tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80975252446192909902024-03-22T13:22:15.118+05:00English Literature NotesLets Learn With UsAdminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.comBlogger65125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-30960383189848999562021-04-29T11:25:00.004+05:002021-04-29T11:25:55.543+05:00 Symbols in Heart of Darkness<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Darkness</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The symbol of darkness opens the novella, when Marlow is on the yacht on the Thames: "And this also," he says, speaking of England, "has been one of the dark places on earth." He meansthat the land and its peoples were primitive before the Roman</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">conquest, a parallel to European colonial control of Africa.Light and peace is here now, Marlow implies, but "darkness was here yesterday."Once Marlow's story is we ll under way, he says, "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness" (Part 2, Section 2). There is literal darkness in the jungle and the waters of the river. But he also says that the suffering of the indigenous people and the evil in the hearts of the Company agents is a metaphoric darkness, a darkness of the unknown, of difference, and of blindness.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">The most important metaphoric darkness is that revealed in Kurtz's heart and symbolized by the decapitated heads of native men displayed like decorative knobs on his fence posts. There, they are "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids."These heads and the grisly fence stand as enduring symbols of Kurtz's depravity. Kurtz, then, symbolizes the darkness of the colonizers' lost morality, but there is also a sense in which Kurtz is the victim of the darkness of the jungle. Marlow comments on "how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own" in trying to explain his descent into depravity</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ivory</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ivory symbolizes the greed of the Europeans. It is a consuming passion for them, the lure that draws them to Africa. It has become like a religion to them: "The word 'ivory' rang in the air," Marlow says when he is at the Outer Station. It "was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it." Ivory, which is white, is the one thing of value that the Europeans in Heart of Darkness find in dark Africa. But ivory is also equated with darkness and corruption. Marlow muses that Kurtz had been captivated by the wilderness, which had "taken him, loved him, embraced him, consumed his flesh" until he had lost all his hair, his bald head now looking like an "ivory ball." When Kurtz is on the verge of dying, just before he says his last words, Marlow notes his "ivory face." Ivory no longer has value; it is a thing of evil, which is what Kurtz became.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Harlequin</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">When Marlow arrives at the Inner Station, he is greeted by a young Russian man dressed in clothes that are covered with bright blue, red, and yellow patches. The young man looks as if he is escaped from a troupe of mimes. Marlow compares him to a harlequin, something that does not fit in the African jungle. The harlequin's presence ironizes the tragedy of the situation and suggests another literary convention: the wise fool, although the Russian seems more naive than wise.</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">Drums</span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">As Marlow pilots the steamboat up the river, he hears drums, which he finds unsettling but intriguing, calling it a sound through his racist character, Marlow, he reveals the racist viewpoints of Company agents and of imperialism more broadly. Others, including the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), disagree. Achebe argues that, because Conrad rarely provides native characters with speech or other human traits, he—the writer—does not view Africans as human. A major point in support of the position that Conrad was racist is the fact that the book's central focus is Kurtz and his fate in Africa. In this view, by focusing on one white man's fall from grace—indeed, by presenting him as in some sense the victim of Africa—Conrad overlooks the terrible tragedies colonization wreaked on millions of African people. Another important issue is the question of who should speak for the oppressed. Is Conrad, as a white man, capable of speaking for the oppressed? Or must one be oppressed to tell the story of oppression? Readers of Heart of Darkness must form their own answers to this question and how Conrad's work reflects on that issue.</span></p>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-17409458228343699782021-04-29T10:59:00.001+05:002021-04-29T10:59:51.404+05:00Money in Pride and Prejudice<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Money plays a central role to the plot of Pride and Prejudice. Because of the
entail, the Bennet women will have a bleak financial future after Mr. Bennet
dies. When readers recognize this, Mrs. Bennet’s pursuit of husbands for her
daughters takes on a sense of urgency that supercedes her foolish behavior.
Translating the monetary realities that the characters of Pride and Prejudice
face into modern equivalents helps readers to better understand the characters’
motivations and the significance of their actions. Austen describes people’s
financial situations throughout Pride and Prejudice in terms of actual monetary
amounts. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Darcy is not simply rich, he has 10,000 pounds a year. When Elizabeth’s
father dies, she will not only be poor, she will have a mere 40 pounds a year.
But what do Critical Essays 79 these figures mean in modern U.S. dollars? Critic
Edward Copeland has calculated the value of one pound in Austen’s day to be
roughly equivalent to 80 dollars now. While he emphasizes that his estimate is
not scientific and is probably conservative, such an equivalency helps to put
the sums Austen scatters throughout the novel into perspective. According to
Austen, Mr. Bennet’s annual income is 2,000 pounds, or 160,000 dollars. Compare
that to Darcy’s 10,000 pounds or 800,000 dollars. Additionally, the sums Austen
gives are often discussed in terms of 4 or 5 percents. These percents refer to
the fact that the income the landed gentry earned came from investing their
money in secure government bonds. Therefore, Bingley is described as having
“four or five thousand a year” because Mrs. Bennet is not sure of what his
100,000 pound inheritance is earning. Similarly, Mr. Collins assumes the lesser
amount when he condescendingly informs Elizabeth that he will not reproach her
for bringing only “one thousand pounds in the 4 per cents” to their marriage. In
other words, Elizabeth will only have a 40 or 50 pound annual income to live off
of after her father dies, which translates into 3,200 or 4,000 dollars. This
comparison of Austen’s pound with the modern dollar not only clarifies
characters’ annual incomes, but also exposes the magnitude of certain financial
transactions, such as Darcy’s dealings with Wickham. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">First, Wickham inherited
1,000 pounds, or 80,000 dollars from Darcy’s father. After dissolving his claim
to the clergyman position, Wickham received 3,000 more pounds (240,000 dollars)
from Darcy. Within three years, he was again asking Darcy for money, which Darcy
refused to give him. Wickham then attempts to elope with Miss Darcy, whose
inheritance totals 30,000 pounds (2.4 million dollars). Wickham then runs off
with Lydia, whose portion equals Elizabeth’s—40 pounds a year, 1,000 pounds
overall. He tells Darcy that he has no intention of marrying Lydia and still
plans to marry an heiress. To persuade Wickham to marry Lydia, Darcy must then
pay Wickham’s debts, totaling 1,000 pounds, or 80,000 dollars in addition to
buying his commission at about 450 pounds or 36,000 dollars. </span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Mr. Bennet also
conjectures that “Wickham’s a fool if he takes her for less than ten thousand
pounds,” meaning that Darcy probably also paid Wickham an additional 800,000
dollars. Elizabeth’s overwhelming gratitude toward Darcy and the debt of her
family to him become much clearer in light of these figures in U.S. dollars.</span></div>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-77896176930861793572016-02-21T00:53:00.003+05:002016-02-21T00:53:32.126+05:00Keats' Sensuousness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Keats is a mystic of the senses and not of thoughts as he sought to apprehend the ultimate truth of the universe through aesthetic sensations and not through philosophical thoughts. </span></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: large;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Sensuousness is a quality in poetry which affects the senses i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting. Sensuous poetry does not present ideas and philosophical thoughts. It gives delight to senses, appeals to our eyes by presenting beautiful and coulourful word pictures to our ears by its metrical music and musical sounds, to our nose by arousing the sense of smell and so on.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats is the worshiper of beauty and peruses beauty everywhere; and it is his senses that first reveal to him the beauty of things. He writes poetry only out of what he feels upon his pulses. Thus, it is his sense impressions that kindled his imagination which makes him realize the great principle that:</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats loves nature for its own sake. He has a straightforward passion fro nature by giving his whole soul to the unalloyed enjoyment of its sensuous beauty.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Poetry originates from sense impressions and all poets are more or less sensuous. Sense impressions are the starting point of poetic process. It is what the poet sees and hears that excites his emotions and imagination. The emotional and imaginative reaction to sense impressions generate poetry.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The poets give the impressions receive by their eyes only. Wordsworth’s imagination is stirred by what he sees and hears in nature. Milton is no less sensitive to the beauty of nature, of the flowers in “Paradise Lost” in a sensuous manner. But Keats’ poetry appeals to our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch and sense of hot and cold. He exclaims in one of his letters:</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">O for a life of sensation than of thoughts</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">He is a pure poet in sense of seeking not sensual but sensuous delight.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">SENSE OF SIGHT: Keats is a painter of words. In a few words he presents a concrete and solid picture of sensuous beauty.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“Her hair was long, her foot was light</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">And her eyes were wild.”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">And in “Ode on Grecian Urn” again the sense of sight is active.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Of marble men and maidens overwrought,</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">With forest branches and the trodden weed;”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">SENSE OF HEARING: The music of nightingale produces pangs of pain in poet’s heart.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“The voice I hear this passing night was heard</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In ancient days, by emperor and clown:”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In “Ode on Grecian Urn” he says:</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">SENSE OF TOUCH: The opening lines of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” describe extreme cold:</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“The sedge is withered from the lake</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">And no birds sing.”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">SENSE OF TASTE: In “Ode to Nightingale”, Keats describes different kinds of wine and the idea of their tastes in intoxication.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“O for a beaker full of the warm South</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Full of the true the blushful Hippocrene,”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">SENSE OF SMELL: In “Ode to Nightingale”, the poet can’t see the flowers in darkness. There is mingled perfume of many flowers.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Perhaps the best example of Keats sensuousness is “Ode to Autumn”. In this ode the season of autumn is described in sensuous terms in which all senses are called forth.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness</span></div>
</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Close bosom friend of the maturing sun;”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">For Keats Autumn is the season of apples on mossed cottage tree, of fruits which are ripe to the core and of later flowers for bees. Thus autumn to Keats is full of pictures of delights of sense. There is the ripe fruit and ripe grains and also there is music that appeals to the ear.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats is a poet of sensations. His thought is enclosed in sensuousness. In the epithets he uses are rich in sensuous quality – delicious face, melodious plot, sunburnt mirth, embalmed darkness and anguish moist. Not only are the sense perceptions of Keats are quick and alert but he has the rare gift of communicating these perceptions by concrete and sound imagery.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">As time passes Keats mind matured and he expresses an intellectual and spiritual passion. He begins to see not only their beauty but also in their truth which makes Keats the “inheritor of unfulfill’d renown”.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats is more poet of sensuousness than a poet of contemplation. Sometimes he passes from sensuousness to sentiments. In his mature works like Odes or the Hyperion, the poet mixes sensuousness with sentiments, voluptuousness with vitality, aestheticism with intellectualism. However the nucleus of Keats’ poetry is sensuousness. It is his senses which revealed him the beauty of things, the beauty of universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the wood.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats’ pictorial senses are not vague or suggestive but made definite with a wealth of artistic detail. Every stanza, every line is replete with sensuous beauty. No other poet except Shakespeare could show such a mastery of language and felicity of sensuousness.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-43364387408116593762016-02-21T00:52:00.002+05:002016-02-21T00:52:28.206+05:00Keats' concept of beauty<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Keats was considerably influenced by Spenser and was, like Spenser, a passionate lover of beauty in all its forms and manifestations. The passion of beauty constitutes his aestheticism. Beauty was his pole star, beauty in nature, in woman and in art.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">He writes and identifies beauty with truth. Of all the contemporary poets Keats is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty. He was the most passionate lover of the world as the career of beautiful images and of many imaginative associations of an object or word with a heightened emotional appeal. Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy. He hated didacticism in poetry.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.”</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">He believed that poetry should be unobtrusive. The poet, according to him, is a creator and an artist, not a teacher or a prophet. In a letter to his brother he wrote:</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“With a great poet, the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">He even disapproved Shelley for subordinating the true end of poetry to the object of social reform. He dedicated his brief life to the expression of beauty as he said:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">For Keats the world of beauty was an escape from the dreary and painful life or experience. He escaped from the political and social problems of the world into the realm of imagination. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, he remained untouched by revolutionary theories for the regression of mankind. His later poems such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Hyperion” show an increasing interest in human problems and humanity and if he had lived he would have established a closer contact with reality. He may overall be termed as a poet of escape. With him poetry existed not as an instrument of social revolt nor of philosophical doctrine but for the expression of beauty. He aimed at expressing beauty for its own sake.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats did not like only those things that are beautiful according to the recognized standards. He had deep insight to see beauty even in those things that are not thought beautiful by ordinary people. He looked at autumn and says that even autumn has beauty and charm:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“Where are the song of Spring? Ay, where are they?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In Keats, we have a remarkable contrast both with Byron on the one side and with Shelley on the other. Keats was neither rebel nor utopian dreamer. Endowed with a purely artistic nature, he took up in regard to all the movements and conflicts of his time, a position of almost complete detacher. He knew nothing of Byron’s stormy spirit of hostility of the existing order of things and he had no sympathy with Shelley’s humanitarian and passion for reforming the world. The famous opening line of “Endymion”, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ strikes the keynote of his work. As the modern world seemed to him to be hard, cold and prosaic, he habitually sought an imaginative escape from it. He loved nature just for its own sake and for the glory and loveliness which he found in it, and no modern poet has ever been nearer than he was to the simple “poetry for earth” but there was nothing mystical in love and nature was never fraught for him, as for Wordsworth and Shelley, with spiritual message and meanings.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romantics while Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating the impossible reforms and Byron voicing his own egoism and the political measure. Worshipping beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own heart or to reflect some splendour of the natural world as he saw or dreamed it to be, he had the noble idea that poetry exists for its own sake and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Disinterested love of beauty is one of the qualities that made Keats great and that distinguished him from his great contemporaries. He grasped the essential oneness of beauty and truth. His creed did not mean beauty of form alone. His ideal was the Greek ideal of beauty inward and outward, the perfect soul of verse and the perfect form. Precisely because he held this ideal, he was free from the wish to preach.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats’ early sonnets are largely concerned with poets, pictures, sculptures or the rural solitude in which a poet might nurse his fancy. His great odes have for their subjects a storied Grecian Urn; a nightingale; the goddess Psyche, mistress of Cupid; the melancholy and indolence of a poet; and the season of autumn, to which he turns from the songs of spring. What he asked of poesy, of wine, or of nightingale’s song was to help him:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The weariness, the fever and the fret,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill” and “Sleep and Poetry” – the theme of both these poems is that lovely things in nature suggest lovely tales to the poet, and great aim of poet is to be a friend to soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man. Perhaps Keats would have said that he attempted his nobler life of poetry in poems like “Lamia” and “Hyperion” but it is very doubtful whether he believed that he had done justice to this elevated type of poetic creation.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats’ love of beauty is not ‘Platonic’ in nature. He loves physical objects and takes interest in human body. He does not become obscene but his love of beauty gives us very attractive and suggestive picture of women:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“Yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">To feel forever its soft fall and swell,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Awake forever in a sweet unrest,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Still, still to hear her tender taken breath,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">And so live ever.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Religion for him took definite shape in the adoration of the beautiful, an adoration which he developed into a doctrine. Beauty is the supreme truth. It is imagination that discovers beauty. This idealism, assumes a note of mysticism. One can see a sustained allegory in “Endymion” and certain passages are most surely possessed of a symbolical value. Sidney Colvin says:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">“It was not Keats aim merely to create a paradise of art and beauty discovered from the cares and interests of the world. He did aim at the creation and revelation of beauty, but of beauty whatever its element existed. His concept of poetry covered the whole range of life and imagination.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">As he did not live long enough, he was not able to fully illustrate the vast range of his conception of beauty. Fate did not give him time enough to fully unlock the ‘mysteries of the heart’ and to illuminate and put in proper perspective the great struggles and problems of human life.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-35720544579483318072016-02-21T00:51:00.002+05:002016-02-21T00:51:29.246+05:00John Keats "Ode To Autumn"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Composition of "To Autumn"</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">Keats wrote "To Autumn" after enjoying a lovely autumn day; he described his experience in a letter to his friend Reynolds:</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">"How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm--this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it."</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: large;">General Comments</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">This ode is a favorite with critics and poetry lovers alike. Harold Bloom calls it "one of the subtlest and most beautiful of all Keats's odes, and as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English Language." Allen Tate agrees that it "is a very nearly perfect piece of style"; however, he goes on to comment, "it has little to say."</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">This ode deals with the some of the concerns presented in his other odes, but there are also significant differences. (1) There is no visionary dreamer or attempted flight from reality in this poem; in fact, there is no narrative voice or persona at all. The poem is grounded in the real world; the vivid, concrete imagery immerses the reader in the sights, feel, and sounds of autumn and its progression. (2) With its depiction of the progression of autumn, the poem is an unqualified celebration of process. (I am using the words process, flux, and change interchangeably in my discussion of Keats's poems.) Keats totally accepts the natural world, with its mixture of ripening, fulfillment, dying, and death. Each stanza integrates suggestions of its opposite or its predecessors, for they are inherent in autumn also.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Because this ode describes the process of fruition and decay in autumn, keep in mind the passage of time as you read it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Analysis</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">Stanza I:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats describes autumn with a series of specific, concrete, vivid visual images. The stanza begins with autumn at the peak of fulfillment and continues the ripening to an almost unbearable intensity. Initially autumn and the sun "load and bless" by ripening the fruit. But the apples become so numerous that their weight bends the trees; the gourds "swell," and the hazel nuts "plump." The danger of being overwhelmed by fertility that has no end is suggested in the flower and bee images in the last four lines of the stanza. Keats refers to "more" later flowers "budding" (the -ing form of the word suggests activity that is ongoing or continuing); the potentially overwhelming number of flowers is suggested by the repetition "And still more" flowers. The bees cannot handle this abundance, for their cells are "o'er-brimm'd." In other words, their cells are not just full, but are over-full or brimming over with honey.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Process or change is also suggested by the reference to Summer in line 11; the bees have been gathering and storing honey since summer. "Clammy" describes moisture; its unpleasant connotations are accepted as natural, without judgment.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Certain sounds recur in the beginning lines--s, m, l. Find the words that contain these letters; read them aloud and listen. What is the effect of these sounds--harsh, explosive, or soft? How do they contribute to the effect of the stanza, if they do?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The final point I wish to make about this stanza is subtle and sophisticated and will probably interest you only if you like grammar and enjoy studying English:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The first stanza is punctuated as one sentence, and clearly it is one unit. It is not, however, a complete sentence; it has no verb. By omitting the verb, Keats focuses on the details of ripening. In the first two and a half lines, the sun and autumn conspire (suggesting a close working relationship and intention). From lines 3 to 9, Keats constructs the details using parallelism; the details take the infinitive form (to plus a verb): "to load and bless," "To bend...and fill," "To swell...and plump," and "to set." In the last two lines, he uses a subordinate clause, also called a dependent clause (note the subordinating conjunction "until"); the subordinate or dependent clause is appropriate because the oversupply of honey is the result of--or dependent upon--the seemingly unending supply of flowers.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">The ongoing ripening of stanza I, which if continued would become unbearable, has neared completion; this stanza slows down and contains almost no movement. Autumn, personified as a reaper or a harvester, crosses a brook and watches a cider press. Otherwise Autumn is listless and even falls asleep. Some work remains; the furrow is "half-reap'd," the winnowed hair refers to ripe grain still standing, and apple cider is still being pressed. However, the end of the cycle is near. The press is squeezing out "the last oozings." Find other words that indicate slowing down. Notice that Keats describes a reaper who is not harvesting and who is not turning the press.</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Is the personification successful, that is, does nature become a person with a personality, or does nature remain an abstraction? Is there a sense of depletion, of things coming to an end? Does the slowing down of the process suggest a stopping, a dying or death? Does the personification of autumn as a reaper with a scythe suggest another kind of reaper--the Grim Reaper?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Speak the last line of this stanza aloud, and listen to the pace (how quickly or slowly you say the words). Is Keats using the sound of words to reinforce and/or to parallel the meaning of the line?</span></div>
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<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">Spring in line 1 has the same function as Summer in stanza I; they represent process, the flux of time. In addition, spring is a time of a rebirth of life, an association which contrasts with the explicitly dying autumn of this stanza. Furthermore, autumn spells death for the now "full-grown" lambs which were born in spring; they are slaughtered in autumn. And the answer to the question of line 1, where are Spring's songs, is that they are past or dead. The auditory details that follow are autumn's songs.</span><span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The day, like the season, is dying. The dying of day is presented favorably, "soft-dying." Its dying also creates beauty; the setting sun casts a "bloom" of "rosy hue" over the dried stubble or stalks left after the harvest. Keats accepts all aspects of autumn; this includes the dying, and so he introduces sadness; the gnats "mourn" in a "wailful choir" and the doomed lambs bleat (Why does Keats use "lambs," rather than "sheep" here? would the words have a different effect on the reader?). It is a "light" or enjoyable wind that "lives or dies," and the treble of the robin is pleasantly "soft." The swallows are gathering for their winter migration.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Keats blends living and dying, the pleasant and the unpleasant, because they are inextricably one; he accepts the reality of the mixed nature of the world.</span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-60981563956570862372016-02-21T00:48:00.002+05:002018-10-30T21:02:49.261+05:00John Keats" Ode to a Nightingale"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">Like most of the other odes, "Ode to a Nightingale" is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable--though not so much as "Ode to Psyche." The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. "Nightingale" also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except "To Psyche," which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in "Nightingale" is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats's most basic scheme throughout the odes.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">With "Ode to a Nightingale," Keats's speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age ("where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies") is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale's fluid music ("Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!"). The speaker reprises the "drowsy numbness" he experienced in "Ode on Indolence," but where in "Indolence" that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in "Nightingale" it is a sign of too full a connection: "being too happy in thine happiness," as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird's state through alcohol--in the second stanza, he longs for a "draught of vintage" to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being "charioted by Bacchus and his pards" (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in "Indolence," "the viewless wings of Poesy."