Robert Browning’s Poetry, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”

 

Summary

This highly entertaining poem portrays the grumblings of a jealous monk who finds his pleasures more in the flesh than in the spirit. Presenting himself as the model of righteousness, the speaker condemns a fellow monk, Brother Lawrence, for his immorality; but we soon recognize that the faults he assigns to Lawrence are in fact his own. Unlike many of Browning’s monologues, this one has no real historical specificity: we have no clues as to when the speaker might have lived, and the Spanish cloister is simply an anonymous monastery.

Form

The poem comprises nine eight-line stanzas, each rhyming ABABCDCD. The lines fall roughly into tetrameter, although with some irregularities. Browning makes ample use of the conventions of spoken language, including nonverbal sounds (“Gr-r-r-”) and colloquial language (“Hell dry you up with its flames!”). Many of the later dramatic monologues dispense with rhyme altogether, but this poem retains it, perhaps to suggest the speaker’s self-righteousness and careful adherence to tradition and formal convention.

Because the speaker here is talking to himself, the poem is not technically a dramatic monologue as so many of Browning’s poems are; rather, it is, as its title suggests, a “soliloquy” (even though it is a freestanding poem, and not a speech from a play). Nevertheless it shares many of the features of the dramatic monologues: an interest in sketching out a character, an attention to aestheticizing detail, and an implied commentary on morality.

Commentary

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” explores moral hypocrisy. On the surface, the poem may seem to be a light historical piece, the utterings of a grumpy but interesting monk—however, it repeatedly approaches a tone similar to that used by the more strident of Victorian essayists and religious figures. Browning portrays this man’s interior commentary to show that behind righteousness often lurks self-righteousness and corruption. The speaker levels some rather malevolent curses at Brother Lawrence, accusing his fellow monk of gluttony and lechery, when it is obvious, based on the examples he gives, that it is the speaker himself who is guilty of these sins (for example, when describing the supposed focus of Lawrence’s lecherous attentions, the speaker indulges in fairly abundant detail; clearly he has been looking for himself.) Moreover, the speaker’s fantasies about trapping Lawrence into damnation suggest that Lawrence is in fact a good man who will receive salvation. Thus Browning implies that the most vehement moralists invent their own opposition in order to elevate themselves.

Perhaps most importantly, the speaker describes a bargain he would make with Satan to hurt Lawrence. The speaker claims he could make such a bargain that Satan would believe he was getting the speaker’s soul when in fact a loophole would let the speaker escape. The paradox here is that making any sort of bargain with the devil to the disadvantage of another, whether one tricks Satan in the end or not, must necessarily involve the loss of one’s soul: the very act of making such a treacherous bargain constitutes a mortal sin. No one could admire this speaker’s moral dissolution; yet he represents a merely thinly veiled version of people whose public characters are very much admired—the moralists and preachers of Browning’s day. Browning exposes such people’s hypocrisy and essential immorality.

source: www.sparknotes.com

Robert Browning’s Poetry, Porphyria’s Lover

 

Porphyria’s Lover

Summary

“Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realizes that she “worship[s]” him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society’s pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.

Form

“Porphyria’s Lover,” while natural in its language, does not display the colloquialisms or dialectical markers of some of Browning’s later poems. Moreover, while the cadence of the poem mimics natural speech, it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming ABABB. The intensity and asymmetry of the pattern suggests the madness concealed within the speaker’s reasoned self-presentation.

This poem is a dramatic monologue—a fictional speech presented as the musings of a speaker who is separate from the poet. Like most of Browning’s other dramatic monologues, this one captures a moment after a main event or action. Porphyria already lies dead when the speaker begins. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing her, so too does this kind of poem seek to freeze the consciousness of an instant.

    

Commentary

“Porphyria’s Lover” opens with a scene taken straight from the Romantic poetry of the earlier nineteenth century. While a storm rages outdoors, giving a demonstration of nature at its most sublime, the speaker sits in a cozy cottage. This is the picture of rural simplicity—a cottage by a lake, a rosy-cheeked girl, a roaring fire. However, once Porphyria begins to take off her wet clothing, the poem leaps into the modern world. She bares her shoulder to her lover and begins to caress him; this is a level of overt sexuality that has not been seen in poetry since the Renaissance. We then learn that Porphyria is defying her family and friends to be with the speaker; the scene is now not just sexual, but transgressively so. Illicit sex out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society; the famous Victorian “prudery” constituted only a backlash to what was in fact a popular obsession with the theme: the newspapers of the day reveled in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here, however, in “Porphyria’s Lover,” sex appears as something natural, acceptable, almost wholesome: Porphyria’s girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of immorality.

