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5. Comment ONE poem (20 minutes) 5.1- “Sonnet I”, from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (“Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show”): Describe the form and explain what the poet is saying about writing poetry. Astrophil and Stella is a poem written by Sidney. It’s an English Sonnet which follows the Petrarchan tradition. The Rhyme Scheme is ABAB ABAB CDCD EE. In the second quartrain it is ABAB, instead of BCBC that is the typical of Spenserian sonnets. The metric is 6 feet per line (12 syllabes), so the rhyme scheme tends to pick up speed, leading to the acceleration of the climax. It’s an Iambic hexameter. The poem is divided into two parts: an octet and a sextet (first quatrain and the final couplet). There is a turn (volta) in line 9. There are also alliterations and metaphors. The poem ends with a final couplet, giving an epigrammatic and climatic conclusion. In “Astrophil and Stella”, the poet tries to express his feelings. He wants to write because he wished to express throughout verses his love for Stella using a poetry vocabulary. He had been looking for inspiration in other authors, but Stella She said he didn’t have to look for inspiration in other authors; he had to look into his hearth. That’s why, what the poet really thinks about writing poetry is that that the nature of inspiration is in yourself. This is the message: If you want to write or to express something, you have to look into yourself, to say it in the better way, what you really feel. 5.2- “Sonnet CXXX” (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), or “Sonnet CXXXVIII” Sonnet 130 is the poet's pragmatic tribute to his uncomely mistress, commonly referred to as the dark lady because of her dun complexion. Not only is his sequence largely occupied with subverting the traditional themes of love sonnets, he also combines formal patterns with daring and innovation. Many of his sonnets in the sequence, for instance, impose the thematic pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet onto the formal pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, so that while there are still three quatrains and a couplet, the first two quatrains might ask a single question, which the third quatrain and the couplet will answer. The poetic form uses standard Shakespearean iambic pentameter, following the AB-AB/CD-CD/ EF-EF/GG Rhyme Scheme. Shakespeare uses all the techniques available, including the sonnet structure itself, to enhance his parody of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet typified by Sidney’s work. But Shakespeare ends the sonnet by proclaiming his love for his mistress despite her lack of adornment, so he does finally embrace the fundamental theme in Petrarch's sonnets: total and consuming love. Sonnet 130 is like a love poem turned on its head. Usually, if you were talking about your beloved, you would go out of your way to praise her, to point all the ways that she is the best. In this case, though, Shakespeare spends this poem comparing his mistress's appearance to other things, and then telling us how she doesn't measure up to them. He goes through a whole laundry list, giving us details about the flaws of her body, her smell, even the sound of her voice. Then, at the end, he changes his tune and tells us about his real and complete love for her. -A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, or The Good-Morrow (both by
John Donne): Choose one poem and coment the poetical elements in
connection with the metaphysical aesthetics.
The Good Morrow. John Donne is one of the most celebrated poets of English language belonging
to the metaphysical school of thought. “The Good Morrow” is one of his best
poems which has been awarded with some magnificent traits of metaphysical
poetry by the poet making it a jolting as well as well as an enthralling read.