</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale's music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale's music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word "forlorn," he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is--an imagined escape from the inescapable ("Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf"). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker's experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In "Indolence," the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In "Psyche," he was willing to embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale's song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy's "viewless wings" at last. The "art" of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker's language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favour of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, "But here there is no light"; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he "cannot see what flowers" are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which is in many ways a companion poem to "Ode to a Nightingale." In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in "Nightingale," he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression--the nightingale's song--is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Commentary on ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE </strong></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In this meditation on poetic experience, the poet attempts to conceptualise a reconciliation of beauty and permanence through the symbol of the nightingale The poet begins by explaining the nature and cause of the sadness he is experiencing, a sadness translated into a physical ache and a drowsy numbness. He feels as he might if he had taken some poison or sedating drug. This feeling is in fact the result of a deep awareness of the happiness of the nightingale he hears singing. His resulting pleasure is so intense it has become painful. He longs for some intoxicant that will let him achieve union with the nightingale, take him out of the world, and allow him to forget human suffering and despair and the transience of all experience. Wine, however, is rejected in favour of the poetic imagination. He enters some twilight region of the mind. While he can see nothing, the other senses feed his imagination, constructing within his mind what cannot be seen in fact. This prompts him to contemplate leaving the world altogether. He realises, however, that the ultimate form of forgetfulness, of escape from the troubles of life, would be death. Death at such a moment, listening to the nightingale pouring forth its soul in ecstasy, would be the supreme ending. And yet death is rejected. As the poet realises, the bird would sing on, and he would be unable to hear it. While all humans must die, the nightingale is, in some sense, immortal. The poet, thinking back to the classical world of the Roman emperors and to the Old Testament world of Ruth, considers how its song has been heard for so many centuries. Keats takes us even further back, into a fairy world, a landscape both magical and yet forlorn. With this word `forlorn', the spell is broken: the poet returns to the self, to the present. Fancy, he claims, has failed him once more. He again becomes aware of the landscape around him and the bird's song begins to fade, leaving him wondering whether his experience was a vision or a waking dream.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The nightingale has traditionally been associated with love. The influential myth of Philomela, turned into a nightingale after being raped and tortured, stresses melancholy and suffering in association with love. It has also been associated with poetry. Keats no doubt knew Coleridge's two poems `To the Nightingale' (1796) and `The Nightingale: "A Conversation Poem"', and, according to his letters, only days before writing this ode he had talked with the older poet on such subjects as nightingales, poetry and poetical sensation.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Why did Keats choose the nightingale's song as the basis of meditation in this poem? Is he drawing upon its traditional associations or not? Such critics as Helen Vendler believe that in the choice of music Keats finds a symbol of pure beauty, non-representational, without any reference to ideas, to moral or social values. The nightingale's song is vocal, but without verbal content, and can serve as a pure expressive beauty. Others have argued that it represents the music of nature, which can be contrasted with human art, verbal or musical.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The poem is basically structured around the contrast between the poet, who is earthbound, and the bird, which is free. A related opposition is that between the mortal world, full of sorrow and marked by transience, and the world of the nightingale, marked by joy and immortality. One of the points that has troubled many critics is this claim of immortality for the nightingale: 'Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!' (line 61). The nightingale is, after all, a natural creature. It has been suggested that Keats is referring not to the individual bird, but to the species. This solution has been strongly criticised, however, as humanity, the `hungry generations' (line 62), could also be credited with such immortality as a species. An alternative suggestion is that the nightingale addressed in stanza 7 is purely symbolic; is this solution more convincing? If so, what does the nightingale symbolise? A further interpretation might be that, since the nightingale sings only at night and was traditionally thought of, therefore, as invisible, it, through its `disembodied' song, transcends the material world (so in that sense is immortal); and here Keats is talking of `embalmed darkness', an atmosphere of death.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Another problematic point is Keats's final question on the status of his experience: `Was it a vision, or a waking dream?' (line 79). Some critics have decidedly affirmed that the poem is about the inadequacy of the imagination, a rejection of the `deceiving elf' (line 79). Others see more ambivalence in Keats's attitude. After the possibility of joining the bird in its immortal world has been rejected as a trick of the fancy, they would argue, Keats still suggests through his final question that such vision or transcendent experience is possible, or, at least, still something for which he longs. Is this, ultimately, an escapist poem, or is Keats emphasising the need to accept the human condition, with all the suffering that is associated with it? Compare the ode, in this respect, with the `Ode on Melancholy'.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Language is effectively used to create mood. In the opening of the poem, for example, a sense of sluggish weightiness is suggested by the heavy thudding alliterative `d', `p', and `m' when Keats describes his own dull ache. Compare this with the effects created in the second half of the stanza by the light assonantal sounds in such words as `light' and `Dryad' and the sensuous assonantal sounds of 'beechen', `green' and `ease' when Keats turns to the joy of the nightingale. Compare the vitality and the jubilant tempo of stanza 2 with the dull heaviness and monotony in stanza 3. How are these different effects created? Consider, for a start, the use of repetition, with devices like parallelism and anaphora. There is a dense concentration of sense impressions in this ode, and a frequent use of synaesthesia. In stanza 1, for example, the `plot' where the bird sings is itself `melodious' and the song contains `summer': the visual evokes the aural and the aural the visual. In stanza 2, Keats conveys the taste of wine with reference to colour, action, song and sensation. When Keats says, in stanza 5, `I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs', the suggestion that the incense could be seen emphasises the density and headiness of the perfume: it is so strong it seems visible, tangible. This is often said to be the most personal of the odes. Perhaps it would be better to say that from the abrupt opening of :"My heart aches' onwards, it creates the impression of being the most subjective. Leaving aside the claim by many critics that it is personal in an autobiographical way, how is this impression of subjectivity achieved? It is the processes and movement of the poet's mind that are the central focus of `Ode to a Nightingale', and the personal `I' is very much in evidence. In this respect compare the poem with the `Ode on a Grecian Urn'.</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Lethe-wards</strong><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> (Greek myth) Lethe is one of the rivers of Hades; the dead are obliged to drink from it in order that they may forget everything said and done when alive</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Dryad</strong><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> a tree nymph</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Hippocrene</strong><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> (Greek myth) the fountain of the Muses on Mount Helicon and therefore associated with poetic inspiration; here the term is used to suggest red wine as another source of inspiration</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Bacchus and his pards</strong><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> (Roman myth) the god of wine; the pards are the leopards which draw his chariot</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Fays</strong><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> fairies</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Darkling </strong><span style="line-height: 18.2px;">in the dark</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 18.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Synaesthesia</strong><span style="line-height: 18.2px;">: A sensation that usually only affects one sense is used to trigger a response in another. </span></div>
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<a href="https://www.pivot.one/app/invite_login?inviteCode=nifkfe"></a>Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-27331226079129356262016-02-21T00:44:00.002+05:002016-02-21T00:44:52.529+05:00John Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Stanza I begins slowly, asks questions arising from thought and raises abstract concepts such as time and art. The comparison of the urn to an "unravish'd bride" functions at a number of levels. It prepares for the impossisbility of fulfillment of stanza II and for the violence of lines 8-10 of this stanza. "Still" embodies two concepts--time and motion--which appear in a number of ways in the rest of the poem. They appear immediately in line 2 with the urn as a "foster" child. The urn exists in the real world, which is mutable or subject to time and change, yet it and the life it presents are unchanging; hence, the bride is "unravish'd" and as a "foster" child, the urn is touched by "slow time," not the time of the real world. The figures carved on the urn are not subject to time, though the urn may be changed or affected over slow time.</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The urn as "sylvan historian" speaks to the viewer, even if it doesn't answer the poet's questions (stanzas I and IV). Whether the urn communicates a message depends on how you interpet the final stanza. The urn is "sylvan"--first, because a border of leaves encircles the vase and second because the scene carved on the urn is set in woods. The "flowery tale" told "sweetly" and "sylvan historian" do not prepare for the terror and wild sexuality unleashed in lines 8-10 (another opposition); the effect and the subject of the urn or art conflict. Is it paradoxical that the urn, which is silent, tells tales "more sweetly than our rime"? Twice (lines 6 and 8) the poet is unable to distinguish between mortal and immortal, men and gods, another opposition; is there a suggestion of coexistence and inseparableness in this blurring of differences between them?</span><span style="line-height: 18.2px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">With lines 8-10, the poet is caught up in the excited, rapid activities depicted on the urn and moves from observer to participant in the life on the urn, in the sense that he is emotionally involved. Paradoxically, turbulant dynamic passion is convincingly portrayed on cold, motionless stone.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Paradox and opposites run through the rest of the poem. As you read and reread the poem, you should become aware of them.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Stanza II.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The first four lines contrast the ideal (in art, love, and nature) and the real; which does Keats prefer at this point? What is the paradox of unheard pipes? Is this an oxymoron?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The last six lines contrast the drawback of frozen time; note the negative phrasing: "canst not leave," "nor ever can," "never, never canst" in lines 5-8. Keats says not to grieve; whom he is addressing--the carved figures or the reader? or both? Then he lists the advantages of frozen time; however, Keats continues to use negative phrasing even in these lines: "do not grieve," "cannot fade," and ""hast not thy bliss." Keats may have made a mistake, or there may be a reason for this negative undertone, a reason which will become clear as the poem continues.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Stanza III.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">This stanza recapitulates ideas from the preceding two stanzas and re-introduces some figures: the trees which can't shed leaves, the musician, and the lover. Keats portrays the ideal life on the urn as one without disappointment and suffering. The urn-depicted passion may be human, but it is also "all breathing passion far above" because it is unchanging. Is there irony in the fact that the superior passion depicted on the urn is also unfulfillable, that satisfaction is impossible?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">How does he portray real life, actual passion in the last three lines? Which is preferable, the urn life or real life? Note the repetition of the word "happy." Is there irony in this situation?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Stanza IV.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Stanza IV shows the ability of art to stir the imagination, so that the viewer sees more than is portrayed. The poet imagines the village from which the people on the urn came. In this stanza, the poet begins to withdraw from his emotional participation in and identification with life on the urn.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">This stanza focuses on communal life (the previous stanzas described individuals). What paradox is implicit in the contrast between the event being a sacrifice and the altar being "green"? between leading the heifer to the sacrifice and her "silken flanks with garlands drest"?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In imagining an empty town, why does he give three possible locations for the town, rather than fix on one location? Why does he use the word "folk," rather than "people"? Think about the different connotations of these words. The image of the silent, desolate town embodies both pain and joy. How is it ironic that not a soul can tell us why the town is empty and that the vase communicates so much to the poet and so to the reader? Is this also paradoxical?