W2

Question 1

Cambell

Answer 1

argues speakers in Dramatic Monologues suffer from an ‘unwilling powerlessness’

Question 2

speakers employ voiceless subjects and auditors

Answer 2

to generate power of speaker’s role

Question 3

Ulysses

Answer 3

1. unspecific soldiers are objects, Ulysses refers to ‘my mariners’ = sense of ownership
2. mariners in fact dead; disembodied language e.g. ‘souls’ obscures view of auditors as actual characters –> Ulysses appears sole character

Question 4

Browning continuous motif of absent subject

Answer 4

although the women in ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Poryphria’s Lover’ are the primary concerns of the poems - they are absent from the direct narrative!

Question 5

The Last Duchess (1842) posthumous absent women

Answer 5

1. ‘my last’ = plurality , possessiveness

2. metrical emphasis on ‘my’ = objectification

Question 6

Porphyria’s Lover (1836) absent

Answer 6

shift in subject/object syntax from her as active to speaker active (‘she put my arm’ –> I wound/Three times her little throat around, /And strangled her.’ + caesura; perfunctory and simplicity suggests control

Question 7

Differing methods of exerting/exhibiting power

Answer 7

PL = brute physical force vs MLD = social hierarchy (emissary)

Question 8

Linda K Hughes

Answer 8

argues that the mariners are in fact dead; the very men who were killed on their previous journey back to Ithaca

Question 9

Duke’s character

Answer 9

wide critical consensus that his character alludes to Alfonso II, the fifth Duke of Ferrara, an aristocratic figure in the Italian Renaissance

Question 10

Duke’s thinly veiled rhetorical request ‘Will’t please you rise?’

Answer 10

posing imperative statement within question format; social control

Question 11

Ulysses name precedes him

Answer 11

as a canonical character in Greek and Roman mythology (As Hayley E. Tartell notes)

Question 12

Ulysses’ hubris

Answer 12

Tennyson’s ironic “I am a part of all that I have met”; the speaker assumes his overarching effect on those he has encountered during his travels, rather than him being affected by others

Question 13

Browning and Tennyson both construct their speakers’ supposed power…

Answer 13

in order to discredit it

Question 14

Duke transforms wife into object; but objects hold power in preoccupation

Answer 14

“none puts buy/ The curtain I have drawn for you, but I”.

Question 15

Earl G. Ingersoll

Answer 15

through literal objectification of lovers, the love / power can never be lost

Question 16

The fractured anecdotal sentences seen in ‘My Last Duchess’ strain against the rigid form

Answer 16

This forces readers to either deviate from the rhythm and rhyme, ignoring the masculine endings of the heroic couplets or ignore the punctuation, leading to an overall lack of clarity

Question 17

In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the meter is rigid and regular, until

Answer 17

the mention of the woman, whose very name ‘Porphyria’ contradicts the iambic rhythm established.

Question 18

Cornelia DJ Persall

Answer 18

views dramatic monologues as being characterized by an “ironic discrepancy” between the speaker’s self-description, and the author’s intended portrayal

Question 19

Tennyson Maud form (FIRST FOUR CANTOS- bewildering array of forms and meters)

Answer 19

rushed and impulsive rhythms of first four cantos (series of hexameter stanzas; initated by famous opening lines ‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood’; lawless hexameter of poem begins in these iambs

Question 20

rhythmic restlessness suggests symptomatic preoocupation with sensation…

Answer 20

accompanied by a hypochondriac consciousness or morbidity

Question 21

Describing Tennyson’s use of meter as a means of embodying lack of control seems….

Answer 21

a contradiction in terms, for the very nature of meter is measure; act of measuring as a kind of mania, a Prufrockian dilemma whereby one is fixed, formulated, endlessly spinning…

Question 22

morbidity

Answer 22

unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of dark moods, frenetic outbursts and introspective brooding

Question 23

morbidity emerges not just from monodrama’s speaker but from forms and rhythms of poem ‘Maud’ itself

Answer 23

morbidity emerges not just from monodrama’s speaker but from forms and rhythms of poem ‘Maud’ itself

Question 24

the poetic voice of Maud is divided between

Answer 24

lyric subjectivity and dramatic objectivity; crucial difference between poet and speaker, as well as speaker and audience

Question 25

struggle of protaganist to exert a discipline over his ungoverned subjectivity is shown as…

Answer 25

raging hexameters are broken by ‘a voice of the cedar tree… singing an air that is known to me’ ; Maud’s song presents steadfast iambic rhythms of the ballad stanza.

Question 26

steadying effect of iambs over ungoverned subjectivity in Maud

Answer 26

‘Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward’

Question 27

Sprung Rhythm

Answer 27

a meter in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not matter

a) spondee replaces iamb as dom meter
b) number of unstressed syllables varies considerably line to line
c) reflects dynamic / variations of ocmmon speech in cont to monotony of iambic pentameter
d) influenced rise of free verse in early 20th C

Question 28

‘The Windhover’

Answer 28

1. Hopkins blends and confuses adjective,s verbs and subjects to echo theme of merging
2. ‘ing’ ending to poem’s rhyme scheme –> unity
3. great no of verbs in short space of lines
4. sprung rhythhm allows H to vary speed of his lines so as to capture bird’s pausing and racing

Question 29

hovering rhythm the windhover

Answer 29

‘the rolling level underneath him steady air’

Question 30

Porypheria’s Lover - while the cadence of the poem mimics natural speech,

Answer 30

it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming ABABB;
intensity & asymmetry suggests madness concealed within speaker’s reasoned slef-presentation

Question 31

Tennyson and Whitman

Answer 31

T great admirer of Whitman
LOG and Maud both published 1855
T even organised collection amongst poets to send money to Whitman
They both died in 1892

Question 32

best line Pied Beauty

Answer 32

‘fresh-ut-falls’ - firecoal chestn

Question 33

Faas traces geneology of Victorian psychological poetry to beginnings and origins in early Tennyson and Browning…

Answer 33

to Romantic sceince of feelings to influence of Elizabethan drama and Shakespeare’s soliloquies.