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- ONE longer question (20 minutes)
-Elizabethan Poetry: The Sonnet.
William Shakespeare used and popularized the sonnet with the declamatory couplet. His popularity spring boarded the sonnet to a prominent place in English literature and become the 2nd dominant sonnet form along side the _Petrarchan or Italian Sonnet (1)_**
The Shakespearean Sonnet, sometimes called the English Sonnet or Elizabethan Sonnet, does not use the octave/sestet structure of the Italian Sonnet. It is usually found in three quatrains ending with a rhyming couplet. Although the Italian form often pivots between the octave and the sestet, the Shakespearean Sonnet pivots deeper into the poem, sometime after line 9 or 10. Shakespeare even delayed the pivot until the 13th line in his Sonnet 30. Wherein the Italian sonnet discloses the epiphany of the subject slowly, the Shakespearean Sonnet makes a swift leap to the epiphany at the ending couplet.
The defining features of the English or Shakespearean Sonnet are:
- It is a quatorzain made up of 3 quatrains and ending in a rhymed couplet.
- (^) Metric, written in iambic pentameter. Sometimes the opening line of the sonnet begins with the first foot, a trochee before the poem falls into a regular iambic pattern.
- Composed with the volta (a non physical gap) or pivot (a shifting or tilting of the main line of thought) deep into the poem, varied but always well after the 2nd quatrain.
- Developed so that each quatrain progresses toward a surprising turn of events in the ending couplet. The epiphany of the poem arrives in a swift leap at the end.
- (^) Rhymed with up to 7 rhymes with a rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.
- Composed with an ending rhymed couplet which should be declamatory and the defining feature of the sonnet. This couplet is often the loudest, most powerful part of the sonnet.
Themes: “The Sonnet”
- Lady’s great beauty
- Her power over the poet
- Her cruelty to him
- His sleeplessness
- The fire of his love and the ice of her chastity
- The pain of absence
- The renunciation of love
- And the eternity and originality of his poems.
The Sonnet & Sonnet Sequence (IMPORTANT)
- Italian form : octave (2 quatrains) and sexted, rhyming abba abba cdecde (introduced by Wyatt.SOME Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stela 1591). The “volta” or “turning point” occurs in line 9.
- English form : 3 quatrains and a couplet, rhiming abab, cdcd, efef, gg (introduced by Sydney’s Astrophil and Stela, Shakespeare…). The “volta” or “turn” often occurs in the 3 rd^ quatrain or in the ending strophe (tercet or couplet).
- Spencer’s Amoretti, 1595, preferref richer rhymes abab bebe cdcd ee.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609)
- Finest love-poems. Cryptic sequence, neither narrative, nor autobiography.
- The “L” of the Poet, the “Lovely Buy”, the Rival Poet, the Dark Lady.
- Based on the Petrarchan tradition, but subverting it (Idealism vs. Realism; Chaste Lady vs. Dark, promiscuous Lady; “Lovely Boy” (not the lady) is the object of praise, love and devotion, etc.)
The language of Sonnets
- (^) Simple language
- Rich metaphorical style
- Imagery from a wide variety of sources : law, history, gardening, astrology, navigation, domestic affairs…
- Rhetorical strategy (IMPORTANT): to elaborate an initial statement to reach a conclusion in the final couplet, or to turn the situation into another direction in the final sextet.
Differences between the Elizabethan and the Metaphysical Poetry.
The term "metaphysical" refers to philosophical speculations beyond the sensory: notions such as time, God, human nature etc. The term was originally applied to Donne's poems because of his use of academic learning in the poems. Elizabethan poets, 16th^ century, were concerned with the expression of simple and conventional themes in a fairly elaborate and artificial way, the metaphysical were more intellectual in subject matters and style, and expressed their interest in their own experience and in the changing world around them. The different language used in this periods is also interesting, there is a contrast between the direct colloquial language used by Metaphysical poets and the irregular language of Elizabethan. It was very important to follow a logical order for Metaphysical, in contrast Elizabethan didn't have a special way of writing.
-John Donne and the Metaphysical Wit.
The last decade of the sixteenth century present in the poems of John Donne, a new style of verse. Donne, born in 1573, possessed one of the powerful intellects of the time, but his early manhood was largely wasted in dissipation, though he studied theology and law and
-Imagination and Individuality in the English Romantic Poetry.