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In terms of the theme of pain-joy, what is Keats saying in lines 1-4, which describe the procession? in the rest of the stanza which describes the desolate town? Is he describing a temporary or a permanent condition?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Is the viewer, who is the poet as well as the reader, pulled into the world of the urn?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Stanza V.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The poet observes the urn as a whole and remembers his vision. Is he emotionally involved in the life of the urn at this point, or is he again the observer? What aspect of the urn is stressed in the phrases "marble men and maidens," "silent form," and "Cold Pastoral"?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Is there a paradox in the phrase "Cold Pastoral"?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Yet the poet did experience the life experienced on the urn and comments, ambiguously perhaps, that the urn "dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity." Is this another reference to the "dull brain" which "perplexes and retards" ("Ode to a Nightingale")? Why does Keats use the word "tease"? By teasing him "out of thought," did the urn draw him from the real world into an ideal world, where, if there was neither imperfection nor change, there was also no real life or fulfillment? Or, possibly, was the poet so involved in the life of the urn that he couldn't think? Was the urn an escape, however temporary, from the pains and problems of life? One thing that all these suggestions mean is that this is a puzzling line.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In the final couplet, is Keats saying that pain is beautiful? You must decide whether it is the poet (a persona), Keats (the actual poet), or the urn speaking. Are both lines spoken by the same person, or does some of the quotation express the view of one speaker and the rest of the couplet express the comment upon that view by another speaker? Who is being addressed--the poet, the urn, or the reader? Are the concluding lines a philosphical statement about life or do they make sense only in the context of the poem? Click here to read the three versions of the last two lines.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Some critics feel that Keats is saying that Art is superior to Nature. Is Keats thinking or feeling or talking about the urn only as a work of art? Your reading on this issue will be affected by your decision about who is speaking.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">No matter how you read the last two lines, do they really mean anything? do they merely sound as if they mean something? or do they speak to some deep part of us that apprehends or feels the meaning but it is an experience/meaning that can't be put into words? Do they make a final statement on the relation of the ideal to the actual? Is the urn rejected at the end? Is art--can art ever be--a substitute for real life?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">What, if anything, has the poet learned from his imaginative vision of or daydream participation in the life of the urn?</span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-86694861940951232702016-02-21T00:36:00.000+05:002016-02-21T00:36:01.501+05:00 Explanation Of Ariel Poem By Sylvia Plath<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">"Ariel," the title poem of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous volume of the same name is one of her most highly regarded, most often criticised, and most complicated poems. The ambiguities in the poem begin with its title, which has a three fold meaning. To a reader uninformed by Plath’s biography "Ariel" would probably most immediately call to mind the "airy spirit" who in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a servant to Prospero and symbolizes Prospero’s control of the upper elements of the universe, fire and air. On another biographical or autobiographical level, "Ariel," as we know from reports about the poet’s life, was the name of her favorite horse, on whom she weekly went riding. Robert Lowell, in his forward to Ariel, says, "The title Ariel summons up Shakespeare’s lovely, though slightly chilling and androgynous spirit, but the truth is that this Ariel is the author’s horse." Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, adds these comments,</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">ARIEL was the name of the horse on which she went riding weekly. Long before, while she was a student at</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Cambridge (England), she went riding with an American friend out towards Grantchester. Her horse bolted, the stirrups fell off, and she came all the way home to the stables, about two miles, at full gallop, hanging around the horse’s neck.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">These two allusions, to The Tempest and to her horse "Ariel," have often been noticed and pointed out, with the emphasis, from a critical perspective, being placed on the biographical referent. But there is another possible referent in the title of the poem which no one has yet noted, although the poet, apparently, went out of her way to make reference, even obvious reference, to it. I refer to "Ariel" as the symbolic name for Jerusalem. "Ariel" in Hebrew means "lion of God." She begins the second stanza of the poem with the line "God’s lioness," which seems to be a direct reference to the Hebrew or Jewish "Ariel."</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Plath’s obsession with Judaism and the Jewish people is clearly indicated in many of her poems.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Indeed, some of the imagery which informs the passage concerning "Ariel" in the Book of Isaiah (29:1-7) appears to have been drawn on directly by Plath for her imagery in her poem "Ariel." In Isaiah 29-5-6 we read,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">And in an instant, suddenly,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">You will be visited by the Lord of hosts</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">With thunder and with earthquake and great noise,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">With whirlwind and tempest,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">And the flame of a devouring fire</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In short, then, the poet seems to be combining these three references to "Ariel" in her poem, and creating a context where each of the possible meanings enriches the others. She even seems to imply this when she says, in the second stanza, "How one we grow." Each of the three "Ariel’s" contributes its part to the totality of the poem, and each of them merges into the others so that, by the end of the poem, they are all "one."</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Now, of these three references to "Ariel," the two that seem most fruitful in terms of an analysis of the poem appear to be the autobiographical and the Biblical In terms of the autobiographical overtones, the poem can be seen as what apparently it is in fact—an account of the poet’s going for a ride on her favorite horse. Each of the details she mentions with respect to the ride (at least through the first six stanzas) can be seen as exact reporting of what it is like to ride a horse. The last five stanzas of the poem obviously move beyond the literal telling of taking a horseback ride and move into something which partakes of the mystery whereby the rider experiences something of the unity which is created between horse and rider, if not literally, at least metaphorically. This change in the theme of the poem is signaled both by a change in tone and by a change in technique, and specifically by the break in the rhyme scheme.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In talking of the rhymes in Plath’s poetry, John Frederick Nims points out that in The Colossus, Plath’s first book, she chooses to rhyme "atonally" using one of several variations:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The same vowel-sound but with different consonants after it: fishes-pig-finger-history; worms-converge. Different vowel-sounds but with the same final consonant: vast-compost-must; knight-combat-heat (this is her most characteristic kind of rhyme in The Colossus). Unaccented syllable going with accented or unaccented: boulders-wore: footsoles-babel. She considers all final vowels as rhyming with all others: jaw-arrow-eye (perhaps suggested by the Middle-English practice in alliteration). Or she will mate sounds that have almost anything in common: ridgepole-tangle-inscrutable.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Nims goes on to say,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In Ariel, the use of rhyme is very different. In some poems it is ghostlier than ever. But more often it is obvious: rhyme at high noon. The same sound may run on from stanza to stanza, with much identical rhyme. "Lady Lazarus" illustrates the new manner. The poem is printed in units of three lines, but the rhyme is not in her favorite terzarima pattern. Six of the first ten lines end in an n-sound, followed by a sequence in long e, which occurs in about half of the next twenty-two lines. Then, after six more a’s, we have l’s ending eleven of fourteen lines, and then several r’s, leading into the six or more air rhymes that conclude the sequence. Almost Skeltonian: the poet seems to carry on a sound about as long as she can, although not in consecutive lines.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Now up to the seventh stanza of the poem (and continuing on through the remainder of the poem once the transitions has been made in the seventh stanza, "White / Godiva, I unpeel— / Dead hands, dead strigencies"), the rhyme scheme has been, for the most part, "regular" in terms of the slant rhymes Nims has suggested, each stanza having two lines which rhyme, given Plath’s approach to rhyme. "darkness" / "distance," "grow" / "furrow," "arc" / "catch," "dark"</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">/ "Hooks," "mouthfuls" / "else," "air" / "hair," "I" / "cry," "wall" / "arrow," and "drive" / "red." It is true that the rhymes do not all fit the categories Nims has set forth, although some of them do. Where the rhymes do not fit his scheme, another scheme, equally justifiable, could be suggested—one which the poet apparently used equally often, here as well as in other poems in Ariel. For instance, in the case of the rhymes "darkness" / "distance," the rhyme works on the duplication of the initial "d’s" and the final "s’s"; in "arc" / "catch," "arc" ends in the consonant "c" which is picked up as the initial letter in "catch" (also the sequence "ac" in "arc" is reversed in "catch" to "ca"); the "k" in "dark" and "Hooks" carries the rhyme for the lines ending in these two words; in the "wall" / "arrow" rhyme Plath has apparently worked the words so that the letters of the one word become inverted and duplicated backwards in the letters of the other, thus "w" begins "wall" and ends "arrow" and the double "1" in "wall" is duplicated by the double "r" in "arrow," each of the double consonants following the vowel "a"; and the initial "d" of "drive" goes with the final "d" of "red," and so forth.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">But, to show the change in theme in the Godiva stanza, Plath breaks the rhyme within the stanza itself, while, and at the same time, she joins this transitional stanza to what has gone before and to what will follow by interlocking its rhyme with the dangling or unused line in both the preceding and following stanzas. Thus "heels" from the preceding stanza is made to rhyme with "unpeel" in the Godiva stanza, and "seas" of the following stanza is made to rhyme with "stringencies." The unity of the poem as a whole has thus been maintained while the shift in its theme is signaled both thematically and structurally by a shift in the rhyme scheme.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In addition to this rather complex patterning of rhyme, Plath also has her own alliterative-devices to bind together individual lines and, at times, larger units of her poems. In "Ariel," for instance, we find lines like, "Pour of tor and distances," "Pivot of heels and knees," and "Of the neck I cannot catch." In each of these lines, the internal rhyme ("pour" / "tor") or the alliteration ("cannot catch") or the assonance ("heels and knees") creates a kind of music which takes the place of exact or even slant rhyme.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">On at least two other occasions, then, Plath has set forth similar experiences to the one she details in "Ariel," and in each case she has communicated her experience in terms of horses and horseback riding. All demonstrate a desire to have her reader feel, if not see, the unities of the interconnected emotions which she is attempting to express in these poems. Particularly in "Ariel," she is careful to link the thematic and rhyme devices already mentioned to an overall structure which suggests the special kind of fusions that she intends. The poem is written in three line stanzas, and, in the sense that two of the lines in each stanza rhyme, the poem might be considered to fall into a loose terza rima. Another way in which the form works to complement the meaning is in the stanzaic form itself. The very fact that the stanzas are tri-fold parallels the tri-fold allusions to horse, Ariel in Shakespeare, and "Ariel" as a reference to Jerusalem, Therefore, the stanzaic structure as well as the structure of the individual stanzas corroborates the theme of the poem.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">But perhaps the most important structural, as well as thematic, line in the poem is the last line, which is also the final stanza of the poem. This line is important in a three-fold way: first, the "ro" of "cauldron" is inverted to "or" in "morning," thus continuing the duality of the double, and here internal, rhyme that occurs throughout the poem, but at the same time tightening the rhyme even further into the space of a single line; second, the words "eye" and "morning," carrying as they do the overtones of "I" and "mourning," at once incorporate the personal activity (riding a horse) with the communal concern of the Biblical passage (where "Ariel" comes to signify the whole history of the Hebrew race and the suffering, the "mourning" so immediately identified with that history); and, thirdly, the word "cauldron" mixes all of the foregoing elements together into a kind of melting pot of emotion, history and personal involvement. Thus, the poem takes on the richness and complexity we have come to expect from the poet, and, not without reason, stands as the title poem of the book. As A. Alvarez has said, "The difficulty with this poem lies in separating one element from another. Yet that is also its theme." Indeed, Plath seems to have always had a similar difficulty in separating one element of her life from another. But, that, too, was also, and always, her theme.</span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-75448960178755680202016-02-21T00:33:00.002+05:002016-02-21T00:33:53.914+05:00Explanation Of the Poem 'Morning Song By Sylvia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">This poem is part of the collection Ariel and it is considered part of the so called Confessional poetry, a kind of poetry drafted by a group of poets of the fifties of the twentieth century in which Sylvia Plath has been framed and which works are composed in a mode of verse that reveals the poet's personal problems in a very frankly way. Long time it has been considered as a characteristic of the collection the theme of suicide, as a hint of the intimate subjects dealt with in the poems, but as in the previous research of this paper has been stated, death poems were not part of this collection, being the poems that express ideas on death not part of the original selection made by Plath before dying.