Metaphysical poetry is predominantly intellectual where the emotions of the poet are expressed
In his poems Wordsworth showed that God and universe or nature are the same thing and he also
expressed a relation between the man and common life with the cosmos. In “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, Wordsworth identifies the daffodils with the starts that shine and the Milky Way, everything as the same thing. Wordsworth wrote realistic poetry, themes and situations from common life, anything about fantastic characters. He preferred tell stories about real and common man or woman, children, animals or nature elements. “I wandered lonely as a cloud” tells the story of a man who is wandering and suddenly he saw a lot of daffodils which “dance in the breeze”. This is an example of how a natural fact as the flowering of daffodils can be used by the poet to make a story and shows it in a poem. It is not necessary to utilize unreal elements or fantastic characters. Furthermore, Wordsworth also changed the language in poetry. He was not only focused in trying to use an archaic language with a lot of metaphors, elevated style and difficult words that people don’t commonly know. He preferred to use the language of feelings, a spontaneous and emotional language which everybody can understand. The metaphors and personifications he used were about natural scenery. The “sublime”, the excellence in language, the expression of a great spirit, the power to provoke an ecstasy in readers. He expresses the sublime through the nature, as it is seen in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, how a simple fact is telling as a great event, how the poet expresses what the character feels and how Wordsworth makes that the readers can feel. 5.5- “Ozymandias” (by Percy Bysshe Shelley). Comment this poem in connection with the Romantic ideals and preoccupations. Ozymandias is a poem which reflects some aspects of the English Romanticism One of the aspects reflected in the poem is the interest in exotic places. Ozymandias takes place in a foreign land that allows the reader to use their imagination to interpret things in their own way. We can also see the sense of individualism in this poem. It is focused on one individual literally to convey a message. The love and worship of nature is also present here, because the scene of the poem is located in a desert, far away of the urban life. Another characteristic is the interest in the past. The poem Ozymandias travels deep into the past and alludes to thirteenth century Egypt B.C and the supposed monarch in that time period. This allusion is supported by this quote: "I met a traveler from an antique land." It is being compared Shelley’s period with the thirteen century. The interest in inmortality is also seen in Ozymandias. Shelley presents a monarch that was overly proud, his pride was so towering that he built a statue of himself, that he believed would be relevant for some time. Ozymandias felt as though his greatness would endure, as though he would be immortal himself, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!" However, Shelley’s envision proves false as he is no longer relevant, and his statue is no longer erect nor intact, it is isolated and unnoticed, "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay." Shelley builds this piece of work around the theme of immortality. 5.6- “Dover Beach” (by Matthew Arnold). Comment this poem in connection with Victorian times. Dover Beach is a poem by Matthew Arnold, who wanted to say that the faith, that great mainstay of the Victorian world, had failed, like a light gone out. All that's left is love. Matthew Arnold was born in Victorian age in which people no longer appreciated the beauty of nature but believed in new discoveries of science. The faith of religious was being critical, too. However, in this poem, the narrator was kind of mourning the fade of faith in God. In the first stanza, the sea was calm, but under it there were many pebbles drew back and flung which made the "grating roar" and "bring the eternal note of sadness in". The narrator was with his lover standing by the window. He said, "Come to the window, sweet is the night!” He was watching Dover Beach and felt the beauty of it. In the second and third stanza, the narrator compared himself to Sophocles and both of them were listening to "the misery of human". "The misery of human" referred to people at that time pursued science blindly and forgot about the importance of nature inspiration. Matthew Arnold was quite right: love is the basic need for human, especially for lovers. If lovers couldn't be true to each other when other people quench their true feelings to fit the modern trends,
-“The Windhover” and Gerard Manely Hopkins’ poetic innovations.
"The Windhover" is a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). Hopkins dedicated the poem "to Christ our Lord".
The name of “Windhover” refers to the bird's ability to hover in midair while hunting prey. In the poem, the narrator admires the bird as it hovers in the air, suggesting that it controls the wind as a man may control a horse. The bird then suddenly swoops downwards and "[rebuffs] the big wind". The bird can be viewed as a metaphor for Christ or of divine epiphany. Gerard Manley Hopkins is now regarded as one of poetry’s great innovators, using Welsh and Anglo-Saxon traditions to create poems, crammed full of repetition and alliteration. The result is poetry bursting with dynamic energy.
The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent a masterful use of language. Hopkins blends and confuses adjectives, verbs, and subjects in order to echo his theme of smooth merging: the bird’s perfect immersion in the air, and the fact that his self and his action are inseparable. Note, too, how important the “-ing” ending is to the poem’s rhyme scheme; it occurs in verbs, adjectives, and nouns, linking the different parts of the sentences together in an intense unity. A great number of verbs are packed into a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive precision as possible the exact character of the bird’s motion.