For the Victorians, modernity meant numbness: urban life, with its constant over-stimulation and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories, immunized people to shock. Many believed that the onslaught of amorality and the constant assault on the senses could be counteracted only with an even greater shock. This is the principle Browning adheres to in “Porphyria’s Lover.” In light of contemporary scandals, the sexual transgression might seem insignificant; so Browning breaks through his reader’s probable complacency by having Porphyria’s lover murder her; and thus he provokes some moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience. This is not to say that Browning is trying to shock us into condemning either Porphyria or the speaker for their sexuality; rather, he seeks to remind us of the disturbed condition of the modern psyche. In fact, “Porphyria’s Lover” was first published, along with another poem, under the title Madhouse Cells, suggesting that the conditions of the new “modern” world served to blur the line between “ordinary life”—for example, the domestic setting of this poem—and insanity—illustrated here by the speaker’s action.

This poem, like much of Browning’s work, conflates sex, violence, and aesthetics. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work. How is it that society considers the beauty of the female body to be immoral while never questioning the morality of language’s sensuality—a sensuality often most manifest in poetry? Why does society see both sex and violence as transgressive? What is the relationship between the two? Which is “worse”? These are some of the questions that Browning’s poetry posits. And he typically does not offer any answers to them: Browning is no moralist, although he is no libertine either. As a fairly liberal man, he is confused by his society’s simultaneous embrace of both moral righteousness and a desire for sensation; “Porphyria’s Lover” explores this contradiction.

How to Write Literary Analysis

 Introduction

When you read for pleasure, your only goal is enjoyment. You might find yourself reading to get caught up in an exciting story, to learn about an interesting time or place, or just to pass time. Maybe you’re looking for inspiration, guidance, or a reflection of your own life. There are as many different, valid ways of reading a book as there are books in the world.

When you read a work of literature in an English class, however, you’re being asked to read in a special way: you’re being asked to perform literary analysis. To analyze something means to break it down into smaller parts and then examine how those parts work, both individually and together. Literary analysis involves examining all the parts of a novel, play, short story, or poem—elements such as character, setting, tone, and imagery—and thinking about how the author uses those elements to create certain effects.

A literary essay isn’t a book review: you’re not being asked whether or not you liked a book or whether you’d recommend it to another reader. A literary essay also isn’t like the kind of book report you wrote when you were younger, where your teacher wanted you to summarize the book’s action. A high school- or college-level literary essay asks, “How does this piece of literature actually work?” “How does it do what it does?” and, “Why might the author have made the choices he or she did?”

The Seven Steps

No one is born knowing how to analyze literature; it’s a skill you learn and a process you can master. As you gain more practice with this kind of thinking and writing, you’ll be able to craft a method that works best for you. But until then, here are seven basic steps to writing a well-constructed literary essay.

Ask Questions

When you’re assigned a literary essay in class, your teacher will often provide you with a list of writing prompts. Lucky you! Now all you have to do is choose one. Do yourself a favor and pick a topic that interests you. You’ll have a much better (not to mention easier) time if you start off with something you enjoy thinking about. If you are asked to come up with a topic by yourself, though, you might start to feel a little panicked. Maybe you have too many ideas—or none at all. Don’t worry. Take a deep breath and start by asking yourself these questions:

Collect Evidence

Once you know what question you want to answer, it’s time to scour the book for things that will help you answer the question. Don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to say yet—right now you’re just collecting ideas and material and letting it all percolate. Keep track of passages, symbols, images, or scenes that deal with your topic. Eventually, you’ll start making connections between these examples and your thesis will emerge.

Elements of Style

These are the hows—how the characters speak, how the story is constructed, and how language is used throughout the work.

 Construct a Thesis

When you’ve examined all the evidence you’ve collected and know how you want to answer the question, it’s time to write your thesis statement. A thesis is a claim about a work of literature that needs to be supported by evidence and arguments. The thesis statement is the heart of the literary essay, and the bulk of your paper will be spent trying to prove this claim. A good thesis will be:

·        Arguable.

“The Great Gatsby describes New York society in the 1920s” isn’t a thesis—it’s a fact.

·        Provable through textual evidence.

“Hamlet is a confusing but ultimately very well-written play” is a weak thesis because it offers the writer’s personal opinion about the book. Yes, it’s arguable, but it’s not a claim that can be proved or supported with examples taken from the play itself.

·        Surprising.

“Both George and Lenny change a great deal in Of Mice and Men ” is a weak thesis because it’s obvious. A really strong thesis will argue for a reading of the text that is not immediately apparent.

·        Specific.

“Dr. Frankenstein’s monster tells us a lot about the human condition” is almost a really great thesis statement, but it’s still too vague. What does the writer mean by “a lot”? How does the monster tell us so much about the human condition?

Develop and Organize Arguments

The reasons and examples that support your thesis will form the middle paragraphs of your essay. Since you can’t really write your thesis statement until you know how you’ll structure your argument, you’ll probably end up working on steps 3 and 4 at the same time.