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The poem is composed in free verses; it does not seek a regular metre and rhyming scheme. It is composed by six stanzas of three verses each.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The first stanza begins with the word love, which is a good hint of the theme of the poem. It is, the birth of Sylvia's son and the feelings she experiments because of her maternity. This word, love, it is said to be the reason of the baby's coming to the world. This coming, the sense of movement of the action, is compared with that of a watch, as an object that starts working at a certain point, in the life of a person this certain point can be the moment of the birth. This mentioned watch is a gold watch, the adjective gold gives an idea of the importance of the concept compared to it, in this case the newborn. And the word fat, referring to this watch, alludes to the baby's shape, being babies often tubby and rounded in their shape when they are born. In the second verse Plath tells the moment the midwife slaps the footsoles of the baby, when babies are born, the midwifes or the doctors that help in the childbirths usually snap the baby's buttocks or, in this case, the footsoles to help them breath as they start crying. In the poem, this crying, described as bald, sets the moment the new person has come to the world. This idea is described as “[…] took its place among the elements”. Being these elements interpreted as the elements that compose the world, the natural elements, and, they may be as well, the elements human beings have created to conform the world as it is nowadays, or as it was in that moment of history when Sylvia Plath lived.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The second stanza describes how the arrival of the new born has been welcomed. The first verse talks about the echoes of the voices of the parents magnifying his arrival, these words give idea of the happiness brought to them by the birth. The child is described as “new statue in a drafty museum”, his nakedness is compared to a statue, this image can be easily evoked by the reader. The naked body of a baby, so delicate and soft, is comparable with the perfection of the statues chiselled by crafty sculptors. This image of the delicate baby is the cause of the parent's worries, of the end of the safety felt before the new born's arrival, because of the responsibility on the new person good development and growing. So Sylvia says they stand as blankly walls, just staring around the baby, expectant.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The third stanza begins comparing Sylvia's motherhood with the breaking of the clouds in rain. The rain, stated as a mirror which reflects the disappearing of the clouds themselves; extinction made by the action of raining and the blow of the wind. This expression may express the idea of motherhood not as a condition of possession by the mother. The baby belongs to the world, to itself, to the elements which surround his life in the world.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In the fourth stanza the worry of the mother as the baby sleeps is expressed. The breath of the baby is described as “moth-breath”, this comparison gives an idea of the speed and regularity of the baby's breath as it sleeps. As moths are characterized by the fast and constant movement of their wings and are nocturnal insects. Therefore, the movement of these insects is compared with the rhythm of the breath of the baby at night when it is sleeping. This breathing, expressed as a flying is described as flickering among “the flat pink roses”. These flat pink roses may be the decoration of the wall papers of the room where the baby sleeps as they are described as flat and walls are the limits of the rooms and the breathing, as the moths flying, collides with the limits of the room where it is taking place or as the verse says “Flickers among” them. The mother's worry and attention is expressed when she says that she wakes to listen to this breath and the sound that comes to her is said to be like the sound of the sea that moves in her ears. This description of the sound gives idea of the rhythm of the breathing, similar to the sound of the sea.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In the penultimate stanza the characteristic mother's state of alert is expressed when she says that if she hears a cry of her baby she stumbles from bed, in a clumsy way, being his clumsiness reflected by the composed term cow-heavy, and described as floral surely referring this term, floral, to the print of her Victorian nightgown. The mouth of the baby as it cries is described as a cat's mouth, this comparison may be because of the similarity of the baby's lament, surely longing for food, with that of the baby cat drawing for its mother attention. The last verse of this stanza links with the first verse of the next one and starts describing the moment of the daybreak</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">This last stanza as I said before links with the previous one where the window is mentioned. In this stanza it is said that the window square whitens, the day light is coming and in a poetic way she describes how the night ends by saying that it “swallows its dull stars”. The she describes the beginning of the baby's day. It starts babbling. This is a description of the baby's attempts to produce sounds, something characteristic of humans before we learn how to speak. These sounds are described as “The clear vowels rise like balloons”. The first sounds babies produce are most of all vowels. And the description of their production and heard like the rising of balloons in the air give clear idea of the constancy and intensity of the rising of these sounds.</span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-14253249310029986152016-02-21T00:31:00.003+05:002016-02-21T00:31:37.881+05:00 Explanation Of Poem 'The Arrival Of The Bee Box<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The first stanza of "The Arrival of the Bee Box" provides, in some measure, a corrective to the excesses and exaggerations of "The Bee Meeting." The speaker is now able to answer her own earlier question about the box; in fact, overcoming her former passivity, she even takes responsibility for it, "I ordered this, this clean wood box." Seeing it more clearly in her present state of mind, it is no longer the long, white virgin’s coffin feared to be for her but a prosaic "clean wood box" that she herself owns. As if to demonstrate the unequivocal reality of the box, she says it is "Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift." The choice of "chair," the classroom philosopher’s favorite object for exhibiting the "real," is good humored and appropriate. Further, the rhyming phrase, "square as a chair," gives aural substance to the box, and the word "square" suggests honesty, directness, and exactitude. In three words, then, she has overturned the hallucinatory tone of the first poem.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Yet her fine control over words diminishes rapidly, and she concocts a quick succession of odd metaphors for the box--"I would say it was the coffin of a midget / Or a square baby." The subjunctive "I would" testifies that she is aware even before she generates them that her metaphors are contrived. These self-conscious tropes preview the numerous metaphors and similes that this poem will hazard. Even when she claims to leave off making metaphors, she slips immediately into another sort of verbal play, "I would . . . were there not such a din in it." The humming sound created by the three short i’s of "din in it" attests to irrepressible linguistic production. But the difference between "The Arrival of the Bee Box" and "The Bee Meeting" is that here the speaker remains fully aware that she is using poetic language to shape her experience.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In fact, one could read this as a poem about poetic language. If the box represents form and the clamor inside of it represents content, then "The Arrival of the Bee Box" may best be read as a poem in which the speaker explores the relationship between her "asbestos gloves" and her incendiary subject matter. In this view, the two aborted metaphors, the coffin of the midget and the square baby, can be understood as descriptions of poetic content that becomes malformed or remains undeveloped when cramped into conventional structures. In this sense, her first attempts to describe the box were accurate. "The box is locked" because its contents are "dangerous," yet the speaker "can’t keep away from it." As she examines the box and considers opening it, she is faced with the threat that what is inside may destroy her.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">This is a box she has approached elsewhere in her poetry. In each case it seems to represent the conflict between rigid outer forms and a suppressed inner life. It is, of course, the long, white box she fears in "The Bee Meeting" that will trap her in a premature grave; but it is also the hive box in an earlier poem, "The Beekeeper’s Daughter" (118). There, in a line she will recycle for "The Arrival," the daughter of the beekeeper, like the present speaker, tries to look into the box: "Kneeling down / I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye / Round, green, disconsolate as a tear." The eye of the daughter recognizes in the eye of the queen bee a reflection of her own dejection. Both are isolated by their special bond to the father/beekeeper and trapped by structures of power in which they are defined completely by their relation to him. Here, however, the bees are "furious" rather than disconsolate, and she can see nothing of them. When the effort to see fails, "I put my eye to the grid. / It is dark, dark," she must take recourse in listening, "I lay my ear to furious Latin." Here again, as in "Words heard," the persona finds her own voice by hearing the voices of others.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Naturally, then, she begins to create metaphors for the sound in an attempt to understand it. Over the course of the next three stanzas she proposes three analogies for the contents of the bee box, each one an image of power and oppression. First it reminds her of "the swarmy feeling of African hands / Minute and shrunk for export, / Black on black, angrily clambering." Here her role in relation to the box is that of slave trader or colonizing exporter. The power of the colonizer (exporter/poet) over the colonized (African hands/poems) results in the diminution of the latter, which are "Minute and shrunk for export"; the contents of the box are once again imagined as dwarfed and deformed as the whole notion of containment through forms is repeatedly called into question. The bees (and, we can infer, the poems) resent their captivity and agitate to escape. In this analogy, she is right to feel that the bees are dangerous. Next "It is like a Roman mob, / Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!" Echoing again that line from "The Beekeeper’s Daughter," she says, "I lay my ear to furious Latin." Relinquishing power over this mob because she cannot understand them, she admits, "I am not Caesar." Almost inadvertently, these first two metaphors for the din in the box employ exemplary instances from history of domination: the slave trade, white colonization of non-white countries, and autocracy. These political structures, then, are related to the formal structure that controls and contains content. This is the role she rejects in claiming not to be Caesar. Finally, she tries to speak more directly, but even this effort produces a metaphor: "I have simply ordered a box of maniacs." This line is a continuation of her preceding disclaimer: I am not a tyrant who wants to dominate the bees; I simply ordered a bee hive, but it has turned out to be more than I bargained for. Further, however, it too offers a metaphor of power relations--the mental asylum--this time one that the speaker can perhaps identify with more easily since, in "The Bee Meeting," she felt herself becoming the maniac in the box.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Realizing now that she is obliged to the box at least for the night, she senses the danger she is in and toys first with the idea of abdicating her power, "They can be sent back" (the passive voice construction is not accidental), then immediately with the idea of exerting it, "They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner." Clearly, the poem views such power as corrupting, for as soon as she assumes the position of authority ("I am the owner"), she becomes aware of her total control ("They can die").</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Fortunately for the bees, the role of autocrat is not one she relishes; thus, instead of executing her control over them, she wonders "how hungry they are"--a line that reveals she is probably not capable of withholding food from them. (Even the syntax of the line that proposes not to feed them is contorted to throw emphasis on the likelihood that she will care for them: the affirmative phrase "I need feed them" comes first and then, as an unconvincing afterthought, the negative word "nothing.") Indeed, she would like to feed them, or better, to set them free, but she cannot tell how they will treat her if they are liberated. Turning again to the protective myth of Daphne, she tries to imagine freeing them without harm to herself: "I wonder if they would forget me / If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree. . . . / They might ignore me immediately." These lines are actually quite strange. She does not wonder if the bees will attack her but if they will "forget" her, as though her connection to them is more profound and binding than that of a customer who has just purchased a hive. Likewise, the choice of the word "immediately" suggests a concern with duration rather than with the imminent event of their assault. This language also indicates that she has some prior connection to the bees. In the reading I am pursuing, this connection parallels a career of writing that shuts up her imaginative vitality in rigid forms. The bees, then, represent her own repressed feelings, and she dreads the possibility of being overcome by her own memories and outrages. Would she ever be able to forget the slights and injustices? Would the feelings immediately consume her? The "unintelligible syllables" causing the commotion in the box are the sounds of her own anger and fury, and it is her inability to articulate an outrage that she can nevertheless hear that "appalls [her] most of all."</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The allusion to Daphne in this poem is not merely an image for the speaker’s isolated problem; rather it represents other women as well. She recognizes precedents for the metamorphosis: "There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades, / And the petticoats of the cherry." Here for the first time she detects the traces of other women in these trees, their blondness and their petticoats. To refuse the metamorphosis is to attempt to remain in the world as she is, an extremely vulnerable position for a woman (even more so for a woman writer). It necessitates protective gear that is hardly less alienating than bark and leaves, a "moon suit and funeral veil." Moreover, the gear that is meant to protect her human vulnerability seems instead to dehumanize her (the moon suit suggests her strangeness).