“The Windhover” is written in “sprung rhythm,” a meter in which the number of accents in a line is counted but the number of syllables does not matter. This technique allows Hopkins to vary the speed of his lines so as to capture the bird’s pausing and racing. Listen to the hovering rhythm of “the rolling level underneath him steady air,” and the arched brightness of “and striding high there.” The poem slows abruptly at the end, pausing in awe to reflect on Christ.
As a result of this sprung rhythm, many of these short lyrics exhibit a tension between the energy and force of the rhythm and the restriction of the form.
Many of the best of these lyrics express Hopkins's ecstatic joy in the beauty of nature. His works revealed his constant effort to discern and reproduce the particular characteristics of a beautiful object or experience that distinguish it from any other. Hopkins called this individuality or "inscape" and designated the experience of perceiving inscape and thereby being joined more intimately with the object or experience as "instress."
Hopkins extended his earlier, purely sensuous view of natural beauty to a sacramental view of nature as a material symbol of God's perfect spiritual beauty. The realization of natural beauty thus becomes a religious experience in which a perceiver is instressed with the inscape of a beautiful thing and thus instressed with God, the creator of that beauty. His most famous poem, "The Windhover,” records his realization of the inscape of Christ through the inscape of a hawk and poses his ecstatic joy in the beauty of both bird and Christ against his willing submission to the asceticism of routine religious duties.
6. Comment ONE poem (30 minutes) “To His Mistress Going to Bed” John Donne. Comment the metaphysical elements in this poem.
One metaphysical characteristic is the use of puns and clever plays on words: ingenuity and wit was
writing down what he saw in his hallucination, Coleridge would have solidified the pleasure dome of ice caves. This would have created a physical, geographical location for us to experience in our own minds. Had he been able to remember the topographical details, he could have shared this
“miraculous” place with us, his readers. COMPLETAR ALGO CON LA PREGUNTA DE COLERIDGE'S THEORY OS IMAGINATION. And all who heard should see theme there
And all should cry: “Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair
Weave a circle around him thrice
And close your eyes in holy dread:
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise!”
Coleridge’s drug use also appears in the poem. These lines can loosely interpreted as Coleridge’s vision would have been so great and strange that people might have seen him as a wizard or a person of dark magic. They also might have thought he was crazy, not unlike many people think that Lewis Carroll, another opium addict, was crazy, too. This comes from the mention of weaving of a circle around him and the flashing eyes and floating hair. The implication of drug use might come from “For on honeydew he hath fed/ And drunk the milk of Paradise!” Paradise could mean the “high” from the opium. With this poem Coleridge shows the fact that If we can share all of what our imagination has to offer with society, society can benefit. It can expose the world to another alternate universe where chaos is order and order does not exist, nothing is what we expect.
6.4- “Ode to the West Wind” (By Percy Bysshe Shelley) and the Romantic Poet. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” is a poem very related with the
ideals of Romanticism, of which one is the imaginative proportions to which he
depicts the creative force of the “West Wind.” These are just a few of the
Romantic elements in Shelley’s poetry, which depict him as an astounding
Romantic poet.
Shelley pays homage to the “West Wind” by starting the ode with an
invocation, and he allows it to run through the poetic veins of the persona in
the strophe and the antistrophe. The first stanza is an invocation: “O wild West
Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,/ Thou, from whose unseen presence the
leaves dead/ Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”
Here, the persona seems to be in harmony with the natural world as he
appreciates the power of the “West Wind” as an agentive force of change.
Metaphors such as “Autumn,” “Wild Spirit,” “Destroyer,” “Preserver,” “Angels,”
Shelley, also, extols the power of the “West Wind” in the antistrophe, but in the epode, he drifts into
a salubrious imagination in which the persona wishes he were a boy accompanying his idol—the “West Wind”--on its “wanderings over Heaven.” Indeed, Shelley becomes so enchanted with the West Wind that he equates
himself with its evocative force. As he points out, “West Wind has chained and
bowed/ One too like thee: tameless, Wind.”
In a sense, Shelley espouses the diligence and talent of the persona in the
poem: “A heavy weight of hours and swift, and proud” (55-56).