There’s no single method of argumentation that will work in every context. One essay prompt might ask you to compare and contrast two characters, while another asks you to trace an image through a given work of literature. These questions require different kinds of answers and therefore different kinds of arguments. Below, we’ll discuss three common kinds of essay prompts and some strategies for constructing a solid, well-argued case.

Write the Introduction

Your introduction sets up the entire essay. It’s where you present your topic and articulate the particular issues and questions you’ll be addressing. It’s also where you, as the writer, introduce yourself to your readers. A persuasive literary essay immediately establishes its writer as a knowledgeable, authoritative figure.

An introduction can vary in length depending on the overall length of the essay, but in a traditional five-paragraph essay it should be no longer than one paragraph. However long it is, your introduction needs to:

·        Provide any necessary context.

Your introduction should situate the reader and let him or her know what to expect. What book are you discussing? Which characters? What topic will you be addressing?

·        Answer the “So what?” question.

Why is this topic important, and why is your particular position on the topic noteworthy? Ideally, your introduction should pique the reader’s interest by suggesting how your argument is surprising or otherwise counterintuitive. Literary essays make unexpected connections and reveal less-than-obvious truths.

Write the Body Paragraphs

Once you’ve written your introduction, you’ll take the arguments you developed in step 4 and turn them into your body paragraphs. The organization of this middle section of your essay will largely be determined by the argumentative strategy you use, but no matter how you arrange your thoughts, your body paragraphs need to do the following:

·        Begin with a strong topic sentence.

Topic sentences are like signs on a highway: they tell the reader where they are and where they’re going. A good topic sentence not only alerts readers to what issue will be discussed in the following paragraph but also gives them a sense of what argument will be made about that issue. “Rumor and gossip play an important role in The Crucible ” isn’t a strong topic sentence because it doesn’t tell us very much. “The community’s constant gossiping creates an environment that allows false accusations to flourish” is a much stronger topic sentence— it not only tells us what the paragraph will discuss (gossip) but how the paragraph will discuss the topic (by showing how gossip creates a set of conditions that leads to the play’s climactic action).

·        Fully and completely develop a single thought.

Don’t skip around in your paragraph or try to stuff in too much material. Body paragraphs are like bricks: each individual one needs to be strong and sturdy or the entire structure will collapse. Make sure you have really proven your point before moving on to the next one.

Write the Conclusion

Just as you used the introduction to ground your readers in the topic before providing your thesis, you’ll use the conclusion to quickly summarize the specifics learned thus far and then hint at the broader implications of your topic. A good conclusion will:

·        Do more than simply restate the thesis.

If your thesis argued that The Catcher in the Rye can be read as a Christian allegory, don’t simply end your essay by saying, “And that is why The Catcher in the Rye can be read as a Christian allegory.” If you’ve constructed your arguments well, this kind of statement will just be redundant.

·        Synthesize the arguments, not summarize them.

Similarly, don’t repeat the details of your body paragraphs in your conclusion. The reader has already read your essay, and chances are it’s not so long that they’ve forgotten all your points by now.

 source: www.sparknotes.com

A Romantic Metaphor

 The Correspondent Breeze:

A Romantic Metaphor

WHITING in 1834, Henry Taylor noted that Wordsworth's assaults on eighteenth-century diction had succeeded in making poetry, in some attributes, more ordinary spoken. But Taylor also remarked that in effect a new poetic diction had covertly replaced the old. If Romantic poets no longer refer to the nightingale by the Greek name, Philomel, some of them refer to it by the Persian name, Bulbul; Taylor cites one reader who said 'he had learnt, for the first time, from Lord Byron's poetry, that two bulls make a nightingale.' Worse still are the stock terms dispersed through poetry 'with a sort of feeling senselessness,' such as 'wild,' "bright,' lonely," and 'dream," and particularly the variant forms of the word "breathing'; "to breathe,' Taylor says, has become "a verb poetical which [means] anything but respiration.’’

To this cautious observation, I would add that "breathing" is only one aspect of a more general ingredient in Romantic poetry. This is air-in- motion, whether it occurs as breeze or breath, wind or respiration— whether the air is compelled into motion by natural powers or by the action of the human lungs. That the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron should be so completely refreshed is itself notable; but the startling aspect is how often, in the major poems, the wind is not only a property of the landscape, but also a vehicle for revolutionary changes in the poet's mind. The increasing wind, usually associated with the outer transition from winter to spring, is associated with a complex subjective process: the return to a sense of community after isolation, the revival of life and emotional strength after apathy and a deathlike inactivity, and an explosion of productive strength following an era of imaginative sterility.

Coleridge's Dejection: An Ode, written in 1802, furnishes the firstest inclusive illustration of this symbolic equation. The poetic reflection is set in April, which turns out, as in Eliot's Waste Land, to be the crudest month because, in breeding Me out of the dead laud, it bitterly revives emotional life in the spectator, miring recollection and ambition. And as the poem opens, a desultory breeze makes itself audible on a wind-harp—an instrument whose incredible modulations sound through most of the writings with which we are apprehensive.

