Cbristabel, makes obvious use of such words:*

It should be emphasized that the meaning of a word is of primary importance and its onomatopoetic effect always secondary. Furthermore, similar vowel and consonant sounds are capable of widely different effects in different contexts. A passage of Pope’s is of interest here. Notice the different effects, for example, achieved with the letters.*

Answer 9

And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,
Tu-whit!-Tu-whoo!
–Coleridge, Christabel

‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when the loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
-Pope, An Essay on Criticism

Question 10

It would seem that “smoothness” and “roughness” may often be represented more by such things as the movement of the verse and rhyme scheme than by the actual sound of individual words. In the following stanza, for example, Dryden attempts to suggest in words something of the quality of music (note the onomatopoetic “double, double, double beat”). But one should note, too, the way in which the short lines and the quick recurrence of rhyme suggest shrillness.*
REPETITION
Repetition as a poetic device may involve a single word, a phrase, a line, or even an entire stanza. Used in a hymn or other song, it appears as a refrain or a chorus. Sometimes the poet varies the effect by making slight changes in the repeated phrase, line, or stanza. (a) Incremental repetition, typical of the old ballads, is the repetition of a phrase or sentence with a slight change and increment of meaning from stanza to stanza.

(b) Repetition of words at the beginning of successive clauses is called anaphora. An instance is found in Keats’s sonnet, “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” in which a series of three ideas forming the three quatrains are introduced as follows:*

(c) The refrain is illustrated by Spenser’s Epithalamion, each long stanza of which ends with a slight variation of*



(d) The chorus is illustrated by Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast, which repeats as a chorus the last four to ten lines of each stanza.*

are repeated as the first two lines of the second stanza, then both these stanzas are repeated in their entirety midway in the poem, and the first stanza repeated yet again at the end. In A Man’s a Man for A’ That, Burns repeats the phrase, “an’ a’ that,” (or “for a’ that”) at the end of the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines in each stanza, and joins the two phrases (“For a’ that, an’ a’ that”) to form the fifth line throughout. In “The Tiger” Blake repeats the first stanza as the last stanza, with only slight variation, and in “The Lamb” he has four pairs of repeated lines out of a total of twenty. Frost gets a strong effect by repeating only the last line of “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “And miles to go before I sleep.”







Answer 10

The trumpet’s loud clangor
Excites us to arms

With shrill notes of anger
And mortal alarms.
The double, double, double beat
Of the thundering drum
Cries: “Hark! the foes come;
Charge, charge, ‘tis too late to retreat!”
-Dryden, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day

(line 1) When I have fears that I may cease to be
(line 5) When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
(line 9) And when I see, fair creature of an hour!

So I unto my selfe alone will sing,
The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring.
-Spenser, Epithalamion

(e) Miscellaneous functions of repetition. The first two lines of George Peele’s Fair and Fair,
Fair and fair, and twice so fair,
As fair as any may be;
-Peele, Fair and Fair

Question 11

ENJAMBMENT
The use of enjambment (or run-on lines) not only often prevents stiffness but also contributes much to the suggestiveness of poetry. In the following passage from Milton, for example, the long period (i.e., sentence) and the strategic placement of the words Sheer and Dropt at the start of lines reinforce the sense of a fall-*

Answer 11

and in Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o’er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer’s day, and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star,

On Lemnos, the Aegaean isle.
-Milton, Paradise Lost

Question 12

Similarly, in the following lines from George Herbert’s Church Monuments, the statement of dissolution is made vivid by the apparent looseness of the verse:*

Enjambment can, however, be used to achieve many different effects. in Robert Herrick’s “The Winding Sheet,” for example, the lines occur:*

At first “just” seems linked with “justice” and parallel to “equal” and “wise.” The reader is jolted when he reads on and finds that the word is used in a very different sense; the surprise drives home the poet’s point more emphatically. The device has continued to be us,-d in modern poetry, as in the following lines of Dylan Thomas.

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave’s foot….
-Dylan Thomas, After the Faneral It Memory of Anne Jones.*

Answer 12

flesh is but the glasse, which holds the dust
That measures all our time: which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.
-Herbert, Church Monuments

All wise, all equal, and all just
Alike i’ th’ dust.
-Herrick, “The Winding Sheet”

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave’s foot….
-Dylan Thomas, After the Faneral It Memory of Anne Jones.

Question 13

STANZA PATTERNS

A stanza is a group of two or more lines of poetry combined according to some definite plan and constituting a division of a poem. The effect of a stanza depends upon the rhyme scheme, the length of the lines, and other metrical devices. Short lines may be used to suggest intensity, as long lines tend to reflect greater leisureliness. A quick succession of rhymes may suggest compactness and restraint, as unrhymed lines or separated rhymes may suggest freedom or relaxation. Technical variations can provide interest and prevent what otherwise might become monotony. Most important, stanza patterns should be appropriate to or reflect the nature of the subject. As a rule, stanzas are classified according to the number of their lines; a few, however, derive their names from special uses or origins.

THE COUPLET (two-line stanza-rhyming aa) Lines rhyming in Pairs are called couplets. (The technical name for a group of two lines is distich.)
Although a few poems divide the couplets into separate stanzas, and some others group them into four- or six line stanzas, most poems using couplets move continuously without stanza divisions. Two forms are common—one composed of iambic pentameter lines, the other of iambic or trochaic tetrameter lines. Following are examples of the tetrameter measure-octosyllabic couplets:


Following are examples of iambic pentameter couplets. The first, from Chaucer, represents an early use of the couplet, though not as a stanza. The second, from Pope, is written in what is known as the heroic couplet, so called from its use in the consciously grandiloquent drama of the later seventeenth century (Dryden and Otway). The two lines of the heroic couplet express a fairly complete thought, with the second line often reinforcing the first; because of this completeness, with the thought ending with the second line, the couplet is said to be closed or end-stopped. The third example from Keats is called the open or run-on couplet because, as in Chaucer, the thought is carried beyond the end of the two lines. The closed couplet was the favorite medium of the didactic and satiric verse of the neoclassical period of English literature, and it is well suited to those types. It is also particularly appropriate for epigrams (see p. 24); a little practice will show how easy it is to memorize heroic couplets. The open couplet was popular with the nineteenth-century Romanticists. The example from Endymion is somewhat extreme in that the rhyming words are made so unimportant that they are easily lost to the ear. The last quotation, from Karl Shapiro, represents the survival of the ecasyllabic couplet in modern poetry, still more often found as a unit of a stanza rather than as a stanza itself.*

Answer 13

The western waves of ebbing day


Rolled o’er the glen their level way;


Each purple peak, each flinty spire,


Was bathed in floods of living fire.


And from a boy, to youth he grew;


The man put off the stripling’s hue;


The man matured and fell away


Into the season of decay;


And ever o’er the trade he bent,

And ever lived on earth content.
-Scott, The Lady of the Lake

-Browning, The Boy and the Angel
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
-W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats

A Knight ther was, and that a worthy man,

That fro the tyme that he first bigan

To fyden out, he loved chivalrye,

Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye
.
-Chaucer, Prologue to The Canterbury Tales

Be silent always when you doubt your sense;

And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence;

Some positive, persisting fops we know,

Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so;

But you, with pleasure own your errors past,

And make each day a Critic on the last.

‘Tis not enough, your counsel still be true;

Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do;

Men must be taught as if you taught them not,

And things unknown proposed as things forgot
.

-Pope, An Essay on Criticism

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth;

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits.


By marring the image, by the black device

Of the goat-god, by the clown of Paradise,

By fruits of cloth and by the navel’s bud,

By itching tendrils and by strings of blood,

By ugliness, by the shadow of our fear,

By ridicule, by the fig-leaf patch of hair.


-Keats, Endymion

Question 14

THE TERCET (three-line stanza)

The tercet, a three-line stanza built on a single rhyme, as in the first quotation below, has obvious limitations in an extended poem.’It is more effective combined with a refrain as in the Herrick poem. But it is most successful when used with an intricate rhyme scheme known as terza rima, a scheme, borrowed from the Italian, rhyming aba, bcb, cdc, and so on; Dante’s Divine Comedy is the best example of its use. Notice that the middle line of one stanza sets the rhyme for the stanza following, a pattern of great charm in that it makes the movement of verse continuous by binding one stanza to another. Note how Shelley completes the pattern with a couplet; another plan closes with a four-line stanza rhyming alternately. The quotation from Auden is in terza rima, but employs slant rhyme.*



THE QUATRAIN (four-line stanza)
The quatrain is the most popular stanza form in English poetry. It exists in many variations, of which the following are the most familiar:

The ballad stanza (rhyming abcb) The folk ballad and many ballads written in imitation of the folk ballad use the four-line stanza with alternating tetrameters and trimeters, and with the trimeters rhyming. Other well-known types of ballad stanzas rhyme abab and aabb and employ a scheme of line lengths different from the one indicated here.*

Answer 14

“The sap dries up: the plant declines.

A deeper tale my heart divines.

Know I not Death? the outward signs?
“

In the hour of my distress,
When temptations me oppress,

And when I my sins confess,


-Tennyson, The Two Voices

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share


The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, 0 uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be


The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven


As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!


A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
-Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

It is your face I see, and morning’s praise
Of you is ghoses approval of the choice,

Filtered through roots of the effacing grass.


Fear, taking me aside, would give advice
”
To conquer her, the visible enemy,
It is enough to turn away the eyes.”
-W. H. Auden, Family Ghosts

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
–Coleridge, The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner

Question 15

The heroic quatrain, or elegiac stanza (rhyming abab) The heroic quatrain, or elegiac stanza, another popular quatrain in English poetry, is composed of iambic pentameter lines rhyming alternately. Other meters and line lengths also are common.*

One rhyming pair enclosing another (rhyming abba) Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the most famous poem using this stanza form, is notable at once for its continuous dignity and its simple melody. As shown in the second example below, this formal stanza is also used effectively by contemporary poets.*

THE SEXTAIN (six-line stanza) Various combinations of six lines may comprise this stanza.*

CHAUCERIAN STANZA, OR RHYME ROYAL (seven-line stanza-rhyming ababbec)

Because James I of Scotland wrote a Scottish poem in which he used an iambic pentameter seven-line stanza, that form is often called rhyme royal, it was Chaucer, however, who first used it in English, and for this reason the term “Chaucerian stanza” is greatly to be preferred. The rhyme scheme of the stanza makes it suitable for both lyric and narrative poetry.*

Answer 15

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea;

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
–Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like a season’d timber, never gives;

But though the whole world turn to coal,

Then chiefly lives
.

-George Herbert, Virtme



Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,


And in the setting thou art fair.