</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In a last effort to find a way to release the bees without risking injury, she reasons that since she is "no source of honey," they have no cause to attack her. Yet she overlooks the irony that whoever liberates the bees must inevitably be exposed to danger. This point is conveyed through the verbal play on "honey" and "sweet": "I am no source of honey / So why should they turn on me? Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free." Ironically, by being sweet she will be like the honey that the bees are after; in fact, it is her sweetness--her desire to help and her willingness to release the bees--that makes her so vulnerable. On all levels of the poem, the beekeeper opening the box, the woman giving vent to repressed emotions, or the poet uncovering her real subjects, the liberator will likely get hurt.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">"The Arrival of the Bee Box" is the only poem in the sequence that exceeds the five-line stanza pattern. It closes with an extra line--significantly, a line about form that the form of the poem is not able to contain--that asserts "The box is only temporary." This final utterance not only announces the inevitable displacement of the box but also outstrips the formal boundaries set by the poem (and the sequence). The speaker will release the bees. The content will exceed the form. More important, of course, the hand that penned the apocalyptic last line will remove its asbestos glove.</span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-35207279751249423952016-02-21T00:26:00.002+05:002016-02-21T00:30:16.054+05:00 Explanation Of Poem The Bee Meeting By Sylvia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In the first poem, "The Bee Meeting" (211-12) the speaker finds herself in the midst of other people. The long, Whitmanian lines sprawl horizontally to accommodate the crowd of villagers, "The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees" and later "the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know." There may be a pun in the title of this first poem (and in the running title for the sequence) since the word "bee" itself refers to a group of neighbors. In an interesting etymological loop, the word "bee," meaning a meeting of neighbors who unite their labors for the benefit of one of their number (as in a barn raising bee or a quilting bee), is an allusion to the social character of the insect. This sense of "bee" may account for the fact that the villagers all appear to be doing something specifically to or for the speaker and may qualify the speaker’s paranoid response to their attentions toward her.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The place and time of the meeting suggest that the speaker is at a transitional stage. She meets the townspeople "at the bridge," a symbolic place of connection between divided locales and, therefore, a site of change. The way the speaker is dressed confirms the time of the year is summer, a season traditionally associated with the final harvest that precedes decline. Further, the sequence itself moves from summer to winter--and even beyond since the final poem promises spring. Many readers are fond of emphasizing that Plath’s Ariel began with the word "love" and ended with the word "spring" (Poems 14-15), but none has stressed the significance of summer in this culminating sequence. She began the Bee poems shortly after moving to the country cottage she had dreamed of, giving birth to her second child, losing her husband to another woman, seeing her first book of poems in print, and finding a publisher for her first novel. Clearly, the new volume of poetry would reap the sweet and bitter fruits of these recent events. The Bee poems assess the speaker’s relation to her neighbors, children, husband, other women, and herself, as well as her place in history. The summer season hints that one phase of her life is ending, and so it is an appropriate time for reevaluation and change.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The most distinctive feature of "The Bee Meeting" is its gothic tone. If this is a poem about transition, then the speaker finds change extremely disorienting--even nightmarish. The speaker’s paranoia is conveyed through her confused and incessant questions, inability to recognize familiar people, stuttering repetitions, monstrous personifications, and obsession with violence and death. Likewise, the bizarre setting is created through imagery and metaphors of violence, a mixed atmosphere of the ritual, the carnival, and the funeral, and mythic allusions. These elements are intensified rhetorically with alliteration, assonance, and dissonance. Noticeably, then, the formal features that lend the poem its gothic tone are the staples of Plath’s poetics of excess. In this expressionistic landscape the speaker must begin to puzzle out her relationship to others. Significantly, the task demands that she control her overactive imagination, that is, that she see through the thematic and rhetorical trappings of excess that she herself has contrived.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The poem opens and closes with questions and is riddled with questions throughout. Of the eleven stanzas, all but two have at least one question and most have more. Through much of the poem, the speaker tries to answer them herself; but when the last line closes the poem with yet another question, obviously it cannot be answered (at least not within this poem). Consequently, it is the one inquiry in the poem that is not punctuated with a question mark as though the atmosphere of enigma and uncertainty has been naturalized in this perplexing setting, and the interrogative is now as definitive an utterance as she can formulate.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Her first questions concern the people around her and what they are doing: "Who are these people at the bridge to meet me?" "Which is the rector now, is it that man in black? / "Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?" "Is some operation taking place?" "Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?" and finally "what have they accomplished?" The manuscript drafts from this poem reveal that Plath changed many of these questions from straight declarative sentences apparently in order to intensify the speaker’s confusion and disorientation.20 Her sense of alienation from her neighbors naturally serves to emphasize her isolation, but this is a larger point than we may at first realize. A central issue of the Bee sequence is the speaker’s autonomy; the sequence, in fact, works to separate her from others. In itself, isolation is not a problem; on the contrary, it is a state the speaker must achieve in order to know herself, gather her resources, and pursue a new direction. The anxiety and dislocation she experiences in "The Bee Meeting" suggest it is the community of neighbors--not isolation--that the speaker cannot tolerate. She receives their attempts to help her, well-intentioned though they may be, as assaults upon her. She feels vulnerable ("In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection"), effaced by their efforts to protect her ("here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock, / Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees. / Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice."), forced to conform ("they are making me one of them"), and yet finally betrayed ("The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands. / Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold"). However, there is no evidence in the poem that the villagers actually behave suspiciously. Instead, what should be obvious is that participating in the collective life of the village has disastrous effects on the speaker; clearly, she is not "one of them," and thus she finds their attempts to include her extremely threatening.21</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">It is not only in her dealings with the townspeople that the speaker’s perceptions are distorted and exaggerated. She views the setting with the same expressionistic sensibility that informs her apprehension of the villagers. Stanzas four and five depict a dangerous and frightening landscape:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Strips of tinfoil winking like people,</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">All elements of the scene are personified, exacerbating the confusion of who’s who, in the opening stanzas, with what’s what here. The contraptions for warding off plant foragers (strips of tinfoil and feather dusters) present an image every bit as alien as the townspeople in their apiary gear; indeed, they are "like people" but only in the respect that they are as weird and ominous as the villagers. The "eyes" of the bean flowers are black, as though, bruised; their leaves are like pierced hearts; their flowers like blood clots; and the hawthorne tree kills its own offspring. These personifications compare the elements of the landscape to a monstrous humanity and thus have the effect of dehumanizing the whole environment.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">On the other hand, the speaker depicts herself as inextricably bound in her own humanness. Throughout the sequence she alludes to Daphne, who metamorphosed into a laurel tree to elude Apollo, in contrast to her own human vulnerability. In this poem she imagines herself becoming "milkweed silk" and "cow-parsley" so that the bees will not attack her. In the second poem, "The Arrival of the Bee Box" (212-13), she employs the Daphne myth more explicitly, again as a fantasy of protection from the bees: "I wonder if they would forget me / If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree." The desire to transform from the human to the vegetable reveals a longing to escape sexual oppression. In Ovid, the source for this allusion, Daphne’s father wants his daughter to marry and have children (specifically male children): "‘Daughter, you owe me a son-in-law . . . you owe me grandsons!’" (I, 37). But Daphne resists: "‘O father, dearest, grant me to enjoy perpetual virginity" (I, 37). Though she is granted her wish ("He, indeed, yielded to her request" I, 37), she remains prey to the male sexual privilege that marriage would institutionalize. Daphne’s physical vulnerability, like the speaker’s here and in "Stings," is captured in the image of her bare arms: "[Apollo] marvels at her fingers, hands, and wrists, and her arms, bare to the shoulder" (I, 37). Surely the speaker resembles Daphne in this: in "The Bee Meeting" she says, "In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection," and in "Stings" again she is "Bare-handed . . . the throats of [her] wrists brave lilies." The emphasis on physical vulnerability is crucial since elsewhere in mythology, as in the myth of Daphne and Apollo, the transformation into a tree is effected in order to escape sexual assault.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Moreover, the metamorphosis into a plant concerns the definition and boundaries of the human. One could change into a god or an animal (categories believed to be the outside limits of the human), but these beings are still sexually vulnerable. Only by relinquishing all claims to the human can Daphne escape sexual assault. For the speaker of the Bee sequence, however, such a metamorphosis is simply another conceit and one she must give up in order to achieve the self-awareness and new self-definition of "Wintering" (217-19). Significantly, then, the allusion occurs early in the sequence in the two most technically wrought poems with their personifications, myths, alliterations, repetitions, and what has been termed their "manic metaphor-making" (Van Dyne 168)--"The Bee Meeting" and "The Arrival of the Bee Box." By the last poem, "Wintering," the association between the woman and the plant is merely analogous, not metamorphic. She is clearly human, knitting over the cradle of her child (and therefore no longer like the virginal Daphne): "The woman, still at her knitting, / At the cradle of Spanish walnut, / Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think." One might be tempted to say that the baby is encased in the Spanish walnut like Daphne in the laurel tree and that the woman too is becoming a plant, no longer even able to speak. However, the walnut tree merely serves the mother and child, by being fashioned into a cradle, in the same way that the metaphor of the bulb serves the poet, by providing an image for her hibernation. Her ability to control these plant metaphors attests to the progress she has made since the beginning of the Bee sequence. These are distinctions the earlier poems fail to make. Such restraint is still far off in "The Bee Meeting" where personification and metamorphosis are employed to heighten the speaker’s strangeness, vulnerability, and confusion.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Even so, the speaker recognizes that the myth of metamorphosis, like the other conceits in the poem, is an inadequate solution to her problem; however, her moment of clarity is brief at this point. In the crucial and distinctive seventh stanza, she confronts the hysterical tone and the surrealistic allusions to Daphne, "I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me / With its yellow purses, its spikey armory," and says flatly, "I could not run without having to run forever." Her separateness from others--the real issue in the sequence--would pursue her even into the Daphne myth; when she becomes "rooted," that is, transformed into the tree to evade the bees and villagers, the other vegetation now assails her: "the gorse hurts me / With its yellow purses, its spikey armory." And significantly, the flowers and prickles of the gorse are imagined as both female (purses) and male (armory) just like the communities of the villagers or the bees. Abandoning all tropes in the sanest line of the poem, she admits, "I could not run without having to run forever." Fleeing the actual scenes and causes of her anxieties is futile, but she still has not given up the attempt to escape into literariness. After this bald avowal, she appears to delegate the Daphne imagery to the hive: "The white hive is snug as a virgin, / Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming." The lines recall Daphne’s metamorphosis: "her soft sides were begirt with thin bark. Her hair was changed to leaves, her arms to branches. . . . Her gleaming beauty alone remained" (I, 41). The contracting assonance of the long i’s that signals the shutting up of the hive ("white hive") and the whispered alliterations of s’s and h’s ("snug," "sealing," "cells" and "honey," "humming") betray the speaker’s lyric responsiveness to the bees. The self-containment and contentment that the hive achieves at the end of stanza seven is short-lived, however, just as the speaker’s moment of sanity was; in stanza eight when the bees are smoked out of the hive, they (and the speaker) once again take flight of their senses: "Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics." Their fear ignites hers, and she reverts to her earlier fantasy of metamorphosis by trying to "stand very still, [so] they will think I am cow-parsley."</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Feeding this impressionistic mood is the speaker’s inability to perceive accurately, to rein in her hyperactive imagination and hone her vision. Like the paranoid questions that can be answered reasonably ("Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers" or "I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me? / Yes"), the speaker must revise her first impressions of the landscape: "Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string? / No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible." The repeated emotional burst of "No, no" as she realizes the red clots are only flowers suggests that the simple reassuring answer is as unnerving to her as the alarming question because their contrast is a measure of her extremity. Her task in this poem is to liberate herself from both the bizarre and the mundane. She will confront more directly in "Stings" (214-15) that she does not want to end up as the queen, the extraordinary but fated center of the hive; yet she also does not want to become the drudge, one of the "unmiraculous women" whose "strangeness evaporate[s]" from a life of domestic labor. Her vacillations from the bizarre to the mundane, from the surreal to the real, from suspicious questions to matter-of-fact answers are finally what exhaust the speaker by the end of the poem--"I am exhausted, I am exhausted"--though she, like many readers of the poem, blames the villagers.