Jarnes Bowyer, Coleridge's schoolmaster and pre-Wordsworthian reformer of poetic diction, had energetically proscribed the conventional lyre as an emblem for poetizing. 'Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! But by the procedure already noted—we might call it Taylor's principle—the lyre of Apollo was often supplanted in Romantic poetry by the Aeolian lyre, whose music is provoked not by art, human or divine, but by an impetus of nature. Poetic man, in a statement by Shelley which had close paradigm in Coleridge and Wordsworth, is an instrument subject to impressions Tike the shifts of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing symphony. “The wind-harp has become a constant Romantic analogue of the poetic mind, the figurative mediator between outer motion and inner sentiment. It is possible to infer that, without this plaything of the eighteenth century, the Romantic poets would have lacked a conceptual model for the way the mind and imagination respond to the wind, so that some of their most characteristic passages might have been, in a literal sense, unthinkable.

In Coleridge's Dejection the moaning wind-harp predicts a storm which the lyric speaker in his indifference awaits in the expectation that, as in the past, it may send ‘my soul abroad' and send out the

stifled, drowsy, impassioned grief,

Which Buds no natural outlet, no relief ....

The speaker reviews the sufferings that have made him take shelter in "abstruse research," and have demolished his inner joy and any possibility of emotional commerce with the outer scene. Worst of all is the attendant paralysis of his poetic power, the "shaping spirit of Imagination.' But even as the speaker indexes the situations of his death in life, the outer wind braces to a storm of driving rain and constrains the wind-harp into loud and violent music. In implied parallel with the wind-harp, the poet also responds to the storm with mounting vitality—what he calls 'the passion and the life, whose fountains are within, once more break out—until, in a lull of the wind, the poem rounds on itself and ends where it commenced, with a gentle both of nature and of mind. But the poet has moved from the calm of apathy to one of stability after passion. By the agency of the wind storm it describes, the poem turns out to contradict its own premises: the poet's spirit arouses to severe life even as he bemoans his inner death, accomplishes release in the discomfort at being cut off from all outlet, and indicates the power of vision in the strategy of commemorating its failure.

That the poem was grounded in experience is apparent from Coleridge’s many letters confirming to his pleasure in wind and storms, which he watched ‘with a total impression worshipping the power and “eternal Link” Of Energy,” and through which he had walked, “stricken . . . with Barrenness in a “deeper gloom than I am willing to remember,” seeking The inspiration for finalizing Christabel,* In one passage, written some nine months after he had accomplished Dejection, we discover a symbolic wind Again involving the renewal of feeling and imagination, and leading to the sense of the one life within us and abroad:

In modest solemnness, I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn: a wild activity, of thoughts,imagination, feelings, and impulses of motion, rises up from within me—a sort of bottom-wind, that blows to no point of the compass, and comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me. . . . Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have, an opposite. . . . where is there room for death?

Furthermore with Coleridge's friend, Wordsworth: "Winter winds,' Dorothy wrote, 'are his delight—his mind I think is often more fertile in this season than any other.' ° Of this phenomenon Wordsworth himself gave remarkable testimony in the autobiographical Prelude, From the beginning of this work, in fact, the recurrent wind serves unobtrusively as a leitmotif, representing the chief theme of continuity and interchange between outer motions and the interior Me and powers, and providing the poem with a principle of organization beyond chronology.

Earlier poets had inaugurated their epics by conjuring for inspiration a Muse, Apollo, or the Holy Spirit, Wordsworth's opening lines, which have an identical function, are:

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze

That blows from the green fields and from the clouds

And from the sky ....

Acquitted at last from the city and the tyrannical weight of the past, the poet says 'I breathe again"; but so, we find, is nature breathing, in a passage where the wind becomes both the impetus and outer correspondent to a spring-like renewal of the spirit after a wintry season, and also to a revival of poetic enthusiasm which Wordsworth, going beyond Coleridge, equates with the inspiration of the Prophets when touched by the Holy Spirit. There is even a glancing metaphoric parallel between the resulting poetic creation and the prototypal innovation by divine utterance—For 'Nature's self," as Wordsworth said later, 'is the breath of God' (Prelude, 1805 ed., V, 222.)

For I, methought, while the sweet breath of Heaven

Was blowing on my body, felt within

A corresponding mild creative breeze,

A vital breeze which travell'd gently on

O'er things which it had made, and is become

A tempest, a redundant energy

. Vexing its own creation. Tis a power

That does not come unrecogniz'd, a stonn

Which, breaking up a long-continued frost

Brings with it vernal promises . . .

The holy life of music and of verse ....

To the open fields I told

A prophecy; poetic numbers came

Spontaneously, arid cloth'd in priestly robe

My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem,

For holy services. . . .