I praise the fall it is the human season


-Tennyson, In Memoriam

0 mistress mine, where are you roaming?
0, stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting,

journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
-Shakespeare, Song from Twelfth Night

The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne,

Thassay so hard, so sharp the conqueringe,

The dredful joye, that alwey slit so yerne,

Al this mene I by love, that my felinge
A
stonyeth with his wonderful worchinge

So sore y-wis, that whan I on him thinke,

Nat wot I wel wher that I wake or winke.
-Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls

Question 16

OTTAVA RIMA (eight-line stanza-rhyming

abababee)
This stanza, consisting of eight iambic pentameter lines, is adopted from the Italian, from which it takes its name. A peculiarly flexible stanza form, it was admirably suited, for example, to Byron’s many moods as expressed in Beppo and Don Juan,*

THE SPENSERIAN STANZA (nine-line stanza
rhyming ababbcbce)

Edmund Spenser wrote his Faerie Queene in stanzas composed of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a hexameter line, an Alexandrine. It will be observed that the Spenserian stanza is an extension of the Chaucerian by the addition of two lines, one the Alexandrine, but both tied into the original rhyme scheme. The Alexandrine does, however, detach itself to some extent from the rest of the stanza. Often, for example, Spenser will move in the final line from narration to reflection; or he will use the line to summarize a situation.*


Although the stanza is capable of a form of “climax,” it is obvious that it is a difficult medium for narrative since the continuity is broken every nine lines. Apart from Spenser, the stanza has only seldom been used effectively. It is interesting to notice Keats’s use of it in the Eve of St. Agnes and Shelley’s in Adonais*

MISCELLANEOUS STANZA FORMS
The variety of stanza forms is almost infinite, employing any number of lines from two to eighteen (Spenser’s Epithalamion) or more. At the base of many of these will be found some form of quatrain with other lines integrated at the poet’s will.*



Answer 16

The coast-I think it was the coast that I

Was just describing-Yes, it was the coast

Lay at this period quiet as the sky,

The sands untumbled, the blue waves untost,

And all was stillness, save the sea-bird’s cry,

And dolphin’s leap, and little billow crost

By some low rock or shelve, that made it fret

Against the boundary it scarcely wet.
-Byron, Don Juan

Much daunted with that dint, her sence was dazd,

Yet kindling rage, her selfe she gathered round,
And all attonce her beastly body raizd

With doubled forces high above the ground:

Tho wrapping up her wrethed sterne arownd,

Lept fierce upon his shield, and her huge traine

All suddenly about his body wound,

That hand or foot to stirre he strove in vaine:


God helpe the man so wrapt in
Errours endlesse traine.
-Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Bk. 1, 1, 18

And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot;
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village-churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.
-Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

If yet I have not all thy love,
Dear, I shall never have it all,
I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move;
Nor can entreat one other tear to fall,
And all my treasure, which should purchase thee,
Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters I have spent.
Yet no more can be due to me,
Than at the bargain made was meant,
If then thy gift of love were partial,
That some to me, some should to others fall,
Dear, I shall never have thee all.
-Donne, Love’s Infiniteness

Question 17

THE UNRHYMED STANZA
Although most poetry is written either in rhyming stanzas or in blank verse (see p. 5), a few poems are composed of unrhymed stanzas. Notable in this group is Collins’s Ode to Evening, from which the following stanzas are quoted.*

Unrhymed stanzas are prevalent in contemporary poetry.*

Answer 17

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing;
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn,
As oft he rises ‘midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum:
Now teach me, maid composed,
To breathe some softened strain,

Whose numbers, stealing through thy darkening vale,
May, not unseemly, with its stillness suit,
As, musing slow, I hail
Thy genial loved return!
-Williarn Collins, Ode to Evening

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
-Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

Question 18

The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet
The Italian, or Petrarchan sonnet, named after the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374), consists of two parts -an,octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The octave is really two quatrains, rhyming abba abba; in these eight lines the poet formally presents his thought or emotion. The sestet, rhyming cde cde or cd cd cd, contains an answer, a reflection, a counteremotion, or some other resolution by way of concluding the poem. In the following example, note the importance of the word Then at the beginning of the sestet, which indicates that what follows ig directly dependent on what has previously been stated in the octave.*

The English or Shakespearean sonnet
The English or Shakespearean sonnet is associated with the poet’s name because he was the first to develop the full potentiality of this form. Its particular structure was actually devised by the Earl of Surrey after he and Sir Thomas Wyatt adopted the sonnet form into English literature from the Italian poets. The English sonnet consists of three quatrains, which present three points or aspects of an idea, and a concluding couplet which summarizes or ties together what has been expressed in the quatrains. The rhyme scheme, subject to some variation, is abab cded efef gg. The perfect fusion of form and content which the English sonnet allows is shown in the following example, where the phrase in me in the first line of each quatrain emphasizes the series of closely related thoughts being expressed, and where the pronoun This at the beginning of the couplet points back clearly to what has preceded.*

Answer 18

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I beard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
-Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

-Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

Question 19

The Spenserian sonnet
Spenser rearranged the rhymes of the Petrarchan sonnet and sought to gain continuity through an interlocking pattern similar to that of his famous Spenserian stanza. Indeed the rhyme scheme of the first eight lines of this stanza is employed in twelve lines of the Spenserian sonnet-rhyming abab bcbc cdcd. The concluding lines of the sonnet are a couplet ee. Usually, the effect is close to that of an English sonnet, but the division into quatrains is more arbitrary, less functional.*

Answer 19

Fresh spring the herald of loves mighty king,
in whose cote armour richly are displayed
all sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring
in goodly colours gloriously arrayd.
Goe to my love, where she is carelesse layd,
yet in her winters bowre not well awake:
tell her the joyous time will not be staid
unlesse she doe him by the forelock take.
Bid her therefore her selfe soone ready make,
to wayt on love amongst his lovely crew:
where every one that misseth then her make,
shall be by him amearst with penance dew.
Make hast therefore sweet love, whilest it is prime,
for none can call againe the passed time.
-Spenser, Amoretti, 70

Question 20

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (TROPES)
Meter and figurative language-that is, language that expresses one thing in terms of another by analogy, extension, or other association–are two major and virtually indispensable ingredients of poetry. A critical approach to poetry requires knowledge not only of meter but also of the function and scope of the various figures of speech. These should never be mere decoration; they are one of the means by which a poet can develop and express his meaning. Satisfactory definition of figures of speech is difficult since in ommon usage the various terms have often been made interchangeable. There is a tendency to include symbols, similes, and metaphors under the heading of “imagery”; “metaphorical” is loosely used to mean “figurative”; and “symbolical” or “symbolizes” is often applied to almost any of the figurative qualities of language. But each of these terms has a specific meaning, however arbitrary, and it is important to learn these meanings in order to have a terminology for analyzing the subtleties and complexities of poetry. The trope, which is the generic name for figures of speech (tropology is the use of figurative language), exists in a number of forms, of which four are most important: the image, the symbol, the simile, and the metaphor.
An image is the representation of a sensory experience or of an object which can be perceived through one of the five senses. In Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale we find “a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense” (feeling), “a beaker full of . . . the blushful Hippocrene” (taste and sight), “verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways” (sight), “soft incense hangs upon the boughs” (smell), and “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” (sound). Such lines evocative of sensation as*

became the ideal early in the twentieth century of a group of poets called the Imagists. The Imagists believed that “poetry should render particulars exactly, and not deal in vague generalities” and that poetry should “employ always the exact word, not the merely decorative word.” Their inspiration was partly drawn from a short Japanese poetical form called the Haiku, consisting usually of a single sharp image. The image is literal and concrete in its implications, no matter what thoughts or feelings it may arouse; the symbol, on the other hand, is literal, and at the same time abstract in its implications. The symbol always communicates a second meaning along with its literal meaning. For example, one can read Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale and enjoy the poem for its almost indescribably rich and beautiful imagery. The nightingale itself, on the most literal level, is a bird whose song inspires the poet and to whom the poet addresses himself. Interpreted on a deeper level, the nightingale symbolizes immortality. A symbol stands for something -in this case immortality-not specifically named or discussed within the poem. A symbol, then, is a highly dramatic and economical way for a poet to express his meaning. There are two kinds of symbols those whose abstract meanings emerge only out of the context and thus have to be created within the terms of a given poem, and those whose abstract meanings are more or less fixed by tradition and use. Examples of the first kind are the nightingale in the Keats poem just mentioned, Blake’s Tiger (evil, or experience), and George Herbert’s Collar (spiritual restraint). An example of the second kind of symbol, that with a traditional meaning, is given in the following lines*
in which the “Crosse” symbolizes the redeeming power of Christianity

Answer 20

Dark eyed,
0 woman of my dreams,

Ivory sandaled.
-Ezra Pound, Dance Figure

Curse on that Crosse (quoth then the Sarazin)
That keepes thy body from the bitter fit;
-Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Question 21

or in this quotation*

in which, as is established by custom, “roses” symbolize life and beauty and “yew” symbolizes grief and mourning. Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” in which the two roads symbolize the element of decision in human destiny, is an example of a modern poem using a traditional symbol. A group of late nineteenth-century French poets, called the Symbolists, worked to symbolize general truths, metaphysical insights, and ysteries, and had a strong influence on a number of English and American poets who followed them. We can see from the example of Ode to a Nightingale that details expressed as images contribute to the development of a symbol. Indeed, it is customary to find various kinds of figures of speech working together in this way. The simile and the metaphor should be considered together, for they both express analogy, that is a comparison between one thing and another. The difference between them is simple: a simile establishes a comparison by the use of the word “like” or.”as”; a metaphor establishes an identity between the things being compared. A simile may be brief, as, for example, in*

or it may be extended through a whole poem, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97 (“How like a winter hath my absence been/ From thee,” etc.) or Vaughan’s The World (“I saw Eternity the other night,/ Like a great ring of pure and endless light,” etc.). A metaphor also may be brief, as in these lines*

or it may be extended through a whole poem, as it is in Campion’s lyric (“There is a garden in her face,/ Where roses and white lilies grow,” etc.). A metaphor should not be confused with an image. It can be distinguished from a symbol in that the two terms involved in a metaphor are both mentioned literally, or unmistakably suggested. If any of these four terms can justifiably be used more inclusively, it is symbol, into which images, similes, and metaphors sometimes extend. Ten other relevant terms should be mentioned briefly:
Personification is the representation of an inanimate object or abstract idea as having the attributes of a living person.*

Allegory is the presentation of a continuous action or extended idea by means of symbols or personifications; a narrative in which the underlying meaning is different from the surface meaning. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the best-known allegory in English poetry. An eponym is a name so commonly associated with the attributes of its owner that it comes to symbolize those attributes; for example, Helen (beauty), Hercules (strength), Croesus (wealth). An epithet is a word or phrase added -to or substituted for the name of a deity or person. Examples include Loving Father (God), daughters of Eve (women), the Galilean (Christ).
Metonymy is the use of one word for another with which it is for one reason or another closely connected –symbolically, causally, physically, or otherwise; for example, in the first line below, scepter, learning, and physic here stand for king, scholar, and doctor.*

Synecdoche is the use of the name of a part to signifythe whole; or of the name of the material to signify what is made from it.*

Oxymoron is the effective combination of contradictory or incongruous words, as in the following quotation.

Litotes (understatement) is a means of expressing, for example, the affirmative by using the negative of the contrary.*

Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration or overstate ment to heighten the effect.*

A paradox is a statement that is apparently contradictory. On scrutiny, however, the apparent contradiction disappears, and the statement is found to be true and richly meaningful.*

Answer 21

Strew on her roses, roses,

And never a spray of yew!
-Arnold, Requiescat

The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne.
-T . S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;


-Hopkins, I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.
-Ernily Dickinson, The Chariot

The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
-Shakespeare, Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun

often beneath the wave [the sea], wide from this ledge.
-Hart Crane, At Melville’s Tomb

In their amazement lyke
Narcissus vaine,

Whose eyes him starv’d: so plenty makes me poore.
-Spenser, Amoretti, 35

And nobody calls you a dunce,
and people suppose me clever.
-Browning, Youth and Art


I lov’d Ophelia; forty thousand brothers

Could not with all their quantity of love

Make up my sum.
-Shakespeare, Hamlet

That I may rise, and stand, o’er throw mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
-Donne, Holy Sonnets, 14

Question 22

VOCABULAIRE ET FIGURES DE STYLE

                     L’ utilisation des mots 

Les effets de son

Le travail des sons est primordial dans le travail d’ ecriture, il participe de la creation d’effets de sens : Ia repetition de plosives et de fricatives participe ainsi td’une durete sonore qui cree des effets musicaux et structure le texte et sa comprebension. Ces echos peuvent alors renforcer le lien entre signifiant et signifie ; par exemple l’onomatopee (onomatopoeia ) renvoie au pouvoir mimetique de la langue et sa capacite a imiter d’autres sons non linguistiques. Par exemple, dans la strophe qui ouvre le poeme “Christabel” de Samuel Coleridge ( v. La poesie romantique )*

Le poete joue a la fois sur des onomnopees et des repetitions de consonnes, qui font echo a la poesie alliterative anglo-saxonne. L’alliteration est la repetition de consonnes ou d’un groupe de consonnes, mais il existe aussi un autre motif de repetition de consonnes, plus rare, la consonance, qui consiste en la repetition de la consonne finale de plusieurs mots, qui a pour effet la creation d’un rythme fort (la consonance peut avoir pour effet et d’attirer l’attention sur une syllabe non accentuee et donc de modifier l’accentuation globale du groupe de mots). Iorsqu’il s’agit de la repetition de voyelles, l’assonance (aussi appelee rime vocalique, vocalic rhyme), est utiliee.
Lorsque la repetition des sons a pour effet une harmonie, un apaisement, il s’agit dune euphonie..(euphony); celle-ci est le plus souvent provoquee par la repetition de voyelles longues ou de consonnes liquides, A l’inverse la repetition de sons discordants est une cacophonie (cacophony).