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The frequency with which readers of "The Bee Meeting" conclude that the villagers fiendishly draw the innocent speaker into their demonic ritual attests to the poem’s success in evincing the speaker’s point of view.22 Yet, the townspeople appear menacing because her fantastic imagination distorts perception. It is true, as nearly every reader points out, that the first list of villagers includes the town officials--the rector, the midwife, the sexton, and the agent for bees--and therefore suggests some sort of public ritual. Yet the second list, an even more important one since it enumerates the people who might be the central mysterious "surgeon" performing the ritual, is noticeably composed of common, insignificant, and thus innocuous characters: the butcher, the grocer, the postman, and most vaguely, "someone I know." Moreover, the setting of the mysterious ritual is borrowed, like the Daphne imagery, from literature and thus gives the poem self-conscious literariness rather than emotional veracity. The event is modeled on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, "Young Goodman Brown," in which the title character, like the speaker here, has a nightmarish meeting with his neighbors in a shorn grove. That Plath wants to tap the literariness of this allusion rather than merely its theme and mood is obvious in the more playful, imbedded references to Hawthorn--the hawthorn tree in the grove and the "scarlet" flowers that recall The Scarlet Letter. Like Young Goodman Brown, the speaker of "The Bee Meeting" is a dubious judge of the intentions of the villagers.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">In some ways, her position in relation to the villagers is very much like that of the bees. The townspeople do not intend to harm the bees; they merely want to divide the hive into three hives and save the queen bee from the virgins. Yet the bees misinterpret the smoke (that is used to drive them out so the hives can be moved): "Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove. / The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything." Likewise, the queen hides from the people who are trying to help her: "The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?" The intensely lyrical quality of some of these passages (the long o’s that almost seem to loop and curl like the smoke they are describing--"Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove"--the long i’s that tighten and enclose the bees in a unity of sound--"The mind of the hive") again belies the speaker’s sympathetic identification with the bees. Strategic repetitions further link the speaker to the bees; she says of herself, "They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear" and of the queen, "She is old, old, old." This connection between the speaker and the bees must be read carefully, however, for its purpose is to separate her from the villagers every bit as much as it is to associate her with the bees. She is like the bees primarily in that she is unlike the townspeople. Further, the bees themselves are similar to the villagers in some ways (in their group function, in their hierarchy, in the threat they pose to the speaker). This point is more important than it first appears. Many readers interpret the sequence, especially the third poem "Stings," as a work in which Plath attempted to create an image of herself from the bees, whether as victimized wife (the drudges) or victorious poet (the queen bee). Yet the larger success of the sequence depends on the speaker’s recognition that the hive is an unsatisfactory model for human social relations (indeed, the metaphor of the hive amounts to a critique of heterosexual social relations) and that the bees are outside of her, as everything that oppresses her is. Distinguishing herself from her conceits makes possible the relationship to the bees she acknowledges in "The Swarm" (215-17)--"How instructive this is!" Here at the end of "The Bee Meeting" she still confuses herself with the bees, "Whose is that long white box in the grove . . . why am I cold," and experiences a foreboding of death (an early draft of this line read "that coffin, so white and silent" [Van Dyne 165]). Yet, like the bees, she must learn that this is not "the end of everything." By the last poem, she has established her autonomy as well as her connection to the world; despite the fact that Plath changed the sequence title from "The Beekeeper" and "The Beekeeper’s Daybook" to "Bees," the speaker is aware in the last poem that she is a beekeeper not a bee. When she says in "Wintering," "It is they [the bees] who own me," she does not mean that she cannot distinguish herself from them--only that she is connected to them by their dependence upon her, a relationship she assents to: "This is the time of hanging on for the bees." Thus, the speaker’s rhetorical and emotional identification with the bees in the first poem, like the other intensely imaginative elements, stems from excesses that the sequence as a whole works to overcome.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">Another aspect of "The Bee Meeting" that often diverts critical attention from the speaker’s unreliability is the penultimate stanza in which the new virgins</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The appeal of this stanza, of course, is that it prefigures the violence of the bride flight in "Stings" and is consistent with the theme of vengeful self-destruction that is said to monopolize Plath’s imagination. And, indeed, it does foreshadow the third poem of the sequence in its vision of "recovering" a queen, as "Stings" will say. However, much more important here is the fact that the bride flight remains merely a dream. This poem ends with exhaustion and uncertainty not, like "Stings," with energy and self-assurance. And, as might be expected, the speaker recedes even further into the unreality she has been struggling throughout the poem to cast off.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;">The failure of her effort to distinguish between the real and the surreal is anticipated in the opening of the final stanza which signals her defeat, "I am exhausted, I am exhausted," and confirmed in the last line where three accusing questions give vent to her worst fears, "Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold." She sees what appears to be a coffin, realizes something has ended, and feels the chill of the grave already upon her. Yet the box, the sense of accomplishment, and the iciness of death all derive directly from her own metaphor in the preceding lines. When she claims to be a "Pillar of white in a blackout of knives. / . . . the magician’s girl who does not flinch," she is, in effect, conjuring up her own box and stepping into it. Reneging on all the other images for herself the poem has contrived, this last metaphor makes passivity a performance and tinctures the funereal atmosphere with the carnival. Embracing virginity with a vengeance, she becomes the magician’s "girl"--both daughter and assistant--who participates in the trick of Sawing the Lady in Half.23 The box, then, is the prop that makes the optical allusion possible. She is the "pillar of white in a blackout of knives" because she is the stoical girl in the box who remains unscathed even as the phallic knives appear to pass through her, a variation of Daphne who becomes the unfeeling tree in order to avoid Apollo’s sexual assault. The knives do not cut her because they are merely a "blackout," that is, an optical illusion. The term is taken from the theatrical expression "blackout," meaning to dim the lights while a scene changes or, in a magician’s act, to allow a trick to be accomplished under the cover of darkness; it is also a word that suggests the magician’s occupation, "black art." She is unflinching, not because she is brave, but because she is in on the trick. The shock at the end of the poem that inspires the final three questions is her surprising realization that she is the only one left performing. "The villagers are untying their disguises," but the speaker is still caught in hers. While the townspeople were carrying out their chores, and there is no evidence in the poem that they were doing otherwise, the speaker has nailed her own coffin, so to speak, with her fantastic imaginative constructions. Moreover, her role as the magician’s girl associates her with witchcraft since it allies her with sorcery as well as with illusion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;">The exhaustion she feels at the end of the poem makes her unable to answer the last battery of questions. This is appropriate since the voice of the poem is expert at heightening rather than allaying fears and uncertainties. She will, however, approach the last enigma from another angle in the second poem. "The Arrival of the Bee Box" (212-13) must be understood as responding to her demand in this first poem to know "Whose is that long white box in the grove."</span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-23649700053647576692016-02-21T00:24:00.000+05:002016-02-21T00:24:05.719+05:00Sylvia Plath Life and Works<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932, at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, in the Jennie M Robinson Memorial maternity building in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Otto Emil Plath 1885-1940) and Aurelia Schober Plath (1906-1994). She would be an only child for two and a half years, when her brother Warren was born, 27 April 1935. Her first home was on 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston. After Warren Plath's birth, the family moved to 92 Johnson Avenue in Winthrop, Massachusetts just east of Boston. This is where Plath became familiar and intimate with the sea. From an early age she enjoyed the sea and could recognize its beauty & power.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Otto Plath taught at Boston University (BU). To get there, he took a bus, boat and trolley to get to work each day from Winthrop. At that time BU's site was on Boylston Street just off Copley Square. This site is now New England Financial. Otto Plath's health began to fail shortly after the birth of his son Warren in 1935. He thought he had cancer as a friend of his, with similar symptoms, had recently lost a battle with lung cancer. Otto Plath was an expert on bees. He wrote a book called Bumblebees and Their Ways, published in 1934. Sylvia Plath was impressed with her father's handling of bees. He could catch them and they would not sting! (He caught only the males; the males do not have stingers.) Otto Plath died on 5 November 1940, only a week and a half after his daughters eighth birthday. He died of diabetes mellitus, which at the time was a very curable disease. Upon his death a friend only asked, "How could such a brilliant man have been so stupid?"</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In 1942, Aurelia Plath moved the family to 26 Elmwood Road, in Wellesley. This was Sylvia Plath's home until she began college. She repeated the fifth grade so that she would be in class with children her same age, and she aced her courses. From then on, Plath was a star student, making straight A's the whole way through high school. She excelled in English, particularly creative writing. Her first poem appeared when she was eight in the Boston Herald (10 August 1941, page B-8).</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Plath won a scholarship to attend Smith College, an all girls' school in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was ecstatic in the fall of 1950 to be a 'Smith girl.' She immediately felt the pressures of College life, from the academic rigors to the social scenes. Sylvia Plath received a scholarship to attend Smith College. The benefactress of this scholarship was Olive Higgins Prouty, a famous author. Olive Higgins Prouty lived at 393 Walnut Street in Brookline, a suburb of Boston near to Wellesley. Once at Smith, Plath started a correspondence with Olive that lasted the rest of her life. Plath wanted to be both brilliant and friendly, and she achieved both.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">From around 1944 on, Plath kept a journal. The journals gained in importance to her in college. She would come to rely heavily on her journals for inspiration and documentation. She had a very quick, sharp eye, noting details that most people miss and take for granted. Her journal became her most trusted friend and confidant, telling it secrets and presenting a completely different and real self on those pages. Sometimes she was blunt, other times candid. She captured ideas for poems and stories, and detailed her ambitions. One of the more memorable passages she writes about the joy of picking her nose. (January 1953)</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">At this point in her life, the early Smith years, she was writing very measured, pretty poems. She had the craft of poem making down, but she did not have the voice. She was working hard on syllabics, paying close attention on line lengths, stanza lengths and a myriad of other poetic styles that any apprentice should know. Plath was different, though, as she worked herself to perfection. She relied on her thesaurus to push her way through poem after poem. She emulated Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and W.H. Auden. She read Richard Wilbur, Marianne Moore and John Crowe Ransom. She also wanted to write short stories for women's magazines such as the Ladies Home Journal and other influential 1950s magazines. She was also sending poems and stories out regularly, facing rejection most of the time. She did, however, receive some success.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Beginning in 1950, Plath began publishing in national periodicals. Her article "Youth's Appeal for World Peace" was published in the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) on 16 March. Her short story "And Summer Will Not Come Again" appeared in the August issue of Seventeen & the poem "Bitter Strawberries" appeared in the 11 August CSM. Throughout 1951, Plath was collecting rejection slips at a fast pace, but she was also published quite a bit.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In 1953, Plath wrote articles for local newspapers like the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Springfield Union as their Smith College correspondent. Her short story, "Sunday at the Mintons" won first prize in a Mademoiselle contest. From this story, she also won a Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle at 575 Madison Avenue in New York City during June 1953. (The offices have since moved & the magazine recently ceased publication.) She and several other young women stayed at the women only Barbizon Hotel, at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue. The events of this very important month are well covered in her novel, The Bell Jar. (In The Bell Jar she calls the hotel, The Amazon.) Her published journals for these months are thin, and do not reveal too much about the breakdown that followed. She returned from the New York exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically. She was banking on being admitted to a Harvard summer class on writing. When she received word she had not been accepted, Sylvia Plath's fate was also secured. Her journals end abruptly in July. For details of the summer of 1953, readers must rely on information Plath put down in a few letters to friends and in her novel, The Bell Jar.