And a bit farther on comes the remaining element of the Romantic

complex, the analogy between poetic mind and Aeolian harp:

It was a splendid evening; and my soul

Did once again make trial of the strength

Restored to her afresh; nor did she want

Eolian visitations; but the harp

Was soon defrauded, . . . (1805 ed., I, 1-105)

 

The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery

 

The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery

LEARNERS of romantic personality poetry have had a great deal to tell us about the philosophic elements of this poetry: the particular mixture of Deistic theology, Newtonian physics, and pantheistic naturalism which saturates the Wordsworthian landscape in the duration of ‘Tintern Abbey, The theism which sounds in the “Eolian Harp’ of Coleridge, the confrontation between French atheism and Platonic idealism which even in “Pro- Methegs Unbound’ Shelley was not able to settle. We have been in-Strutted in some of the more barely scientific coloring of the poetry—the Images originated from geology, astronomy, and magnetism, and the Coruscate green enigma which the electricians participated to such phenomena as Shelley’s Spirit of Earth. We have contemplated also the “sensibility” of romantic readers, distinct, according to one influential Interpretation, from that of neoclassic readers. What was fascinating to the Age of Pope, ‘Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux” (even about These the age might be loath to admit its excitement), was not, we are tom, what was so manifestly exciting to the age of Wordsworth. ‘High mountains are a feeling, but the hum of cities torture.’ Lastly, recent critical history has reinvited interest to the romantic theory of intuition, and particularly to the edition of that concept which Coleridge originated from the German metaphysicians, the view of poetic imagination as the esemplastic capacity which reshapes our primary understanding of the world into symbolic routes to the theological.

We have, in brief, a subject— simply contemplated, the essence of birds and trees and streams— a metaphysics of an animating doctrine, a unique sensibility, and a concept of poetic imagination—the significance of the last a question of debate. Romantic poetry itself has previously endured some detriment among advanced critics. One delightful question, however, seems still to want conversation; that is, whether romantic poetry (or more especially romantic nature poetry) shows any creative pattern which may be assessed a special similarity of the subject, the philosophy, the sensibility, and the theory—and hence possibly an ex- planation of the last. Something like an answer to such a question is what I would describe.

For the objective of providing an antithetic point of deviation, I quote here a part of one of the best known and most toughly adequate of all metaphysical images:

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two.

Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th' other do.

It will be appropriate if we comment that this resemblance, rather exaggerated as some might think, is yet unmistakable to interpretation because quite overtly asserted, but again is not, by being asserted, specifically distinguished or restricted in its poetic integrity. The kind of resemblance and the kind of dis- parity that ordinarily attain between a drawing compass and a pair of dividing lovers are things to be attentively deemed in reading this image. And the discrepancy between living lovers and tough metal is not least crucial to the tone of accuracy, constraint, and belief which is the victory of the poem to communicate. Though the resemblance is cast in the shape of the statement, its mood is actually a kind of sub imperative. In the next age, the uncertainty of such a drastic distinction was relaxed, yet the overtness and crispness of statement persisted, and a satire of its own sort.

“Tis with our judgments as our watches, none

Go just alike, yet each belias his own.”

We may take this as typical, I speculate, of the metaphoric structure in which Pope attains quintessence and which withstands a few years later in the couplets of Samuel Johnson or the more strong Churchill. The difference between our decisions and our watches, if noted at all, may be a pleasant epistemological joke for a person who questions the existence of a judgment that is taken out as a watch and consulted by another Judgment.

But the 'sensibility," as we realize, had begun to change even in the era of Pope. Examples of a new sensibility, and of a different structure, having something to do with Miltonic verse and a "phaysico-theological nomenclature, are to be found in Thomson's Seasons. Both a new sensibility and a new structure occur in the hamlets' brown and dim-dis-covered spires of Collins’s early instance of the full romantic fantasy. In various poets of the mid-century, in the Warton’s, in Grainger, or Cunningham, one may think, or rather see expressed a new sensibility, but at the identical time, one may bemoan an absence of poetic quality—that is, of a poetic structure sufficient to embody or objectify the new perception. It is as if these forerunners of another epoch had felt but had not felt strong enough to work upon the subjects of their feelings a pattern of meaning which would utter for itself—and which would hence endure as a poetic monument. As a central exhibit I shall take two sonnets, that of William Lisle Bowles "To the River Itchin' (1789 ) and for the discrepancy that of Coleridge To the River Otter' (1796)—written in the confessed fabrication of Bowles. Coleridge owed his first poetic enthusiasm to Bowles (the "father" of English romantic poetry) and continued to express unlimited admiration for him as late as 1796. That is, they shared the same sensibility—as for that matter did Wordsworth and Southey, who too were deeply affected by the sonnets of Bowles. As a schoolboy Coleridge read eagerly in Bowies' second edition of 1789 (among other sonnets not much superior):

Itchin, when I behold thy banks! again,

Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast.,

On which the self-same tints still seem to rest,

Why feels my heart the shiv'rieg sense of pain?