Answer 22

Tu-whit! Tu-whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock

Question 23

Les mots

Ainsi le choix de transformer les mots peut faire partie d’une demarche creatrice.
I’apherese ( aphaeresis ) courante en poesie, consiste a omettre la sYllabe initiale d’un mot (souvent une voyelle), sur le modele de “neath’’ -pour “beneath’. En poesie un tel precede permet d’ajuster le vers a la metrique, tout comme la syncope qui est l’omission d’une syllabe en milieu de mot, ou l’apocope .. qui consiste en une elision de la syllabe dun mot. A l’inverse, l’auteur peut ajouter des syllabes aux mots ; en debut de mot, il s’agit dune prothese (prothesis), en milieu de mot, de l’epenthese (epenthesis ) et en fin de mot, d’une paragoge. Ainsi Shakespeare, dans le second vers du sonnet 29, souligne sa detresse accentuant le verbe ‘‘weef grace a une prothese : “I all alone beweep my outcast state”.

De meme de nouveaux mots peuvent etre crees grace a la manipulation de lettres, comme les abreviations ,les acronymes, et les anagrammes (anagrams) qui sont des mots crees par le rearrangement des Iettres dun mot afin d’en creer un nouveau. Les palindromes, qui introduisent une flexibilite Iinguistique et un element ludique dans le texte, sont quant a eux des mots ou des phrases qui peuvent etre lus de la meme maniere de gauche a droite qu’a linverse, comme level’ ou “civic” . La creation de mots peut egalement correspondre au besoin de creation d’un nouveau signifie, ce qui est effectue au moyen de neologismes ( des mots entierement nouveaux). de mots-valise ( portmanteau words) qui fusionnent deax mots pour en creer un nouveau, ou de precedes linguistiques plus courants comme la creation de mots composes (compound words). Si un mot n’existe pas ou appartient a une langue etrangere sans que cet emploi soit justifie, il sagit d’un barbarisme (barbarism) et si le mot, correct, est mal utilise car il est utilise a Ia place d’un mot similaire, on parle de malapropism, d’apres le personnage de Mrs Malaprop dans la piece de theatre The Rivals (1775) de Sheridan. Ce procede demeure tres repandu dans les comedies.

Answer 23

x

Question 24

jeux de syntaxe

Outre les modifications du langage a l’echelle des sons et des mots, l’auteur peut egalement choisir de jouer avec la langue, d’opter pour une approche ludique de la communication textuelle, au moyen de jeux de mots (puns ou paronomasia) qui rapprochent des mots aux sonorites proches mais dont le sens est different ou d’un jeu sur les significations dun mot polysemiqse, La replique de Mercutio clans Romeo and Juliet de Shakespeare (v. Le theatre shakespearien), alors quil agonise, en est un exemple frappant : ‘‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man” (III, i), les jeux de mots peuvent egalement deriver d’une ambiguite syntaxique ou grammaticale. Le sous-entendu grivois (double_entendre est quant a lui particulierement utilise dans la litterature elisabethaine, par exemple dans les interludes comiques de pieces de Shakespeare. Ils ne sont pas necessairement mis au service d’un effet comique, et peuvent au contraire etre utilises afin de proposer plusieurs hypotheses de pensee, devenant de veritables outils de reflexion et non des ornements : on retrouve en particulier cette tendance chez Emily Dickinson (v. L’Amerique en vers) James Joyce (v. Le roman moderniste).
La parataxe, qui peut avoir un effet humoristique souvent lie a une progression par syllogismes, est egalement presente en poesie, de certains passages epiques a des textes en vers courts visant a creer des images denses. A l’inverse, l’hypotaxe est presente lorsque la subordination est abondante ; dans ce cas c’est l’ordre logique et chronologique qui est souligne. L’asyndete qui implique l’omission de conjonctions, d’articles ou de pronoms, peut faire partie dun style paratactique et la polysyndete ( polysyndeton), son inverse.
La repetition de certains mots dans la phrase ou le vers vient egalement rythmer le texte : l’anaphore (anaphora) est une repetition en debut de phrase ou de vers, alors que l’epiphore (epiphora ou epistrophe) est a l’inverse une repetition en fin de vers ou de phrase ; la combinaison d’une et d’une epiphore est une symploque (symploce). Si un meme mot est repete en fin de proposition et au debut de la suivante, il s’agit d’une anadiplose (anadiplolosis ), alors que l’encadrement d’une proposition ou d’un vers par un meme mot est une epanalepse (epanalepsis). Si le mot repete est sans aucune separation, et de maniere emphatique, on parle d’epizeuxe (epizeuxis) ; la repetition dune meme question (ou I’enchainement dune serie de questions) est designee par le terme (quaesitio ) , et celle de mots ayant la meme racine, polyptote (polyptoton).

Answer 24

x

Question 25

“Le jeu sur des oppositions fait egalement partie du travail de la rhetorique en miroir (chiastic structure) qui fait se juxtaposer deux propositions inversees, alors que l’oxymore (oxymoron). proche de l’antithese (antithesis) et du paradoxe, est une juxtaposition de termes contradictoires. Si l’effet recherche n’est pas uniquement le contraste mais la nuance, l’antanagoge est utilisee, qui fait se suivre immediatement une declaration negative et une seconde positive sur le meme theme, afin de porter une lumiere differente surles premiers termes.
L’articulation du texte, on le voit, repose sur les variations que l’auteur imprime a l’emploi canonique de la langue ; il peut utiliser divers procedes adopter des variantes grammaticales. Ainsi le solecisme (solecism) est ladeviation de la convention grammaticale, syntaxique ou de prononciaion est la plus repandue : si une partie d’une proposition est sous-entendue, l’ellipse permet de mettre en place un style compact, que l’on retrouve par exemple dans “The Waste Land” de T.S. Eliot (v. La poesie moderniste). En revanche l’aposiopese (aposiopesis), qui laisse une phrase inachevee, permet le plus souvent d’augmenter l’intensite emotionnelle des dialogues. Ces variations peuvent egalement toucher l’ordre des mots : l ‘hyperbate (hyperbaton) souvent decrite par les critiques comme une figure du desordre, va de la simple inversion de l’ordre de deux mots, ou anastrophe, a des exemples plus extremes d’inversion qui touchent des phrases entieres. Ainsi la tmese (tmesis), insertion d’un mot ou d’une proposition dans une proposition, permet au moyen de l’imbrication, de modifier le processus de lecture. Des poses comme e e cummings ( v. La poesie modemiste) en un veritable principe d’ecriture. L’hyberbate egalement une forme d’hyperbate est l’utilisation d’un mot inattendu pour en qualifier un autre. L’hypallage est souvent utilisee pour signaler l’instabilite mentale ou les intellectuelles d’un personnage, ou par simple effet poetique, comme le fait Theodore Roemke (v. La poesie de l’apres-modernisme), dans son poeme “Where knock is open wide”

: Once upon a tree I came across a time.

Les figures de la syllepse (zyllepsis) et du zeugme (zeugma) procedent de la mise en relation de deux tennes qui ne devraient pas, selon les regles grammaticales, etre associes, Cette collision grammaticale est souvent hunoristique. La syllepse implique Ia mise en facteur commun d’un mot, un verbe, avec deux autres qui requierent chacun un sens diff erent
exemple “She looked at the object with suspicion and a magnifying glasss (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations). Le zeugme est un meme verbe ou adjectif applique a deux noms, deviations du canon peuvent egalement toucher la structure logique du texte : ainsi le syllogisme (syllogism) constitue une des racines de logique classique.Le syllogisme est une deduction de deux propositions, qui postule que si l’une est vraie l’autre l’est aussi ; il est aussi bien utilise faire progresser une structure argumentative que de maniere exageree une parodie ou un texte appartenant au nonsense . La reduction a l’absurde (reductio ad absurdum) peut egalement utilisee dans ces deux visees car le locuteur tente de convaincre en poussant une argumentation logique dans ses extremes afin de prouver l’absurdite une posture. Si l’argumentation contient des elements sans lien logique, il s’agit de non sequitur, ou d’un hiatus si un element logique est manquant.

Answer 25

x

Question 26

Le ton

Le ton denote une qualite intangible dun texte, qui le colore dans son ensemble et qui derive de l’attitude de l’auteur implicite ( implied author, une figure de l’auteur inteme au texte) envers le lecteur. Il peut etre serieux, ironique, spiritueI (witty), passionne, melancolique, apaise, etc. L’humour peut ainsi relever de la comedie pure, mais aussi de l’humour noir (gallows humour ou black humor en anglais americain), qui propose un traitement humoristique de sujets tabous ou l’utilisation de situations grotesques a des fins comiques

Le satiriste se veut gardien de certains ideaux moraux aussi bien1u’es Le satiriste se veut gardien de certains ideaux moraux aussi bien qu’esthetiques : la satire a une visee polemique et critique. Elle moque les travers de la societe elle tente de retablir lordre, La satire, qui peut etre en prose en vers, atteint un age d’or en Angleterre a la fin du XVII siecle et durant le xviii siecle, represente par des auteurs comme Alexander Pope Milton et Ies satiristes) ou Jonathan Swift (v. L’avenement du roman). La satire peut etre directe, s’adressant a une personne ou une situation precise en utilisant la premiere personne, ou indirecte, auquel cas le processus satirique fait partie integrante du deroulement du recit. La satire peut suivre le modele de Juvenal (juvenalian satire) et etre formelle, attaquant directement et avec serieux une situation. Elle peut aussi etre horatienne (horatian satire), plus humoristique et tolerante, La satire implique une manipulation de la langue qui exploite son ambivalence. L’ironie est ainsi souvent essentielle a la satire, mais elle peut egalement relever de l’humour, et peut ne pas etre volontaire, L’ironie, ou antiphrase (antiphrasis) consiste en un ecart entre ce qui est dit et ce qui est signifie, souvent l’exact oppose. L’auteur repose sur une connivence avec le lecteur pour mettre en place un tel precede, plusieurs types d’ironie existent, parmi lesquels l’ironie verbale et l’ironie de situation (situationnal irony ). L’ironie verbale implique de dire ce qu’on ne pense pas ; c’ est le cas de l’irone socratique (Socratic irony), dans laquelle un personnage qui feint l’ignorance pose des questions en apparence innocentes afin d’induire son interlocuteur en erreur. L’ironie de situation intervient quant a elle lors d’une discordance entre ce qu’un personnage affirme et les evenements auxquels assiste lecteur/spectateur: c’est par exemple le cas de l’ironie tragique (v. Concepts litteraires ) peut etre exprimee au moyen de sous-entendus. (inuendos ) de sarcasrne (une remarque ironique souvent violente), mais aussi de qui introduisent une disproponion entre le fait auqueI il est fait reference et la realite, comme Iexageration, Ainsi l’hyperbole est une figure d’exageration qui n’est pas destinee a une interpretation litterale, tout comme son inverse, la litote qui est souvent utilisee de maniere ironique. L’euphemsme (euphemism) est une substitution d’un enonce brutal par un autre plus confonne a une certaine norme.