-Ode on a Grecian Urn
" Ode on a Grecian Urn " is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published in January 1820. It is one of his "Great Odes of 1819", which include:
- "Ode on Indolence"
- "Ode on Melancholy"
- "Ode to a Nightingale"
- "Ode to Psyche"
The collection represented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired of works on classical Greek art. The classical Greek art was idealistic and captured Greek virtues, which forms the basis of the poem.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” is divided into five stanzas of ten lines each, the ode contains a narrator's discourse on a series of designs on a Grecian urn. The poem focuses on two scenes:
One in which a lover eternally pursues a beloved without fulfilment, and another of villagers about to perform a sacrifice. The final lines of the poem declare that "'beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know", and literary critics have debated whether they increase or diminish the overall beauty of the poem. Critics have focused on other aspects of the poem, including the role of the narrator, the inspirational qualities of real-world objects, and the paradoxical relationship between the poem's world and reality.
Analysis of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
The poem begins with the narrator's silencing the urn by describing it as the "bride of quietness", which allows him to speak for it using his own impressions. The narrator addresses the urn by saying:
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. (lines 27–30)
A new paradox arises in these lines because these immortal lovers are experiencing a living
death.To overcome this paradox of merged life and death, the poem shifts to a new scene with a
new perspective. The fourth stanza opens with the sacrifice of a virgin cow:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. (lines 31–40)
All that exists in the scene is a procession of individuals, and the narrator conjectures on the rest. The altar and town exist as part of a world outside art, and the poem challenges the limitations of art through describing their possible existence. The questions are unanswered because there is no one who can ever know the true answers, as the locations are not real. The final stanza begins with a reminder that the urn is a piece of eternal artwork:
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral! (lines 41–45)
The audience is limited in its ability to comprehend the eternal scene, but the silent urn is still able to speak to them. The story it tells is both cold and passionate, and it is able to help mankind. The poem concludes with the urn's message:
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 46–50)
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a visual work of art
Keats describes an urn within "Ode on a Grecian Urn" to focus on representational art. Love and
Poesy are integrated into "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with an emphasis on how the urn, as a human
artistic construct, is capable of relating to the idea of "Truth".
Although the poem does not include the involvement of the narrator, the description of the urn
within the poem implies a human observer that draws out these images (love, beauty and art). The
narrator interacts with the urn in a manner similar to how a critic would respond to the poem, which
creates ambiguity in the poem's final lines: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all / Ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know."
As a symbol, an urn cannot completely represent poetry, but it does serve as one component in
describing the relationship between art and humanity. The nightingale of "Ode to a Nightingale" is
separated from humanity and does not have human concerns. The urn, as a piece of art, requires an
audience and is in an incomplete state on its own. This allows the urn to interact with humanity, to
put forth a narrative, and allows for the imagination to operate. The images on the urn provoke the
narrator to ask questions, and the silence of the urn reinforces the imagination's ability to operate.
The English Romanticism
The English Romanticism is a literary movement in England that took place roughly between 1785-1830. Romantic Poets include Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, and Byron.
Characteristics of Romantic Poets
- Beauty of the Supernatural : British Romantics believed something existed beyond the physical world. The Spirit world, according to Romantics, had unleashed its power and inspiration to overthrow tyranny in government and in literature. Unlike the American Romantics who wrote of ghosts, demonic cats, and rope-gnawing rats, British Romanticism's treatment of the supernatural excluded horror and the macabre and focused on supernatural energy and beauty.
- Championing of the Individual: Revolution in Europe brought to light the importance of the individual. Ordinary people now became the subject of lofty language. British Romanticism attempted to free itself from traditional forms and subjects.
- The Importance of Nature: The poet, according to the Romantics, is only at peace when in nature; moreover, while in nature, the poet intervened with the great Universal Mind. Romantic poets made frequent use of personification with nature, ascribing human traits to daffodils, fields, streams, and lakes. Nature, in essence, became emotionally expressive.
- The Dangers of Technology: A natural consequence of celebrating nature was a disdain for technology and industrialism.