Is it—that many a summer's day has past

Since, in life's morn, I carol'd on thy side?

Is it—that oft, since then, my heart has sigh'd,

As Youth, and Hope's delusive gleams, lew fast?

Is it—that those, who circled on thy shore,

Companions of my youth, now meet no more?

Whate'er the cause, upon thy banks I bend

Sorrowing, yet feel such solace at my heart,

As at the meeting of some long-lost friend,

Here is a demonstrative manner which once appealed to the sensibility of its author and of his more sophisticated contemporaries, but which has with the lapse of time gone flat. The orator was happy as a boy by the banks of the river, Age has brought disillusion and the dispersal of his friends. So a return to the river, in recollecting him of the past, brings both sorrow and solace. The truths are asserted in four rhetorical questions and a concluding statement. There is also something about how the river looks and how its looks might participate to his feelings—in the metaphoric recommendation of the 'crumbling’ border and in the approximately illusory hues on the texture of the surge which surprisingly have out-lasted the "delusive gleams' of his owe hopes. Yet the total impression is one of simple association (by contiguity in time) simply asserted what might be described in the theory of Hume or Hartley or what Hazlitt talks about in his essay "On the Love of the Country." 'It is because natural objects have been correlated with the sports of our childhood, with our feelings in solitude . . . that we love them as we do ourselves."

Coleridge himself in his 'Lines Written at Elbingerode in 1799" was to speak of a 'spot with which the heart correlates Holy memories of child or friend." His excitement for Hartley in this duration is well known. But later, in the Biogmphia Literaria and in the third of his essays on 'Genial Criticism,' he was to renounce explicitly the Hartleyan and mechanistic way of shifting back responsibilities of meaning. And already, in 1796, Coleridge as poet was interested with the more problematic ontological grounds of association (the several levels of resemblance, of correspondence and analogy), where cognitive activity exceeds mere "associative response"—where it is in fact the unifying activity known both to later eighteenth century associationists and to romantic poets as "imagination." The 'sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world' of which Coleridge speaks in the introduction to his leaflet anthology of sonnets in 1796 must be applied by us in one sense to the sonnets of Bowles, but in another to the best romantic poetry and even to Coleridge's representation of Bowles. There is an important difference between the kinds of unity. In a letter to Sotheby of 1802 Coleridge was to say more emphatically: "The poet's heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of nature, and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them.'8 In the same paragraph he says of Bowies' later poetry: "Bowles has indeed the sensibUtty of a poet, but he has not the passion of a great poet... he has no native passion because he is not a thinker."

 

John Donne: a love poet

 John Donne: a love poet

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Donne was the first English poet to challenge and break the supremacy of Petrarchan tradition. Though at times he adopts the Petrarchan devices, his imagery and rhythm, texture and colour of his love poetry is different. There are three distinct strains of his love poetry – Cynical, Platonic and Conjugal love.

Giving an allusion to Donne’s originality as the poet of love, Grierson makes the following observation:

“His genius temperament and learning gave a certain quality to his love poems … which arrest our attention immediately. His love poems, for instance, do have a power which is at once realistic and distracting.”

Donne’s greatness as a love-poet arises from the fact that this poetry covers a wider range of emotions than that of any previous poet. His poetry is not bookish but is rooted in his personal experiences. Is love experience were wide and varied and so is the emotional range of his love-poetry. He had love affairs with a number of women. Some of them were lasting and permanent, others were only of short duration.

Donne is quite original in presenting love situations and moods.

The “experience of love” must produce a “sense of connection” in both the lovers. This “sense of connection” must be based on equal urge and longing on both sides.

“The room of love” must be shared equally by the two partners.

Donne magnifies the ideal of “Sense of connection” into the physical fulfillment of love.

"My face in thine eyes thine in mime appears"

This aspect of love helps him in the virtual analysis of the experience of love. Donne was a shrewd observer who had firsthand knowledge of “love and related affairs. That is why in almost all his poems, he has deep insight.

His love as expressed in his poetry was based not on conventions but on his own experiences. He experienced all phase of love – platonic, sensuous, serene, cynical, conjugal, illicit, lusty, picturesque, and sensual. He could also be grotesque blending thought with passion.

Another peculiar quality of Donne’s love lyrics is its “metaphysical strain”. His poems are sensuous and fantastic. Donne’s metaphysical strain made his reader confuse his sincerity.

Donne’s genius temperament and learning gave to his love poems power and fascination. There is a depth and ring of feeling unknown to most Elizabethan poets. Donne’s poetry is startlingly unconventional even when he dallies, half ironically, with the hyperboles of Petrarch.

Donne is realistic not idealistic. He knows the weakness of Flesh, the pleasure of sex, the joy of secret meeting. However, he tries to establish a relationship between the body and the soul. Donne is a very realistic poet.