L’humour peut egalement provenir de la parodie, imitation d’ une euvre ou dune personne qui precede par grossissement des caracteristiques du sujet. La parodie pent etre critique et satirique, ou simplement comique. Lorsque l’imitation est une fin en soi, il s’agit dun pastiche car l’humour de la parodie est contenu dans la proximite entre les deux textes, que le lecteur peut identifier. Le texte burlesque se rapproche de Ia parodie, mais s’en distingue par la methode utilisee : la parodie tente d’imiter a la fois forme et contenu alors que le burlesque peut imiter le style epique, par exemple, mais l’utiliser pour des sujets vulgaires (ce qui devient alors du bathos). Le burlesque demeure attache a un divertissement scenique et on le retrouve sur scene des pieces comme la piece imbriquee Pyramus and Thisbe, imitee des tragedies antiques, jouee dans A Midsummer Night’s Dream de William Shakespeare (v. Le theatre shakespearien).

Answer 26

x

Question 27

William Henry Hudson : Introduction to poetry

Poetry

The essence of poetry is invention. It is according to Shelley the expression of imagination,

modulating its language on the principle of variety in unity.

It is the concrete and artistic expression of the human mind in emotional and rhytmical language.

We have said that literature is an interpretation of life as life shapes itself into the mind of the

interpreter. What then is the essential element in that interpretation of life which we describe as

poetical. By poetical we understand the emotional and the imaginative. By the poetical

interpretation of life, therefore we mean a treatment of its facts, experiences, problems, in which

the emotional and imaginative elements predominate.

Poetry arises only when the poetic qualities of imagination and feeling are embodied in a certain

form of expression. The form is only rhymical language, or metre. Without this we may have

the spirit of poetry without its externals. Treated in prose, a subject may be made richly poetical;

but only, when treated in metre is it fashioned in actual poetry.

Poetry is to be distinguished from prose, as regards its form, by the systematically rhythmical

character of its language.

It was noted by Hegel that the use of verse in a given piece of literature serves in itself to lift us

into a world quite different from that of prose of everyday life. Schiller wrote to Goethe that

substance and Form are connected. This however is one side of the matter. There is another side

which, from the standpoint of the reader is even more important. Metre, like music, makes in itself

a profound appeal to our feelings.

We now inquire a little more into the purport of the statement that poetry is an interpretation of

life through the imagination and feelings.

There are moods of heightened feelings in which the mystery and beauty of the world come

home to us with special vividness and power. It is thus that we are deeply stirred to delight, or

reverent awe.

     The  imaginative rendering contains a quality of  vital  truth which is not to be found in the 

plain statement of it. By poetic truth we mean fidelity to our emotional apprehension of facts, to

the impression which they make upon us. Our first test of truth in poetry is therefore is its

accuracy in expressing not what things are in themselves, but their beauty and meaning, their

interest and meaning for us.

The poetry is wrought not out of, but at the expense of truth. The poetic value of some of

Milton’s natural imagery has similarly been impugned on the score of lack of substantial

knowledge and accuracy of detail.

First-hand knowledge of the aspects of nature and fidelity in the treatment of them must be

reckoned among the elements of poetic truth.

It is diffcult to distinguish between the poetic transfiguration of natural fact, which is justifiable

because it gives us another kind of truth, and that which is tantamount to misrepresentation and

should therefore be condemned. This question was definitely raised by Ruskin in his famous

chapter on The pathetic fallacy. This means sympathetic illusion. Ruskin means our modern,

subjective way of dealing with nature, that is to say our habit of transferring our own mental and

emotional states to the things we contemplate.

He finds fault with the lines in which keats depicts a wave breaking at sea :

           “Down whose green back, the short-lived foam, all hoar,

             bursts gradual with a wayward indolence-

             because salt water may be neither wayward nor indolent.

Nonetheless he concedes that “the idea of the peculiar action with which foams roll down a long,

large wave could not have been given by any other words so well as by this wayward indolence’.
surely, therefore, Keat’s description furnishes us with an admirable example of poetic, as contra-distinguished from scientific truth.
The question of the subjective treatment of nature in litterature cannot be pased over in silence.
poetry transfigures existing realities and ‘ gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
Hence bacon’s conception of poetry as the idealistic handling of life; but he practically ignores the principle of poetic truth and regards poetry as an untramelled exercice of the imaginative power.
His view threfore cannot be accepted without qualification.
the case for form cannot be overstated since the truest spirit of poetry has often be expressed, without recourse to the medium of verse. see Walt Whitman’s “leaves of grass”.
The definitely regulated music of its language is one peculiar element in the satisfaction yielded by it. Metre, like music, makes in itself a profound appeal to the feelings. merely to arkkirange words in a definitely rhytmical order is to endow them , as by some secret magic, with a new and secret emtional power.
In our daily converse with the world, we are chiefly interested, in things as they are in themselves, but with the aspect they bear to our emotional natures.
The mystery and the beauty of the world come home to us in moods of heightened feeling with special vividness and power.
But all poetry has to be tried by the criterion of fidelity, for it belongs to the essential foundations of poetic greatness.
In the development of thought the feelings can never quite keep pace with the intellect and, as a result of this, the poet clings by preference clings by preference to what is old and familiar; Hence the spiritual unrest which is characteristic of Victorian poetry.
Browning calls poets “the makers-see” directing the mind to the loveliness and wonders of the world. As he puts it, speaking through the mouth of Fra Lippo Lippi :
For, don’ t you mark? we’ re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have pass’d
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted -—better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that.
‘No man was ever yet a poet; says Coleridge, ‘without being at the same time a profound philosopher. The great poets, says Emerson, in one of his penetrating apophthegms, ‘are judged by the frame of mind they induce ‘. We require only that his philosophy shall be transfigured by his imagination and feeling; that it shall be shaped into a thing of beauty; that it shall be wrought into true poetic expression; and that thus in reading him we shall always be keenly aware of the difference between his rendering of philosophic truth and any mere prose statement of it.
In the study of poetry, therefore, as in the study of all other kinds of literature, our attention must first be directed to the poet himself; to his personality and outlook upon the world;

                                                         IV

As a guide to the systematic study of our subject, we have next to pass under rapid review the principal kinds of poetry.
There are two classes of poetry :
personnal or subjective poetry or the poetry of self-delineation and self-expression
impersonal or objective poetry, or the poetry of representation or creation
in lyrical poetry, in contradistinction to epic poetry, the poet is principally occupied with himself.
there are different kinds of lyric : lyric of love, lyric of patriotism, lyric of religious emotions.
The lyric must embody a worthy feeling; it must impress us by the convincing sincenty of its utterance; while its language and imagery must be characterised not only by beauty and vividness, but also by propriety, or the harmony which in all art is required between the subject and its medium. It will also be found that the pure lyric, having for its purpose the expression of single mood or feeling, commonly gains much in emotional ower by brevity and condensation, and that over-elaboration is certain to entail loss of effectiveness.
The lyric embodies what is typically human.
The Ode is a rimed lyric often in the form of an address; generally dignified or exalted in subject, feeling, and style’ or as ‘any strain of enthusiastic or exalted lyrical verse, directed to a fixed purpose, and dealing with a dignified theme. It is generally marked by a certain amount of elaboration.
Keats’ Odes To a Nightingale and on a Graecian urn.
Vordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, and Tennyson’s Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.
Next we have the Elegy :
the pastoral type : in which the poet expreses his sorrow under the similitude of a shepherd mourning for a companion, or otherwise through conventional bucolic machinery. see Spenser.

any poem reflective in character and of a markedly melancholic strain.
We now pass to objective and personnal poetry :
such poetry falls into two groups : the narrative and the dramatic.
One great epic of art occupies a place of capital importance in literary history, not only on account of its own splendid qualities, but also because, itself fashioned closely on the Homenc poems. It became in its tum a chief model for other workers in the epic field-the AEneid. In Paradise Lost, English poetry possesses one of the supreme masterpieces of epic literature.
The literary epic makes free use of the supernatural.
Another division of narrative poetry is Metrical romance :
Chaucer’s The Knightes tales
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso
Spenser’s Faery Queene
in which familiar characters and machinery of the old romances, knights, distressed damsels, battles, tournaments, giants, wizards, enchanted castles are remanipulated for different purposes by poets for whom such things have become as much of literary tradition as are heroic and mythical subjects for writers of epics of art.
In yet another subdivision of the verse romance we may place the numerous narrative poems of more recent literature like : Tennyson’s idylls of the king.
They exemplify the use of narratives for allegorical purposes.
The last division of objective poetry is the Dramatic. The narratve element appears commonly in the shape of dialogue as in the long tales of the Odyssey and Aenas.
There is secondly the Dramatic story, including the ballad like Tennyson’s The Revenge,; Browning’s A forgiveness. Tennyson’s melodrama Maud.
in a dramatic story there may be a certain amount of non-dramatic description and ‘setting’; a point which is again illustrated by The Ancient Mariner.
Dramatic poetry is the most entirely objective form of poetry in which the poet most completely loses himsef. The ideal of a dramatic monologue may, therefore, be defined as the self-portrayal, without ulterior purpose, of the personality of the supposed speaker. In practice, however, it is often used by poet as a medium for his own philosophy. He may also use it to present his philosophy directly, as when the supposed speaker is to all intents and purposes his mouthpiece and representative; or may so use it to present his philosophy indirectly, as when he makes the supposed speaker give expression to ideas antagonistic to his own in such manner as to convey or suggest adverse judgment upon them.

Answer 27

Versification :
the study of versification does not, of course, exhaust the interest of poetry on the technical side.
There is the whole vast problem of poetic diction; of the qualities which make it peculiarly strong or tender, passionate or beautiful; of the specific differences between it and the diction of prose; of the mysterious power of certain words and combinations of words, through association or through sound, to stir the imagination and go to the heart; of the ‘natural magic of expression which belongs to the rare moments of highest inspiration, and that final felicity of phrasing by which language is steeped in meanings beyond the definitions of the lexicographer. Since the diction of poetry is inevitably figurative and allusive, those figures of speech and subtle suggestions and innuendoes which are so important an elementof its texture, have also to be considered from the point of view alike of their sources and of their aessthetic value.

Regarding the systematic study of poetry, we may, for example take up the work of a single poet, and will then analyse the content of his writings and investigate the salient qualities of his art; to examine his literary ancestry and affiliations; to trace to their sources the derivative elements in this thought and style; and to consider his relations with spirit and movements of his time. After this, we may pass from to the other poets of his age, taking his work, point by point, a foundation for comparison and contrast. Or we may make an historical study taking into the account the rise and decline of schools.
If poetry is ‘musical speech,’ if it owes much of its beauty, its magic, its peculiar power of stirring the feelings and arousing the imagination to its verbal felicity and its varied melodies of metre and rime, then its full significance as poetry can be appreciated only when it addresses us through the ear.