Imagination and individuality are two important characteristics in the English Romantic Poetry:
On the one hand individuality refers to:
- 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.
- Romantic poets believed the individual person was important and emphasized the needs of the individual over society as a whole.
- Individual emotion was seen as a valuable, unique and genuine (again it is the individual and his or her emotions that inspire).
On the other hand imagination holds:
- Romantics believed that it is the writer’s imagination that produces true poetry.
- Inspiration invokes the imagination; imagination creates poetry (product)
- This is one reason they embraced the spiritual (deeper level of existence) and the supernatural (forces at work that can’t necessarily be explaned)
- Characteristics of the English Romantic Poetry.
Romanticism is often seen as an attempt to escape from the realities of the age. Indeed, the Romantic took refuge in a supposedly glorious past (medieval times, ancient Greece...) an utopian future, or a distant and exotic present. The Romantics developed a fascination with the glamour of the Middle Ages. The subject of Romantic Poetry was often ordinary people. Feelings were very important but knowledge was more. It emphasizes individualism, freedom from rules, spontaneity, solitary life rather then life in society, and the love of beauty and nature. About the style we can say that they abandonment of the heroic couplet in favour of blank verse, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and many experimental verse forms. They educate people using new methods. Some of the most well- known Romantic English poets are Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Shelley. An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or the actual (realism).
- 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.
“Daffodils” (or “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth) Comment the poem in connection with his revolutionary ideas on poetry.
In his poems Wordsworth showed that God and universe or nature is 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
"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.
- 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 an important aspect of Donne's verse and he often uses this technique to create very rude jokes. To His Mistress Going to Bed is very inventive with language play,
on the word "labor", "standing", "flesh upright" etc. In his poems John Donne used to use arresting openings: he was the master of the arresting opening and many poems open with a burst of emotion to gain the reader's (or addressee's) attention: Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy/ Until I labor, I in labor lie. In this time was important the discover of new lands and it was also showed in compositions “O my America! my new- found-land,..”, the learning of Greek and Roman culture would have been an important part of the education of the day. In this poem he refers to Atlanta, for example. The Elizabethan/Jacobean age was the great age of drama and it is no surprise that this is reflected in Donne's work. The Blazon is a literary term used by the followers of Petrarch to describe verses which dwelt upon and detailed various parts of a woman's body - a sort of catalogue of her physical attributes. This is a form of conceit. Donne clearly used this form in To His Mistress Going to Bed, although he uses it in a slightly different way by dwelling on his mistress' clothes as she undresses. Feminist critics have often found themselves disagreeing with Donne's perspectives on women. In this poem the woman is presented in the language of colonialism as if she is to become the possession of the male coloniser ; these colonial images that Donne uses indicate that Donne viewed women as a possession, something valuable to be conquered and enjoyed. A closer reading reveals tantalising complexities. Even in a state of desire, Donne's speaker reveals his capacity for wit: he refers to his excited state using puns on "labour" and "standing." As he anticipates going to bed with his mistress, he is like a soldier waiting for battle: "standing" refers both.
6.2 “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes” (by Thomas Gray). Describe the characteristics of the Neoclassical (Augustan) Poetry in this poem.
There are different characteristics of the Augustan poetry in this poem. First of all, we can see a dignified, aristocratic and elevated language. He uses a kind of artificial language with exaggerations and we can also see mythological references, as “Tyrian”. By this way it’s also shown the cosmopolitanism, with the name of different places, as China or Tyrian. The poem tells a mocking and humorous situation. It is also seen a kind of imitation of the classics, references to Rome and Greece and an aesthetic effect. The Rationalism and the Skepticism are present in this poem, the preoccupation with the present, the here and now, what is happening with the cat and the tub of gold fishes. The poet is not worried about what will happen later in the cat’s life. He’s only focused on what’s happening in the moment, what the cat is doing. Finally, the poet follows Natures. This means it follows a general statement with rhetorical questions, working with the idea of nature. It links a particular case with the universal conclusion.
-Kubla Khan (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge): Coleridge’s Vision, Imagination and Poetry.