Grierson distinguished three distinct strains in it. First, there is the cynical strain. Secondly, there is the strain f conjugal love to be noticed in poems like “valediction: forbidding mourning”. Thirdly, there is platonic strain. The platonic strain is to b found in poems like “Twicknam Garden”, “The Funeral”, “The Blossoms”, and “The Primroses”. These poems were probably addressed to the high-born lady friends. Towards them, he adopts the helpless pose of flirtations and in high platonic vein boasts that:

Different of sex no more we know
Than our Guardian Anglles doe

In between the cynical realistic strain and the highest spiritual strain, there are a number of poems that show an endless variety of moods and tones. Thus, thee are poems in which the tone is harsh, others which are coarse and brutal, still others in which he holds out a making threat to his faithless mistress and still others in which he is in a reflective mood. More often than not, a number of strains and moods are mixed up in the same poem. This makes Donne a love poet singularly, original, unconventional, and realistic.

Whatever may be the tone or mood of a particular poem, it is always an expression of some personal experience and is, therefore, presented with remarkable force, sincerity and seriousness. Each poem deals with a love situation which is intellectually analyzed with the skill of an experienced lawyer.

Hence the difficult nature of his poetry and the charge of obscurity have been brought against him. The difficulty of the readers is further increased by the extreme condensation and destiny of Donne’s poetry.

The fantastic nature of metaphysical conceits and poetry would become clear even we examine a few examples. In “Valediction: Forbidden Mourning” true lovers now parted are likened to the legs of a compass. The image is elaborated at length. The lovers are spiritually one, just as the head of the compass is one even when the legs are apart. One leg remains fixed and the other moves around it. The lover cannot forget the beloved even when separated from her. The two loves meet in the end just as the two legs of the compass are together again, as soon as circle has been drawn.

At other times, he uses equally extravagated hyperboles. For example, he mistakes his beloved to an angel, for to imagine her less than an angel would be profanity.

In Donne’s poetry, there is always an “intellectual analysis” of emotion. Like a clever lawyer, Donne gives arguments after arguments in support of his points of view. Thus in “Valediction: Forbidden Mourning” he proves that true lovers need not mourn at the time of parting. In “Canonization” he establishes that lovers are saints of love and in “The Blossome” he argues against the Petrarchan love tradition. In all this Donne is a realistic love poet.

Sources: http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-optional-subjects/group-v/english-literature/278-john-donne-love-poet.html

 

John Donne a metaphysical poet

 John Donne a metaphysical poet

 

Dryden once remarked:

“Donne affects metaphysics not only in his satires but in amorous verses, too, where nature only should reign.”

Though Donne was influenced by the sixteenth and the seventeenth century poets, yet he did not tread on the beaten track. His concept of poetry was unconventional. In his poetry, the intellect takes the form, primarily, of wit by which heterogeneous ideas are yoked together by violence. The seventeenth century poets labeled his poetry as ‘strong line poetry’, mainly, on account of his concise expression and his deliberate toughness. In his life, he was never called a metaphysical poet. After his death, his poetry was re-evaluated and some other important features were found in it, which won the name of a metaphysical poet for Donne.

Grierson’s defines metaphysical poetry as:

“Poetry inspired by a philosophical concept of the universe and the role assigned to human spirit in the great drama of existence”.

This definition is based on the metaphysical poetry of Dante, Goethe and Yeats. So “metaphysical” is applicable to poetry who is highly philosophical or which touches philosophy.

Combination of passion and thought characterizes his work. His use of conceit is often witty and sometimes fantastic. His hyperboles are outrageous and his paradoxes astonishing. He mixes fact and fancy in a manner which astounds us. He fills his poems with learned and often obscure illusions besides, some of his poems are metaphysical in literal sense, they are philosophical and reflective, and they deal with concerns of the spirit or soul.

Conceit is an ingredient which gives a special character to Donne’s metaphysical poetry. Some of his conceits are far-fetched, bewildering and intriguing. He welds diverse passions into something harmonious.

“When thou weep’st, unkindly kinde,
My lifes blood doth decay.”

 

“When a teare falls, that thou falst which it bore,”

“Here lies a she-sun and a he-moon there”

“All women shall adore us, and some men.”

His approach is based on logical reasoning and arguments. He provides intellectual parallels to his emotional experiences. His modus operandi was “to move from the contemplation of fact to a deduction from it and, thence, to a conclusion”. He contemplates fidelity in a woman but, in reality, draws it impossible of find a faithful woman.

“No where
Lives a woman true, and faire.”

He does not employ emotionally exciting rhythm. His poetry goes on lower ebb. Even his love poems do not excite emotions in us. Even in a “Song” while separating, he is logical that he is not parting for weariness of his beloved.