Question 28

How to read a poem

Introduction

Students treat the poem as language , not discourse ; what gets out is the literariness of the work
** Let us take the first stanzas of W.H .Auden ‘s “musee de beaux Arts” :

It isn’t clear however how it moves from the idea of suffering to the idea of the aged reverently waiting for the miraculous birth
how exactly is “reverent expectancy” a matter of suffering ?
one problem the piece faces is how to be suitably wry about suffering without being cynical. it has to tread a fine line between a lightly ironic wisdom and sounding merely jaded it needs to de-mythologise human pain , but without seeming to devalue it . so the tone - mannered -not callous or cavalier has to be managed . it wants to take the false heroics out of suffering , by “de-centring it “
its anti-heroism is a typical stance of the 1930s
the deepest respect we can pay to the afflicted is to acknowledge the unbridgeable gap between distress and normality . there is an epistemological break between sickness and health incongruous nature of human suffering
the way its everyday surroundings appear to be casually indifferent to it
an allegory of the contingent nature of modern existence
things no longer form a pattern which converges on the hero
they collide quite randomly with the trivial and the momentous
what matters however is how all this shapes up verbally
‘About suffering they were wrong ,
The old masters “
syntactic sidling inn which the regular order of grammar is inverted
a sense of dramatic expectancy is created in the first line
The old masters “ is in apposition to they , which lends the lines a relaxed conversational air
colloquial idiom “doggy” and “Behind” though this kind of speech is more the raciness of the gentleman than the vulgarity of the plebeian
the weighty tri-syllabic word “suffering” sounds out resonantly at the very start
the tone of the piece is urbane but not hard-boiled
it is civilized but not camp
“dreadful is a typical upper -class adjective as in “darling”
the poem asks implicitly how certain extreme situations can be fitted into a familiar frame of reference
is it in the nature of things that the ordinary and the exotic lie side by side ?
thee stanza stretches literally from human agony to a horse’s backside , and so involves a sort of bathos . we are cranked down a tone or two from the solemn “how, when the aged are reverently , passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth
to the deliberately flat “there always must be
children who did not want it to happen , skating
on a pond at the edge of the wood
the syntax conspires with this deflationary effect ; the comma after “How” holds the sentence in suspense allowing us an uplifting moment
“not a little boring” is a polite understatement for “unbelievably boring”
the verse preserves its civility by a kind of verbal indirection
there is another bit of dramatic suspense in the phrase “its human position “ whose meaning is not very clear until we step past the semi-colon and find out .
we then have a straggling sort of line “while someone else is eating or opening a window , or just walking dully
along;” with its slinging together of clauses
a parallel stumbling line is to be found further in the poem , its untidiness suggestive of the clutter of human experience
“while someone else is eating or opening a window , or just walking dully
along;”
children , dogs and horses go on doing their child-like , doggy , or horsey things . and this , so the poetic voice , seems to intimate , is the way things are .
how something looks from the outside is not what it feels on the inside , ad what is central to you is peripheral to me
irony here is not in the tone but in the clash of perspectives
the poem’s technical brilliance may persuade us into accepting a highly contentious proposition : life is one thing while the public world is quite another
we are walled off from the sensations of other
a modern poem by its scepticism
. suffering is not part of an overall design
the poem is intrinsically designed . its conversational tone belies its artistry
the rhymes are discreet and part of what makes them so unobtrusive is the constant enjambment as the flow of thoughts override the line-endings
the anti-heroism of the poem’s argument find an echo in its low-key anti-rhetoric of its style .
** Auden wrote a poem the same year untitled “in memory of W B Yeats”

He disappeared in the dead of winter
the brooks were frozen , the airports were deserted
and snow disfigured the public statues;
the mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day .
what instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day
“in memory of W B Yeats”
the connection between suffering and its surroundings is just arbitrarily there is a kind of poetic licence at work here , as the so-called pathetic fallacy is invoked ironically
rhyme :
the verse can follow suit by deliberately losing its sense of rhythm
“each blithesome damsel shews her shape, enough to burst her stays and tape, and bangs the boards ; the fiddlers scrape their
cat-guts”
each stanza seems to end on an anticlimax as the speaking voice trails away
“ Dubourgh to him was but a fool
he plays melodious without rule
and sung the feats of Sean Mc Cool,
the giant”
the first three lines of the verse set up a rhythm which is disrupted suddenly by the lame tacked-on phrase . a comic effect is thus reached

Answer 28

“ About suffering they were wrong ,
The old masters : how well they understood
its human position ; how it takes place
while someone else is eating or opening a window , or just walking dully
along;
how, when the aged are reverently , passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth , there always must be
children who did not want it to happen , skating
on a pond at the edge of the wood
they never forgot
that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner , some untidy spot
while someone else is eating or opening a window , or just walking dully
along;
scratches its innocent behind on a tree “
W.H .Auden ‘s “musee de beaux Arts” :

Question 29

politics and rhetoric :
the shift from realism to modernism is bound up with an historical upheaval which culminated in the first world war
language is the medium through which Culture and culture - literary art and human society -come to mind
Frederick Nietzsche is an adept of slow reading which cuts again the grain of an age obsessed with speed
this relation between politics and textuality goes back to the oldest form of literary criticism in the Ancient world known as rhetoric . It meant the study of tropes and figures . the art of persuasive public speech
speaking gracefully and thinking wisely go hand in hand
rhetoric was born at the intersection of discourse and power -Caesar was a great demagogue
later on , rhetoric was cut off from social political life
in the Middle Ages , it was superseded by logic . it belonged to the scholastic sphere rather than to the public sphere
in the humanist period , it shifted to the center-stage .humanists brandished it as a weapon against the medieval scholastics
- gradually , rhetoric was equated with bombast, specious manipulation in an age of scientific rationalism . it was subsumed into poetics
the wheel has come full circle since this was precisely what rhetoric meant to Plato in his wrangling with the Sophists.
in the ancient world , rhetoric as persuasive language , dialogical
both passions and metaphors clouded an objective vision of the world
john Lock , the father of modern philosophy condemned rhetoric in his “ essay concerning human understanding” as a powerful instrument of deceit
truth became independent of language in the Eighteenth century . the fuzziness of the words got into the way of the lucidity of meanings
in the romantic area , poetry was pitted against rhetoric , as it is in the programmatic preface to the “lyrical Ballads . But rhetoric still meant deceitful, what can resist it is the truths of human heart
poetry was at war with that kind of poetics which have palpable designs
with Coleridge , Blake , Wordsworth , Shelley ,the word “public has now come to assume pejorative overtones . poetry was part of a counter-public sphere
poetry abhorred abstractions . it became focused on the individual .
Plato saw poetry as an ungovernable mob of particulars while Aristotle , by contrast , saw poetry as dealing in universals , not with the sensually specific
but there is not much sensuous specificity in Wordsworth . romantics were also inclined to speak of the universality of human nature
the romantic symbol is designed to flesh out a universal truth in a specific form -Coleridge symbols
with poets like Blake and Shelley poetry still figured as a transformative political force . it could conjure up new possibilities
in Victorian period this sense of imagination as a political force has faded . it was challenged by the novel in a new division of labor , poetry has become the preserve of personal feelings . it was as though the lyric poem defined the entire genre .
with Eliot , Yeats , Pound and Stevens poetry was revived as a major form . it was in articulating the experience of solitude in the war period that poetry could become publicly representative
it was fossilized by the medieval scholars , suppressed by scientific rationalism , and finally routed by a privatized poetics
Frederick Nietzsche argues that the study of rhetoric should play second fiddle to the study of it as a set of tropes
Post- structuralist thinkers like Derrida thinks that meaning quite never hits the mark
since the poetry was the home of figurative language , it was now seen again as rhetoric -rhetoric in the sense of slippery speech according to Nietzsche yet this was only one theoretical current to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s . from feminist criticism to Mikail Bakhtine literary works were investigated as new patterns of meaning . it was these new-fangled theorists who were most in line with tradition
not repositories of values . they are vehicles of violence
the death of man is also the death of “ bourgeois man” in the novels of Proust and Thomas Mann
it is also the model of experience which underlie a good deal of talk about modern poetry
from Coleridge to Goethe to the American New critics the poem is a version of a well-ordered world , a paradigm of unity .

** as TS Eliot puts it New Quartets :

whereas the truth is not in the slipping and sliding of language , but also in its non- predictability
the most celebrated poem of the twentieth century T S Eliot The Waste land registers the draining of experience of modern life . as if being scooped out and being dismantled is a prelude to being put together
the meanings of words is bound up with the experience of them
imagination :
the modern idea of imagination first emerged in English society when it became clear that everyday life was increasingly governed by selfish individualism
imagination was a sort of compensation for our insensibility to each other . William Blake rank among the visionaries

Answer 29

….. and every phrase
and sentence that is right ( where every word is at home,
taking its place to support the others,
the word neither diffident and ostentatious,
an easy commerce of the old and the new
te common word exact without vulgarity
the formal word precise but not pedantic , the complete consort dancing together)
language is lent an air of finality

Question 30

chapter 2 what is poetry?

if we read Oliver Twist the information it provides on workhouses is fictional because it had an overall rhetorical design . it is there to help to construct a moral vision , narratives usually reconfigure the world to make a point about it
poetry and pragmatism :
the idea of poetry as non-pragmatic discourse might be illuminated by this poem of Carlos William Carlos
this is just to say
i have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
putting the message in this chopped-up form, however overrides its pragmatic function
what attracted him was the sensuous reality of the plums themselves , their delectable sweetness and coldness .this means that his relation to the plums is more poetic than instrumental
in so far as poems like plums yield us pleasure they have a pragmatic function . it is just this function is closely bound up with their sensuous existence
poetic language :
the modern idea of the materiality of the signifier , that the word has its own texture and density has been exemplified by john Milton
we seem to be reenacting Satan’s wanderings in the restless shifts and turns of the syntax , and laborious pile-up of clauses
modernism reflects a crisis of faith in language

chapter three : Formalists ( the Prague school)
the materiality of language is called literariness . it means language which is peculiarly conscious of itself , or to put in another way , language that has been made strange so it becomes newly perceptible to the reader . it is now a tangible object in its own right . poetry highlights verbal signs so that they become newly perceptible
the referential function is subordinated to the entire pattern of verbal relations . the aesthetic function predominates over the referential one
good poem are those in which there is a satisfying interplay of the predictable and the disruptive

the semiotics of Yuri Lotman :
for Lotman , a poem is just a structure or system of signs
let’s look at Yeats celebrated refrain from a poem “Easter 1916”
“a terrible beauty is born”
it contains a semi-oxymoron , or contradiction in terms
words can never attain the status of the Word in T S Eliot Four Quartets
language can capture truth by drawing attention to its own limit
a rather eccentric example of the incarnational fallacy can be found in the phrase “moss’d cottage trees” in Keat’s ode to autumn” : the words are imbued with the physicality of things .
in revering words are densely physical objects in their own rights , the incarnational fallacy only succeed in abolishing them . for word which become what they signify cease to be words at all . at their most material they disappear into the objects they are supposed to denote . words merge into their referents
Seamus Heaney digging may illustrate the point :
“the cold smell of potato mould , the squelch and slap
of soggy peat , the curt cuts of an edge
through living roots awaken in my head “
this intensely physical language seems the outward expression of the poem’s subject matter , as form and matter appear to melt into one another
we get a chain of elemental , bluntly expressive monosyllables : “mould , slap ,, curt , squelch” , most of them redolent of earth , mud and moisture Leavis believes that English speech is naturally incarnational whereas French language reflects things rather than concretely enacts them
the language of digging is also conceptual .what makes it otherwise is just a kind of poetic sleight of hand . but what looks incarnational is only associational .it associates on kind of materiality “lug , shaft , squelch” with another kind of materiality : the soil , spade and vegetation
take this line from Housman :
“what are those blue remembered hills
what spires , what farms are those ?
there seems to be an equivalence between the two adjectives
what is important about these hills is the they are remembered as permanently and intensely as they are blue -rather than grassy or craggy . Each word rub the other into a kind of new palpability
let’s take this line from Robert Frost :
“my little horse must think it queer
to stop without a farmhouse near “
we reap a modest pleasure from the tripping of the meter and the rhyming of “queer “and “near”
it s amusing to think of a horse behaving like a taxi-driver and wondering whether his stopping is scheduled or random

chapter 4 :
The meaning of form
** John Keats poetry is celebrated for his sensuous lushness as in “The Eve of St Agnes”
Form as transcending content :
Cleopatra’s grieving words over her lover’s Anthony’s corpse