Samuel T. Coleridge’s well known poem, “Kubla Khan” is a prime example of how important the imagination was the Romantic writers and to their work. The entire poem is based on a vision Coleridge had during an opium trance. After he awoke from his drugged state, he began to write down what he had seen. He was interrupted and forgot the vision before he could write all of it down. The poem is a reflection of the vision, and of his desire to remember the supposed two to three hundred lines of poetry he meant to write down. It is in the fifth and final stanza of the poem in which Coleridge changes his haunting and dreamlike tone to wistful longing and makes clear his intentions. For the Romantic writers, the imagination brought together the real and unreal, as part of the synthesis of thesis and antithesis, to create what cannot be seen. By 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
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,” “bright hair of Maenad,” and “Dirge” are used by the poet to give the poem varying degrees of imagery—kinetic, visual, and auditory—to delineate the external world as reveling in beauty, glory, and power in the strophe.
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:
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness! Thou foster-child of silence and slow time (lines 1–2)
The urn is a "foster-child of silence and slow time" because it is created from stone and made by the hand of an artist who does not communicate through words. As stone, time has little effect on it and ageing is such a slow process that it can be seen as an eternal piece of artwork. The urn is an external object capable of producing a story outside the time of its creation, and because of this ability the poet labels it a "sylvan historian" that tells its story through its beauty:
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (lines 3–10)
The questions presented in these lines are too ambiguous to allow the reader to understand what is taking place in the images on the urn, but elements of it are revealed: there is a pursuit with a strong sexual component. The melody accompanying the pursuit is intensified in the second stanza:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11–14)
There is a hint of a paradox in that indulgence causes someone to be filled with desire and that music without a sound is desired by the soul. There is a stasis that prohibits the characters on the urn from ever being fulfilled:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (lines 17–20)
In the third stanza, the narrator begins by speaking to a tree, which will ever hold its leaves and will not "bid the Spring adieu". The paradox of life versus lifelessness extends beyond the lover and the fair lady and takes a more temporal shape as three of the ten lines begin with the words "for ever". The unheard song never ages and the pipes are able to play forever, which leads the lovers, nature, and all involved to be:
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,
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.
6.6- “The Lady of Shalott” (by Alfred Tennyson). Comment the poem. You should pay attention to its parts, stanzaic form (rhythm and rhyme), spatial division, Lady and Lancelot, supernatural elements, explanation of the conclusion, etc.
Tennyson breaks up the lines in this poem. The most basic division in the poem is the four big chunks (Parts 1-4). It might help to think of these like acts in a play – they each focus on a different part of the plot. Part 1 describes the landscape around Shalott. Part 2 describes the Lady and the things she sees in her mirror. Part 3 deals with the appearance of Lancelot and how cool he is. Part 4 covers the Lady's boat ride and her death.
The first four stanzas describe a pastoral setting. The Lady of Shalott lives in an island castle in a river which flows to Camelot, but little is known about her by the local farmers. Stanzas five to eight describe the lady's life. She suffers from a mysterious curse, and must continually weave images on her loom without ever looking directly out at the world. Instead, she looks into a mirror which reflects the busy road and the people of Camelot which pass by her island. The reflected images are described as "shadows of the world," a metaphor that makes clear that they are a poor substitute for seeing directly. Stanzas nine to twelve describe "bold Sir Lancelot" as he rides by, and is seen by the lady. The remaining seven stanzas describe the effect on the lady of seeing Lancelot; she stops weaving and looks out of her window toward Camelot, bringing about the curse. She leaves her tower, finds a boat upon which she writes her name, and floats down the river to Camelot. She dies before arriving at the palace. Among the knights and ladies who see her is Lancelot, who thinks she is lovely.
In this particular poem, Tennyson makes it easy on us, because the stanzas are always nine lines long. There are a total of nineteen stanzas in the whole poem. If we count up the
stanzas, we can see that the Parts of the poem get longer as we go along. The first two parts have four stanzas each, Part 3 has five stanzas, and Part 4 has six stanzas.
Tennyson made a big deal out of the rhyming lines in this poem, which are super- noticeable once you start to focus on them. Each stanza in this poem rhymes in exactly the same way.
The mysterious curse on the Lady of Shalott is a big part of the plot. It rules her life and causes her death. This little thread of black magic helps give "The Lady of Shalott" its spooky, sad atmosphere, and also connects it to the medieval fantasy world of wizards and spells.