“But since that I
Must dye at last, ’tis best,
To use my selfe in jest
Thus by fain’d deaths to dye;”

His speculations and doctrines are beyond common human experience. His ideas are beyond the understanding of a layman and are a blend of intellect and emotions making his approach dialectical and scholastic. He asks his beloved in “The Message” to keep his eyes and heart because they might have learnt certain ills from her, but then, he asks her to give them back so that he may laugh at her and see her dying when some other proves as false to her as she has proved to the poet.

Donne was a self-conscious artist, therefore, had a desire to show off his learning. In his love poetry, he gives illustrations from the remote past. In his divine poems, he gives biblical references like the Crucification.

“Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?”

“Get with child a mandrake roote.”

“But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall.”

Metaphysical poetry is highly concentrated and so is Donne’s poetry. In “The Good Morrow”, he says

“For love, all love of other sights controules.”

“For, not in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere.”

“Hee that hath all can have no more.”

His poetry is full of arguments, persuasion, shock and surprise. Instead of conventional romantic words, he used scientific and mathematical words to introduce roughness in his poetry, e.g. he used the words ‘stife twin compasses’, ‘cosmographers’, ‘trepidation of the spheres’ etc.

His style is highly fantastic, curt and he uses rough words. He rejects the conventional style, which was romantic, soft and diffused.

Paradoxical statements are also found in his poems. In “The Indifferent” Donne describes constancy in men as vice and ask them:

“Will no other vice content you?”

In “The Legacy” the lover becomes his own ‘executor and legacy’. In “Love’s Growth” the poet’s love seems to have increased in spring, but now it cannot increase because it was already infinite, and yet it has increased:

“No winter shall abate the sring’s increase.”

He deals with the problem of body and soul in “The Anniversarie” of the individual and the universe in “The Sunne Rising” and of deprivation and actuality in “A Noctrunall”. In his divine poems he talks about the Crucification, ransom, sects / schism, religion, etc.

Donne is a coterie poet. He rejects the Patrarchan tradition of poetry, adopted by the Elizabethans. The Elizabethan poetry was the product off emotions. He rejected platonic idealism, elaborate description and ornamentation. He was precise and concentrated in poetry while the Elizabethan are copious and plentiful in words.

Seventeenth century had four major prerequisites; colloquial in diction, personal in tone, logical in structure and undecorative and untraditional imagination, which were also present in Donne.

To conclude, he is more a seventeenth century poet than a metaphysical poet. There are some features in his poetry which differentiate him e.g., he is a monarch of with and more colloquial than any other seventeenth century poet. If other seventeenth century poet brings together emotions and intellect, he defines emotional experience with intellectual parallels etc. Still, he writes in the tradition of the seventeenth century poets.

Sources: http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-optional-subjects/group-v/english-literature/226-john-donne-metaphysical-poet.html

 

METER AND FEET IN ENGLISH POETRY

 METER AND FEET IN ENGLISH POETRY

English poetry employs five basic rhythms of varying stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables. The most common meters are:

(Stressed syllables are marked in blue and unstressed are in red font color rather than the traditional "/" and "x.")

Iambic

A foot that starts with an unaccented and ends with an accented (stressed) syllable. It is the most common meter in the English language and naturally falls into everyday conversation. An example is "To be or not to be" from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Trochaic

The opposite of an iambic meter. It begins with an accented then followed by an unaccented syllable. An example is the line "Doule, doule, toil and trouble." from Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Anapestic

A foot has two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. Example: "I arise and unbuild it again" from Shelley's Cloud.

Dactylic

A foot including an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables. Example: openly.

Spondee

A foot consisting of two accented syllables. Example: heartbreak.

Pyrrhic

A foot including two unaccented syllables is generally used to vary the rhythm.


Each pair of unstressed and stressed syllables makes up a unit called a foot.

The meters with two-syllable feet are

• IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold
• TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers
• SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

Meters with three-syllable feet are

• ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still
• DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock (a trochee replaces the final dactyl)

Each line of a poem contains a certain number of feet of iambs, trochees, spondees, dactyls or anapests.

1. A line containing 1 foot is called a “Monometer”
2. A line containing 2 feet is called a “Diameter”
3. A line containing 3 feet is called a “Trimeter”
4. A line containing 4 feet is called a “Tetrameter”
5. A line containing 5 feet is called a “Pentameter”
6. A line containing 6 feet is called a “Hexameter”
7. A line containing 7 feet is called a “Heptameter”
8. A line containing 8 feet is called a “Octameter”

Here are some serious examples of the various meters.

Iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables)

• Thattime| of year | thou mayst | in me | behold

Trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables)

• Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers

Anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables)

• And the sound | of a voice | that is still

Dactylic hexameter (6 dactyls, 17 syllables; a trochee replaces the last dactyl)

• This is the | forest pri | meval, the | murmuring | pine and the | hemlocks

 Sources: http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-optional-subjects/group-v/english-literature/26404-critical-appreciation.html