Nothing left remarkable except these ravishing lines themselves
one is reminded of Edgar’s sagacious comments in King Lear : The worst is not / so long as we can say “This is the worst “. as long as we can give voice to our despair there is still a value of sort
“visiting moon “ implies that the planet’s regular motion , suggestive of regular order, now has a kind of futility about it , as Anthony’s death has struck meaning from the cosmos . it is as tough the moon carries on the regular circuit of visits
Tragedy does not cancel out the havoc . it portrays by giving it sense , and shape . it manages to rise above it by the the sheer integrity of its forms
As Bertolt Brecht has remarked “lamentation by means of sounds , or better still words , is a vast liberation , he’s always making something out of the utterly Devastating observations has set in “
the sheer diversity of Cleopatra’s image as she slips from “crown” to “Lord” to “garland” , and from there to “odds” to “moon” suggests the gathering incoherence of grief . but these random modulations from on image to another are subtly managed . her words imbue him with mythological status .
** Form and content also work productively into each other in the first stanza o “sailing to Byzantium “ , one of the great Irish immigration poems :

the poet is telling us that he must abandon the perishable domain of human sensuality, death and reproduction for some more enduring kingdom , one less carnal and fugitive . nevertheless Yeats pays homage to what is repudiating
Yeats is not the kind of writer who explores nature in Keatsian detail . there is nothing lavish , profuse about the birds in the trees and the mackerel-crowded seas . yet the poem achievement t is to create an effect of lavishness . the stanza generates a Cornucopian sense of abundance out of the sparsest material
a sense of mounting excitement
the lines with their staccato rhythms hint at the possibility of an ecstatic loss of control in the face of these fleshy delights
Eliot’s poems are full of ghosts . he was interested in the resonance of the signifier
the celebrated poem of the love-song of J Alfred Prufrock is another case i n point
“Let us go hen you and I,
when the evening is spread thus against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table “…
the allusion to the evening and the sky sets up a conventionally romantic expectation , which the fllowing casually and callously deflates
we are in a world in which settled correspondences and traditional affinities between things have been broken down in the arbitrarily flux of modern experience . this dislocated image which ushers in “modern poetry “ is a sympton of this bleak condition . the point is not how can an evening resemblance etherized patient , but what kind of an alienated conscience could make such an eccentric , connection

Answer 30

“The crown of th’ earth doth melt , My lord
O, withered is the garland of the war
The soldier’s pole is fall’n ! young boys and girls
are level now with men . the odds is gone ,
and there is nothing left remarkable
under the visiting moon “

“that is no country for old men .
the young in one another’s arm , birds in the trees
-those dying generations -at their song
the salmon-falls , the mackerel-crowded seas .
fish , flesh , or fowl, commend all summer long
whatever is begotten , born , and dies .
caught in that sensual music , all neglect
monuments of an ageing intellect “

Question 31

T S Eliot’s The waste Land betrays a kind of discrepancy between the form and content .. it is a collage of allusions, quotations , fractured phrases , spectral figures , listless snatches of memory . it seems no more than a heap of fragments from a collapsed civilisation . yet all this woven into a dense tapestry of cross-references , symbols , and archetypes . the result is a panoramic vision of decay and futility
let’s look at Robert Frost ‘s much loved “stopping on woods on a Snowy evening”
the event itself is low-key
the rather static form reflects the suspended moment in the wood itself
its formal patterning along with that reference to the “ darkest evening of the year “ might be taken to hint that this fleeting experience in the “woods’ is somehow meant . that it is some kind of epiphany or revelation . -at the same time that the language used to describe it , suggests , quite to the contrary , that it is a simply a natural , casual occurrence.
there is a casually conversational feel to the poem’s language
the repetition in the last lines hints at a deeper , more metaphysical meaning , but does so obliquely .what the repetition does is to make the first “and miles to go before i sleep “, which we had taken literally appear more literal and symbolic . it is as though the line has suddenly realized that it means more than it had imagined , and registers it by repeating itself . poetry is expected to draw deeper implications from what it observes . Frost needs that final repetition which implies in its muted way that the experience in the snow-filled wood points to more than itself .
the phrase “fill up with snow” is both delicately suggestive and entirely commonplace , so any too -obtrusive symbolism risks overloading the verses .
the closure is uneasy , since repetition can go on forever and forever , making the conclusion as open-ended in one sense as it is rounded-off in another , does the poem wrap itself or does it trail off ?

the poem teeters on the brink of the symbolic without quite taking the plunge >there is something elusive at the heart of the poem and yet the experience itself must not be devalued by being reduced to a mere symbol of what it is .
there is a tension between the aesthetic and the instrumental attitude to nature , between the pragmatic and the non-pragmatic. the poem is an allegory of poetry .the poem may be about how he likes to be a poet , savoring the texture of things
in the end , the poet throws in his lot with conventional morality ( “but i have promises to keep “) and the conservatively -minded horse, who is a creature of habit as easily disturbed by innovation as the middle-brow reading public

Chapter Five : How to read a poem ?
is criticism just subjective ?
establishing what a poem literally says , or what meter it , or whether it rhymes are objective matters on which critics concur
but talk of tone , pace , mood , dramatic gesture is purely subjective . ironically ,only a few features of form -meter and rhyme - can be formalized . form in poetry is mostly un-formalizable .
Mood :
a poem does not instruct us that they are melancholic ; but this mood , in some sense , may be built into its language
** take as an illustration of melancholy ,the first verse of Tennyson’s poem : “Mariana”
the piece is meticulously overwrought
it is an illustration of what sometimes is called mimetic fallacy whereby poets try to justify the fact that their works are unbelievably boring by claiming that boredom is what they are about . even the rhyme scheme is pressed into this stagnant oppressiveness . this abbba style of rhyming has a curiously haunting , plangent effect , as well as creating a sense of revolving into a circle . it is a suitable sort of rhyme fora poem in which the heroine’s existence has been frozen into a sluggish moment of time . it is not for us to decide on what mood is at stake here
for a feeling to count as a response there must be a internal relation between it and the poem itself
Tone , mood and pitch :
“so great a sweetness flows from his heat” can only be a line by Yeats , with his bold stress on a single word “sweetness” rather than a more complex term or phrase . whereas Keats goes in for compound epithets like “cool-rooted” Yeats seems to prefer simple elemental words like”great , beat” , “stone” , “food” , “bread”
if he wants to suggest human squalor , he writes something like “foul ditch” , and these stock words and phrases used recurrently , come to assume the status of a kind of code accruing complex meanings which do not need to be spelled out
para-rhymes : “thought / were not , “faith” , “teeth”
tone means a particular modulation of the voice expressing a particular mood or feeling .it is one of the places where signs and emotions intersect . so tones can be abrupt , dandyish ,lugubrious , rakish , urbane , exhilirated , imperious and so on
but it is not easy to distinguish tone from poetry from mood which the dictionary defines as a state of mind or feeling . perhaps we can say that the mood in “Mariana is melancholic while the tone is lugubrious or doleful . then there is timbre . timbre in the Tennyson piece could be taken to denote its unique Tennysonien quality
we can speak also of the pitch of the poetic voice
** nobody could read these lines of George Herbert as a hushed whisper:

we can feel the poet’s anger and frustration in the abrupt quick fire shifts of rhythm , the helplessly broken phrases

intensity and pace :
a neglected category is pace
Percy Bysse’s ode to the west wind swirls like wind itself . the enjambment between the stanzas is needed to to keep the wind gusting without lull
compare this with the mesmeric place of “Tennyson’s “The Lotus eater” . this tries to create a mood of lethargy with its effect of stasis and sterile circularity
Texture :
Tennyson’s stanza also provides a convenient example of what we might call “texture” . it is a matter of how a poem weaves its various sounds into a palpable pattern
this stanza from “the Lotus eaters “ avoids sharp consonants ( apart from “pointed” and “pause” the p sound of which i s known as plosive ) , in favor of softer , more sibilant sounds . you can read these lines without an amount of lip-work , thus reenacting the somnolent state they portray
look at the final superb stanza of Yeat’s “Among schoolchildren “
there is a numerous set of b sounds ( “blossoming” , “body “ , “bruised “ “beauty “ , “ born “ . yet they are not particularly obtrusive) . this is partly because they are interwoven with a variety of other sounds as in that marvelous line “ nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil “blear-eyed picks up the sound of nor but with a pleasurable difference while night reflects the vowel sound of “eyed”
in Thomas hardy’s verse “ The Darkling Thrush “ , the whole passage is remarkable for its interweaving of abstract allegory and naturalistic details .
the alliteration of “winter “ and “weakening “ and “dregs ‘ and “desolate “ is counter pointed by the less obtrusive assonance of “made” and “ da
syntax , grammar and punctuation : A voir

Answer 31

“with blackest moss the flower -plots
were thickly crusted , one and all :
the rusted nails fell from the knots
that held the pear from the gable-wall .
the broken sheds looked sad and strange :
unlifted was the clinking latch ;
weeded and worn the ancient latch
upon the lonely moated grange
she only said ‘my life is dreary ,
He cometh not “she said.
ahe said i am aweary , aweary
i would that i were dead “

” is truck the board and cried, “no more,
i will abroad
what ? shall i ever sigh and pine?
My lines and lif are free , free as the road ,
loose as the wind ,as large as store
shall i be still in suit
( “the Collar “)

Question 32

C Partridge : The language of poetry

The free verse

In the free verse the language is free> It employs sporadically most of the devices of metrical poetry, such as assonance and alliteration, and more rarely rhyme; it may indulge in spells of regular metre. Freedom lies in the disposition and count of stresses and the frequency of other syllables in the lines. The retention of lines , often uneven in length is indeed a verse signal and accounts for the importance of the visual aspect on the printed page. The method has the merit of dispensing with unnecessary punctuation, respecially that which indicates pauses and is therefore relevant to interpretation.
In free verse,phrasal groupings,lineally displayed, make a rhythmical impact that readers of stanzaic metres and rhyme find it difficult to explain. prosaic locutions as well as expressive sounds are employed in order to impress the sensibility of the reader favorably or antipathetically. It is not always intended that they should convey logical meaning. What the poem suggests , as a whole to a perceptive mind is its only proper significance. While the poem still retains a vestige of form, rythmical impetus replaces the traditional pleasure that was derived from a recurring patern of sstresses and count of syllables.
A common method of fragmentation is to substitute phrases for complete sentences, a device commmonly employed by Whitman, Eliot and Pound.
The principal aim of the modernist poet is to secure naturalness of speech and Eliot recommended by his practice the cultivation of the rhythmical effects of prose, using line division to replace punctuation. Modern poetry favors subjective monologue.
Dislocation and elliptical phrasings are common in present-day speech.
The distate for Victorian poetry sparked the modern reaction : denunciation of its content, artifice and vocabulary vs art of concentration, tautness and economy.
Much modern poetry is observed to be impressionist in technique, the effects beeing achieved through juxtapositions and tensions which reveal how deeply psychology enters into creation.
technique, in the rhetorical sense of schemes of thought and phrase is not regarded in avant-garde circles as a valid criterion of a poem’s merit. The poet aims to be a sensitive interpreter of his environment. Modern poets do not vie with philosophers in attempting to give meaning to the universe throug art; they assume that the world has an obscure meaning which, gropingly they try to discern and articulate and a poem should be regarded as an exploration whose ultimate form is likely to be unpredictable. Modern writers shrink from explaining what they write. They rely on the cumulative impact of words.
free verse is characterized by natura speech rythms.
Free verse as in Eliot’s Prufrock, inevitably has a conventional pattern, the iambic pentameter behind it
dislocation of thought and syntax, as Donne has recommended to his poetic libertarianism to create an illusion of a rythm that resembles natural speech.
The forbears of modern poetry 
- Browning with his dramatized monologues
Whitman :
Visualizing ‘the great American poet’ in abstract, Whitman forecast that poetic expression would become ‘transcendental and new, indirect and not… descriptive,,, the great poet never stagnates,, he is a seer- he is an individual… he does not stop for any regulation… the poetic uality is not marshaled in rhyme or uniformity’.
Whitman became a master of declamatory, prophetic style, who claimed the poet as a channel of thoughts and things’, one whose personality was concealed by no ‘curtains’ of elegance or originality. In his revelatory poem ‘ song of myself’ he seems to be vitalist, ith unquenchable faith in nature and democracy. His untutored poetry abounds in invocations, apostrophes and emphasizing capitals. The shape of the poem is as unruly as his trust in the things to come. The dramatization of emotions and national events has parallels with Browning promotion of personal philosophy. In Whitman’s case, however the pronouncements were the product not nurtur but of nature; for the poet lacked formal teachings, except in the domestic tenets of Quakerism. His self education included much reading of Carlyle and Emerson, both sharing his transcendental love of liberty.
The majority of Whitman’s output in verse is without stanza form or metrical pattern. ( The love that is hereafter and O Captain! are notable exceptions ).
As the herald of modern free verse, he relies on cadences, on the sentence rythm of orotund lyrical phrases, not on the modulations of a well-formed line, not on the modulations of a w ell—formed line.
A clear midnight written in 1881, is an example:

This is my hour O Soul,/ thy three flight into the wordless,
away from books, away from art,/ the day erased, the lesson
done,
thee fully forth emerging, silent gazing,/ pondering the themes
thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
A poet of this century would have probably divided these four lines into seven, as indicated by the evocative caesuras but Whitman imposed no limits on the length of his units, with the result that the third line has no less tha ten stresses. As free verse would have it, this has the nuance of the speaking voice.
Whitman’s favorite themes are his own experience

                                        Form and rythm
                                        Rhetoric and poetry

In the following passage from ‘The music of poetry’ TS Eliot employs the word ‘form’ in different senses :
‘I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem may tend to realize itself as a particular rythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rythm may bring to birth the idea and the image.’
formal pattern of free verse : organic completeness :
the impression of unity is created if sense, sound and feeling cooperate. Since Coleridge, it has been customary to refer to this unit as ‘organic form’ suggesting that vitality arises from a matching of content to structure. There is however another form which Coleridge called ‘mechanical’. This is the metrical pattern, representing the poet’s subsidiary desire to adapt content to preconceived structure, not necessarily that of stanzaic verse.
in free verse, rythms are measured from stress to stress.
In Mac Neice’s poem sraddling of successive line occcurs in several different situations : between the subject and the predicate, between the predicate and object
problem of ambiguity inherent in lexical language.
Critics in the present century have made it clear that the meaning of a poem is more than the sum of its words. it is extended by overtones and connottions, especially emotive connotations.
Modern verse is prone to represent staqtes of mind, and in so doing juxtapose phrases and situations that seems to want logical connection.
\syntactical fragmentation is not only cause of obscurity.
There has been developed since the 1950 a theory of composition that holds a poem to be a microcosm, generating through its unique experience and identity, which Philips Larkins claims to be different from theory and tradition. This is a move toward primitivism and away from the cultured substractum of Eliot and Pound. The ground lost is Pound’s fragmented syntax and juxtaposed images.
the technical revolution in poetry s to crate a syntax that short-circuits logical thought. Its dislocation is said to be a reflect of the lack of order and lucidity in society.
Not only modern poetry has through free verse given greater scope for content but it alo uses rhetoric through metaphor, alliteration , assonance.. The manner of presenting content is fundamental to style.
the prasctical use of tropes , figures and schemes is in poetic organisation which contributes to meaning not to mentio performance.
What linguists see as deviation from the norms of speech are significant structual elements in poetry.
phonological classes : rhyme, alliteration, assonance
formal classes : parallelism, and various figures of repetition are important elements in patterning and grouping grammatical phrases and clauses which give discipline to the rythm.
the semantic classes : tropes cover figurative meaning and are most illuminating in context and reference. But there is often room for doubt wether the poet uses a word literally or figuratively.
under the heading semantic aare included metaphor, simile, metonymy, synechdoche, paradox and hyperbole.
Formal schemes in poetry : repetition
ex : ‘how can I tech, how can I save. The device is parallelism, in which the correlative questions balance each other. The scheme of rhetoric is amplification. Anaphora
extended metaphor
The poet’s theme is the value is the of lady Gregory’s gracious contribution to Irish culture; hence , the princely personal metaphor ‘fallen sun’ and ‘majesty that shut his burning eye’
A lofty tone is sustained throughout.
the second half of the poem is balanced aginst the first.
polysindeton : the repeated use of the conjonction And at the begining of lines 8 and 10
stanza three argues that a reasonable man must accept his mistakes
the significant phrases of stanza two are the metaphors : the mirror of malicious eyes and wintry blast
in stanza four , the poet’s conviction is that self-analysis should trace mistakes.
notice how cleverly Eliot exploit assonance
the language of repentance echoes many phhrases in the Bible. Eliot subtly explores the implications of liturgical words and gives them a richer meaning but the evocative symbols and allusions are not only drawn from the picturesque Christian tradition alone.
two grammatical features of this poem have semantic import
the poem has a strophic division of 8, 3, 1 lines. The strophes have little logical connection
assuming that who is singular
the garden where the devout sister walks is Eliot’s version of the Earthly paradise
freshness and strength after resolved conflic are the keynotes of this poem which resembles Marina in its sea visions
the essential qualities of this poem is the magic of its music and the integrating power of its symbols.

Answer 32

x

Question 33

How to study romantic poetry

Making of poetry takes two major forms in the Romantic period : lyric and narrative.
literaturethat is not escapist but literature that tries to come to trms with the modern world as it emerges through a series of wrenching changes.
A range of competing, arguing, contending voices rather than a series of commun assumptions that al share
the writer Tom Paine was declared an outlaw for penning Rights of men in 1792.
The American Revolution had started in 1776 when the thirteen colonies had declared their independence from Britain , and ended after seven years of war with British recognition of of that independence in 1783.
The fall of the bastille in 1789 is the moment whwn the French Revolution struck British consciousness.
The French Revolution is the subject matter of Blake’s poem The French Revolution and also of Books IX, X and XI of Wordsworth’s The Prelude : tensions , fears, hopes of living in that erea
they may take a different direction : a new sense of the past , as in Keat’s poem ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ ; or forward ino extravagant fantasies about the future posibilities that we find in Blake’s prophetic books, or in Wodsworth’s poetry, out in the countryside with a painful sharpened sense of its beauty as creeping brick and smoke begin to smother it ; or back deep into the sort of anxious scrutiny of an inner self under strange pressure that spurs Coleridge into writing ‘The Ancient mariner’
different backgrounds :
Byron was a Cambridge graduate while Blake never went to school.. Coleridge was christian wheres keats was atheist.
don’t make generalisations :
set out with a rough, working sense of the time and place and ask yourself what this text makes of these circumstances.
one way to understand a poem is to think about emotions and connections.
What is this poem highlighting ?
period from 1780 to 1830 marked by three large Revolutions : American, Industrial and French.
find the the disparate cluster of hopes, tensions that were central to their outlook.
these tensions and hopes express themselves through the process of choice and combination . what sort of associations do the words call up ?

The poem divides naturally into three parts, corresponding to swithes of point of view; the starting point is the premise that no man can appear ‘great’ to himself. In stanza I , the poet takes an objective point of view of the ‘ego’. Stanza II proceeds to self-examination. Stanza III returns to objective analysis, a significant grammatical change being the replacement of ‘his’ by ‘it’in line 12. the word ‘true place’ seems to refer to intellectual identity
wit is inherent in the comic pedantry, the ingenuity of the parallels and the tangential treatment of the theme which evaded the title.
the poem teems with internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration; the sibilant, liquid, nasal consonants ensure melody for the rhythm.at the core of this poem is the same prompting and…
a lengthy working out of a philosophy of life or the unfolding of a complex plot
it is not accident that the form revived sharply in an age when…
look at the main feeling the writer is trying to get across to you
there various ways round this problem
certain words such as ‘joy’ and ‘wept’ come up again and again with a frequency that is more than accident and that means that Blake is nudging you towards certain repeated themes
more often we are faced with a lyric on its own
the vital clue t the poem can be found if you try to isolate the hope it expresses, the sense of tension between hope and fear.
avoid leaving a messy jumble of impressions
a series of simple words with pleasant and positive associations
just in case we miss it, Blake underlies the idea even further
This much is clear from a couple of readings from..
the notion of innocence comes through in many ways from major signposts such as the very title of the volume to minor details such as the repeated appearance of sheep,a common symbol of innocence in a christian culture.
but if we go back to the moment when the poem was issued, to the historical context, then suddenly the poem reads differently
then we might note the extreme simplicity of the poem’s vocabulary
the language and the syntax of the poem is childlike, pitched at a level thaat the youngsters at whom Blake aims the lyrics would find difficult to understand.
after a laden pause before the fourth stanza…
a scene shadowed by the way history was moving
in the fraught, hysterical climate of the war, the gvt was able to drown opposing voices
those words are worth pausing over because they take us into Blake’s distinctive way of thinking
try to put the poem into an overall context in terms both of the history and experiences Blake was living through and the ideas he held at the time
the words are symmetrically patterned in the first and last stanza
that sense of two opposite extremes, tensed against each other and refusing to compromise, is reinforced by the way the poem heaps up flatly contradictory terms
run your eye through the text
in the second stanza, we can firm up our understanding of the lyric is about
granted that clay and pebbles can sing or warble, Blake is plainly using these objects to stand for things other than themselves
the clay offers a self-obliterating concept of love… while the pebble’s domineering notion of love binding another to its wishes, is a common feature of a type of brute masculinity
what comes strongly through is the notion of tension, a tension between two positions that the poem refuses to smooth out.
this lyric captures the lesson of those times
Wordsworth had a deep love of nature, but once you had said that about it you tended to dry up
this oppositon runs right through the poem.
the pleasure in the poem is associated with what are called in the second stanza the ‘fair works’ of Nature but cutting across this is a sorrow associated with man
Nature, for a start, is given a gender and is called ‘her’ in line 5
crude contrast
the longest words in the poem are unlikelyt to have you reaching for a dictionary
to polish up his French
jolted by the premature deaath of his parens
when the Revolution began to turn sour
Wordsworth was shifted toowards a place in society which distanced him from his youthful radicalism
if we now move on to look for the negative feelings and fears that.. we meet roughly the same structure of emotion

Answer 33

x

Question 34

this religious conception of Nature is matched by the language of the poem as a whole, which is altogether more dense and elevated
his confidence in revolutionnary cahane had ebbed and he has not yet moved on to the orthodox Anglicanism which supplied with a system of value.
the scatter of exclamations in the closing lines, together with the sense of solitude, subverts his efforts at reassurance, contributing to the poem’s status as a tensed, fraught and great romantic lyric
in the collection’s concluding poem ‘Tintern abbey’ he sets out to make explicit what has been implicit in many of the ballads : namely, that the imagination and memory, working on selected scenes, can construct out of them a consoling spirit that will at least that will enable the Wordsworths and othes like them to survive as the din and strife of history rolls over them.
there are broadly , four constituents that can be detected in the organisatio of any narrative. They are order, duration, frequency and point of view.
poets are not bound by historical sequence, so they are not bound by historical duration
duplicated instances of passive women
all this free-thinking is swept aside
the constrained severity of the last lines
a restrained, orthodox discourse is put in place
that ‘but’ becomes the point of reversal in the poem
the poem turns on the opening of the final paragraph, so it is worth looking closely at the way Colerige negotiates this transition
the shift is, as it were externalized; i is not part of the poet’s instinctive , mental development.
it is this exploration that fills the poem
all of that is managed through a series of potent symbol
these are the mariner’s last words as he sums up his experience before leaving the poet to deliver the final stanza
humanity begins to hack out the paths of the future
the poet-mariner paddles back to the mainstrem
the poet figure at the end of ‘Kubla Khan’ opium destroyed the capacity for fierce and sustained concentration which was the essence of his poetic process.
in that tense and fractured era every detail of life became overtly politicised.
that desolate sense of failure is reinforced by the seasonal references
we are distanced from the illusions of love that are described in the five stanzas
after three stanzas in which an anonymous figure sets the mood
he describes his infatuation and overloads the poem with conventional language
the reader is glumly forwarned from the start
a sense of deadlocked frustration
La belle Dame sans merci is cast in dialogue form
he recounts his engrossing happiness before his plunge into lonely despair
an idea that occurs several times in the poem is the fantasy of escape. in the opening lines it is associated with drugs. in stanza two the vehicle is alchool
above all that place is culturally remote
Keat’s mind wanders erratically through pagan mythology
the poet is thrown back on his isolated subjectivity
the poem’s pervading sense of the lights of life
keats works strenuously in the first stanza to crate a sense of superabundance
a lot of power in Keat’s poetry is generated by juxtyaposing opposites
the note that is being introduced here into the arrangement here is of death and its attendant sorrows
thre is no broken despair at the close of the poem. instead the melody holds
‘To Autumn’ records some of the occurences of the season, delighting first in its season and easing towards a sense of death and departure in the final stanza
a tone of vacant despair

‘To Autumn’ roots itself not inillusion but in the painful yet bearable experience of the real word and its seasonal flux. That process is not poeticised by the introduction of classical gods
Keats notes the incipient decay of life.
the lines are uniformly long
the second section forms a single sentence
relatively few of the lines are endstopped by punctuation, many more are run-on-lines
the long wovel sounds of ‘moors’, ‘sprawled’ succeed in drtagging down the pace and the mood
a civilian considers himself periphereal to the momentous events of the time
the ambiguity is that one is not positive that the narrator is in the army
until we reach that line we m,ust welll be assuming that the camp was a work camp
that ambiguity is carried by the eight lines at the end of the section, though the resolution carries a great weight of irony
the great challenge is that of the poet’s self-deprecating criticism
the first section has been presented in the perfect tense. That recall of events in as a present experience is fairly commomly used by poets for it creates an immediacy that grips the readser
rather, he fixes his emotions on two casual encounters. Each of these is worth pausing over
however we must ask ourselves wether a poet who has been at such pains to create a detailed set of impressions in the body of the poem would end by going off at a tangent and confusing us by an obscure reference.
he protests at the political events which have tumbled the world into war
it portends larger issues and suffering
it is as if the rain is constantly diluting the power to engage with larger issues
the poem has strong lyric and narrative qualities
the final couplet pins those images down and locate in them what TY S Eliot calls an ‘objective correlative’ for the powerful emotions of the poet
his line-ending rhymes are various, and , at times ambiguous
the poet is addressing the ways in which the horror of war perverts natural human experiences. The theme is underpinned by the refusal to accept those devices of poetic order
the grim irony in this poem is that..
this accusation overturns the conventional moral stance of ..
this is not the end for which mortal men were meant
his feeling of an unquestioning execution of a soldier’s duties is profoundly questioned and altered
he moves from a feeling of professional ‘content’ to a sobering statement of dignified regret
the first sentence cuts across half of the poem.
the three remaining sentences are contained by the verse structure
the poem unravels a complex moral and emotional response which simply will not be contained by a conventional expression of grief.
the acceptance of the finality of death
Dylan Thomas forces us to reconsider assumed meanings even of such a common word as ‘death’
the whole of the first line ha rather a akward feel.the syntax seems strained by the inversion of ‘Iago petrych, his name’ followed by the oddness of ‘…though, be it allowed’
he is trapped by the harshness of hill farming and the predictability of the cycle of work. we are caught between the stultifying drabness of the menial tasks necessary to his survival and and the peculiarity of the description
the piling on of negative, even repulsive details has the effect of alienating the reader, leaving one unprepared for the final twist of the poem’s final conclusion.
the description has been unrelenting in its harshness.
R S Thomas is working toward a reversal of our feelings in the final stage of the poem, and in order to make that reversal more dramatic he may be seen to draw his reader into sharing the extremes of repugnance which Iago’s physical and mental states occasion in the reader
surely Thomas is aiming this bard at those people who’affect’ refinement whilst retreating behind considerations of tasres and manners’
he roots us to the reality of the past
his simplicity of purpose allows for no subtleties of metaphysics or theology
a physically dirty and imaginatively bereft man ground down by his life in the unyelding Welsh hills.
R S Thomas makes us confront our natural repulsion in the face of the character, before imposing the nub of his argument that Iago represents all our origins.
we are drawn into an empathy from the recognition that it is a form of ourselves which we are being shown.
such ambiguity is intriguingly at the core of the artist’s purpose
these long sentences are punctuated by commas
the range of characters who appear sustains the reader’s interest
at its ending the poem mixes feelings of urban order and closure with what at first seems to be a strangely inappropriate image of movement of escape
the overriding impression is that
this is quite a taxing poem

the short second line in each verse has the effect of disjointing the verse
these short lins break the flow of the verse
the forward movement of the narrative
the ay in which the poet weaves together images of banality, of urban enclosures and images of the pastoral

Answer 34

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Question 35

Philip Larkin, by involving us in the rites of passage of ordinary lives, succeeds in creating a mythical dimension in ‘The whitsun weddings’ that is at once rooted in the familiar and transcending it .
Hugues is shocking us out of our bland assumptions regarding the birds
the fact of their lives is as basic as that of all natural things. The poet reminds us that the name for a raven incorporates the sense of a rapacious assault
‘genius’ is a catch-all word for…
he makes his point further by..
the reader is not alllowed to settle into any reassuring assumptions about language
paradoxically , it seems that this range of activities pales beside language is the means of objectifying and rationalizing the facts of experience.
we are self-reflective beings
untrammelled by the indulgence of our imagination
the lines never appear to settle into a regularity of length
the line cfan be stretched at times and at other times be cut short
this sense of rythm is built up by the stress of usually, three or four syllables in each line , through the repetition of syntax, the parallelism which occur time and time again
there is a strong sense of the incantatory chant about the poem ; accusatory tone
a grating of guttural sounds
there are consonant rhymes foot /white; obscene/engine
the patterning of language in poetry and, as in oratory - sermons and speeches work to convince the reader of the implicit worth of the argument propounded.
Furthermore, she goes on to claim that …
picture postcard images of the Austrogerman culture.
maybe the key to the poem lies in its exaggerated fears, the complex of fantasy and ignorance which the poet has with regard to her father
but no sooner is that image introduced that the poem introduces the comparison with ..
at this point we must recognize that Sylvia Plath’s poem is entirely unconventional; though she calls on a rane of conventions the vilainy of fear , the sorcery of gypsies
Plath is prepared to stretch our credulity in order to express her feelings
she has plucked imagery out of her life’s history
the man who had dominated her early kife is irrevocably divorced from the poet
whilee that confines the father to a coffined oblivion
the experience has drained her vitality
there the Dracula figure is a male who preys on female victims. It is one of the most disturbing ( and apparently, convulsive) meataphors in European mytholgy of monsters and fears.
Sylvia Plath’s poem may be seen as a chant, a surreal litany which works to exorcise her life of the men she feels she has sufferd by.
the implication is that…
the imagery which she feels most appposite to her feelings
the poem is redeemed from the sense of self-indulgence by thee honesty she aplies to her own weknesses.
the way in which Plath maintains a tension of between painfu revelation, chilling historical references and witty, almost vaudeville humour is both entertaining and subsersive,
the second section picks up the tone of the opening lines
it is in the boy’s imagination that the fea is generated, in a sense, rationally
the ‘coarse croaking’ and ‘bass chorus’ is an ironocal intimation of the trauma of adolescent boy’s voice breaking into manhood.
the poetry is charged with an emotional energy
the poem works convincingly in that it builds up a convincing account of a childhood experience.
the poem is delivered in the first person
a poet who relishes the sound of words
the fact that half of the verses run on into the next verse sets up an interesting tension between the line patterns and the unfolding of the narrative
water looks and sounds poetic, while not in any way detracting from the strength and purpose of the narrative
the modern short story introduces epiphany , the ending which leaves the reader on the edge of some realisation
the dangers of too slavish a worship of their poems in a tension between poetic qualities and the appeal of the natural speaking voice with its everyday speech rythms.
the formative sensual pleasures of the boyhood experience
creating for the reader a sense of holiness that is barely tangible, but nonetheless precious
the final verse outline the horrible completion of the patient’s tragedy
the consonant rhyming of ‘christ’ with ‘list’ and ‘cyst’ is dark;ly ironical
the intrnal rhyme of ‘wide’ and ‘petrified’ is striking
the aptness of the final image
the patient is buried , his personality obliterated
he drifts out of existence as our breath exhales in the pronunciation of those wovels

modern poetry

The metaphor of human or worldly knowledge as a smoky torch unable to light the way through life is quite effective
The ironies here are verbal as well as dramatic: the lan- guage used to describe the town’s adulation of its first citizen (“imperially slim” and “admirably schooled in every grace”) is undercut by the sudden and unadorned description of Cory’s suicide.
The poem’s first stanza introduces the subject of the portrait in brilliantly understated fashion:
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he line of the stanza, with its anticlimactic five beat rhythm and its deflatingly colloquial turn of phrase, presents an ironic contrast to the exag- geratedly dramatic presentation of Cheevy in the first three lines. After the somewhat enigmatic first line (what exactly is a “child of scorn”?) and the hyperbolic diction of the second (“assailed the seasons”) we find the melo- dramatic cliche ́ of “He wept that he was ever born” (a line that may also
reflect the reality of Robinson’s own worldview).
Robinson also uses sound very effectively here, repeating certain vowels as a means of further dimin- ishing the self-importance of Cheevy. The “ee” sound, repeated through “Cheevy,” “lean,” “he,” “seasons,” “he,” “he,” and “reasons,” emphasizes the narrow and somewhat pitiful circumstances of Cheevy’s life.
The poem’s ending, however, catches the reader by surprise with a final note of grim authenticity:
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking,
Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking.
Here the final line is used with devastating skill to complete the portrait of Cheevy, who is not only a dreamer but an alcoholic. The rhyme of “thinking” and “drinking” – again playing with the thin vowel sounds of Miniver’s name – encapsulates the difference between what Cheevy is and what he would like to be.
The poem ends with a series of similes comparing the state of marriage to various natural images. Only in the final comparison does Robinson express his pessimistic vision of marital love:
Though like waves breaking it may be Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
Robinson’s language remains old-fashioned in comparison with that of Frost or Stevens, and the syntax of his lines lacks the natural fluidity of Frost’s best writing, yet there is a rare power in these lines. In the first line, a spondee in the second foot interrupts the iambic beat of the meter, imitating a wave breaking on the coast; in the final line, the inverted syntax works to enhance the image of being driven blindly down a stairway to the rough sea.
The City’s fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee, Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod, Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
To analyze these stanzas in any kind of detail would require more space than we have here, but I will suggest a few directions such an analysis could take. In the previous seven stanzas, Crane has introduced the two major symbols of the proem: the seagull flying “with inviolate curve” over the New York harbor and the bridge itself, standing high above the river. The gull and the bridge are opposites – one a part of nature and the other a human creation – and yet they are closely associated in visual and symbolic terms: the shape of the bridge reproduces the curve of the seagull’s flight, and like the bird the bridge serves as a mediating link between the mundane world of the city and the transcendent realm of artistic or imaginative freedom.
In the eighth stanza, the bridge is figured as both “harp” and “altar,” and thus related both to music and to religious worship. These two functions are fused by a “fury”: the fury of creative process which will bring the poem into being. The bridge, transformed into a sacred musical instrument (the “choiring strings” suggesting the choirs of heaven), becomes the “threshold” of a new era, one in which the poet is to play a central role. The poet is seen in his three guises: as prophet, pariah, and lover.
Much of the imagery Crane uses suggests the religious dimension he assigns to the bridge: in addition to the images of light and darkness, Crane uses the word “immaculate” – usually applied to the Virgin Mary – and describes the bridge as lifting the night in its arms, an allusion to Mary lifting Jesus from the cross. Like the bridge under whose shadows he waits, the poet remains “sleepless” – filled with creative expectation – as he hyperbolically figures the bridge as connecting everything from the Atlantic Ocean to “the prairies’ dreaming sod.” The bridge is “vaulting the sea” in two senses: it is building a protective vault, or arched ceiling, over the sea (also suggesting the vaulted architecture of a church or cathedral), and it is more actively vaulting, or jumping, across both space and time. In the final and most dramatic formulation of the poem, Crane proposes that the bridge “Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend / And of the curveship lend a myth to God.” Crane’s invocation to the bridge – at once his muse and his primary symbol – has reached its climax. The word “curveship,” Crane’s own coinage, contains within it the shape of the bridge, building on the “inviolate curve” of the seagull and forming part of the circle (“white rings of tumult”) delineated by the gull’s wings. At the same time, the suffix “-ship” suggests both the

Answer 35

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