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Throughout July and early August, Plath tells us in The Bell Jar that she could neither read nor sleep nor write. In an interview given to the Voices & Visions audio/video series, Aurelia Plath tells us that her daughter could in fact read, and that she meticulously read Freud's Abnormal Psychology. Plath, however, felt despondent. On 24 August 1953, she left a note saying, "Have gone for a long walk. Will be home tomorrow." She took a blanket, a bottle of sleeping pills, a glass of water with her down the stairs to the cellar. There she crept into a two and a half-foot entrance to the crawl space underneath the screened-in porch. She began swallowing the pills in gulps of water and fell unconscious.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Aurelia Plath gave a good fight into finding her missing daughter, barely waiting a few hours to phone the police. An exhaustive search started in the Great Boston area to try and find the missing Smith beauty. Boy scouts and local police and neighbors combed Wellesley thoroughly through small parks as well as in and around Morse's Pond. Headlines in the papers the next day, 25 August 1953, alerted many of Plath's friends. Headlines were less favorable the next day, Wednesday 26 August 1953. However, around lunchtime Plath was found with eight sleeping pills still in the bottle. Sylvia was treated at McLean Hospital in Belmont with the help of her Smith benefactress Olive Higgins Prouty. Her doctor was Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, and Dr. Beuscher would go on to be a great help to Plath in the years to come. Her recovery was not easy, but Plath pulled through and was readmitted to Smith for the spring 1954 semester. This is really the beginning of Sylvia Plath, poet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">1954 was a remarkable year. She met Richard Sassoon, who would later play a significant role as lover. Plath also continued where she left off at Smith, doing excellent work in spite of the breakdown. That summer she studied at Harvard Summer School, living with Nancy Hunter-Steiner in apartment 4 at the Bay State Apartments, located at 1572 Massachusetts Avenue.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The next school year at Smith, Plath worked hard, continuing her excellence. In the spring 1955 semester, Plath turned in her English honors thesis, The Magic Mirror: The Double in Dostoevsky. She graduated summa cum laude and also won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge University.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Before Plath left for England, however, she needed to get through a summer of living at 26 Elmwood Road where her first suicide attempt, two years earlier, occurred. She spent much of her time dating young men like Richard Sassoon, Gordon Lameyer and toward the end of the summer, an editor named Peter Davison. However, before setting sail, Plath ended these attachments, preferring to take on what England had to offer. As Plath sailed to England, she spent her time "flirting and then making love" (Wagner-Martin). Plath was excited about Cambridge for many reasons, two of which were its possibility for the best education and to find a man to marry (at that time men outnumbered women at Cambridge by the astonishing ten to one).</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">As an American in England, Plath was shocked and overwhelmed by Cambridge. Coming to England in mid-September, Plath spent her first ten days in London, sightseeing and shopping. When she arrived at 4 Barton Road and Whitstead she was at first disappointed as it is at the back of the college. She loved Cambridge though and immediately became familiar with its old streets and customs. British schooling is very different than in America so Plath had major adjustments ahead of her. She had to choose her courses for two years and at the end of the second year were the exams. This meant much study on her own, though she was responsible for writing essays weekly on topics, attending lectures and meeting one hour a week with her tutors. Plath's tutor, Dorothea Krook, would become a very important female role model in the coming years, much as Dr Ruth Beuscher was to her. Krook taught Plath in a course on Henry James and the Moralists. Her academic course load was much lighter than it was at Smith, so that autumn Plath joined the Amateur Dramatics Club (ADC) and had a small role as an insane poetess. Initially, she tried to steer clear of dating as she grew accustomed to life in a foreign country. She still maintained relations with Richard Sassoon, who was living in Paris at the time. Plath spent her winter holiday with Sassoon in and around Paris and Europe. However romantic this holiday was, Sassoon soon wrote to Plath asking for a break, telling Plath that he would contact her when he was ready.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Plath, back at Cambridge and not too happy with the English winter, began falling ill and sinking into a depression. She suffered from a splinter in her eye which became the subject of the poem "The Eye-Mote", and along with a cold & flu, began to think she would not conquer Cambridge after all. On 25 February Plath met with a psychiatrist named Dr Davy and in her journal entry for that day-expressed anger at Sassoon. At the ripe age of 23, Plath really needed someone to love and to love her. To be 23 and single in 1953 was considered to be passed her prime.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">That afternoon after the meeting with Dr Davy, Plath bought a copy of the Saint Botolph's Review and read impressive poems by E Lucas Myers and more impressive poems by a poet called Ted Hughes. Plath was told of a party that evening celebrating the publication of this new literary review to be held at Falcon Yard.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The meeting of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is probably the best-known meeting of two aspiring poets in the 20th century. Plath walked into the room with a date named Hamish and quickly began enquiring as to Hughes' whereabouts. She found him, recited some of his poems, which in the few hours since first reading them had memorized. According to her journals and letters, they were dancing and stamping and yelling and drinking and then he kissed her on the neck and she bit Hughes on the cheek, and he bled. No matter what sort of hyperbole was used in the retelling of their meeting, it was dramatic and life changing. Hughes' voice boomed like the thunder of God, and his Yorkshire accent was deep and intense. She wrote the poem "Pursuit" to him and in the poem she calls him a panther. It is also in this poem that Plath announces with some clairvoyance that "One day I'll have my death of him." Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes both found influences in W.B Yeats, Dylan Thomas and D. H. Lawrence, to name a few. Hughes read these poets as well and also Hopkins, Blake, Chaucer and Shakespeare. There is no doubt that Hughes helped Plath achieve the major poetic voice she would later find. The voice might have always been in Plath, the talent and drive was certainly there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">That spring Plath suffered much heartache and confusion over her love for Richard Sassoon, who had asked Plath not to contact him until he figured out what he wanted (he was in love with at least two other women). Plath traveled to London for one night before going to Paris for her spring break and she stayed with Ted Hughes at his flat at 18 Rugby Street. They made hectic love all night long and then she traveled to Paris in search of Sassoon to find some resolution. Sassoon's decision could not have been any clearer; he was far away from Paris and did not want to be found. Plath, finding her letters unanswered at Sassoon's residence, became desperate, frequenting places she and Sassoon previously visited. Plath met several other friends from Cambridge, some strangers and finally had a bad time of traveling through Italy with her ex-flame Gordon Lameyer. Plath received at least one love letter from Hughes, which lifted her. She flew from Rome to London to be with Hughes, leaving Lameyer behind.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes married on Bloomsday 1956 (16 June) at the Church of St. George-the-Martyr at Queen's Square, Bloomsbury, just a few paces from the offices of Faber & Faber. Aurelia Plath was there to witness. The Hugheses spent the summer writing and no doubt getting to know each other better in Benidorm, Spain. The couple also spent in Paris, France, and Alicante, Spain, before visiting Yorkshire, to be with Ted's parents, who knew nothing of the wedding.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">In the fall, Plath continued studying at Cambridge. Eventually, Plath moved in to a flat located at 55 Eltisley Avenue with Ted Hughes. Ironically, some relatives of Richard Sassoon lived above them. The two poets would study, cook, eat, take walks and learn to live with each other. Ted Hughes took a job teaching at a local boy's school. This would be one of his most enjoyable jobs. Plath and Hughes made arrangements to go to America in the summer of 1957.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #e1ebf2; color: #536482; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Immediately upon their meeting, Plath began typing and sending out Hughes's poems publishers in America and England. Due in part to this work, in early 1957, Ted Hughes won first prize in the New York Poetry Center contests judged by Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender for his book The Hawk in the Rain. This was a contest he was unaware he entered. His publishers would be Harper & Row and they would bring the book out that summer. Plath had been writing some very good poems this English winter, among them "Sow," "The Thin People," and "Hardcastle Crags." On 12 March 1957 Plath was offered a teaching position in Freshman English at Smith College.</span></span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-5807776372812167592015-12-06T20:55:00.002+05:002015-12-06T20:55:41.740+05:00The Crucible Symbolism in & Similarities to McCarthyism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">McCarthyism</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: In the 1940s and 1950s Americans
feared the encroachment of Communism. The Soviet Union was growing in power and
the threat of a nuclear holocaust was on the forefront of American minds.
Eastern Europe had become a conglomerate of Communist satellite nations. Throw
in China and Americans began to feel they were surrounded by a Communist
threat. Paranoia ensued.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Crucible</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Salem
established itself as a religious community in the midst of evil. Salemites
considered the forest the domain of the devil. Salem was surrounded by forest.
Paranoia ensued.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">McCarthyism</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator, made
unsubstantiated claims that more than 200 "card carrying" members of
the Communist party had infiltrated the United States government. He had no
proof.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Crucible</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Delusional
girls make unsubstantiated claims about the existence of witches in Salem. They
have no proof.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">McCarthyism</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: McCarthy's unsubstantiated claims
ruined lives and led to increased hostility.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Crucible</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: The girls
unsubstantiated claims ruin lives and lead to increased hostility in Salem.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">McCarthyism</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Those who were accused were assumed
guilty, put on trial, and expected to divulge the names of other Communist
sympathizers. Failure to do so led to sanctions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Crucible</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Those who
are accused are assumed guilty, put on trial, expected to confess, and expected
to accuse others of being witches. Failure to do so leads to death.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">McCarthyism</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: The media were not willing to stand
up to Senator McCarthy for fear of being accused of being a Communist.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Crucible</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">:
Townspeople are not willing to stand up to the court for fear of being accused
of being a witch.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">McCarthyism</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Arthur Miller was called before the
House Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently blacklisted.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Crucible</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Arthur
Miller wrote it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Other Significant Symbols<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Dol</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">l: The doll found
on Elizabeth Proctor's shelf is a traditional symbol of voodoo and witchcraft.
In The Crucible, the doll (as well as Rebecca Nurse) symbolizes the
transformation of good to evil: dolls, in a normal society, represent childhood
innocence and bring happiness. In Salem, dolls represent evil. This extends to
the Puritan government and church, both being entrusted to protect its
citizens, yet both doing the opposite.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Stones</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Giles Corey
refuses to make an official plea in court. In order to persuade him to make a
plea, officials of the court stack concrete stones on him and eventually crush
him. The stones symbolize the weight of Salem's sins that are crushing the good
in its society.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">Elizabeth
Proctor's Pregnancy</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">:
Elizabeth's execution is stalled on account of her pregnancy. This represents
hope that the future may be different.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Boiling Cauldron</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">:
The controversy begins with Salem girls running wild through the forest around
a cauldron of boiling water. This cauldron symbolizes the wildness of the
girls, or more specifically, their repressed sexual desire bubbling over.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Witch Trials</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: In
addition to the similarities between McCarthyism and The Crucible already
discussed, the trials symbolize the effect of intolerance, extremism, and
hatred.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">The
Forest</span></b><span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";">: Puritans
believed that the forest was the devil's dominion. They failed to recognize,
however, that Salem's evil and destruction came from within. The forest,
therefore symbolizes the evil present in all humans.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-3699507495669171352015-12-06T20:54:00.000+05:002015-12-06T20:54:15.226+05:00Arthur Miller's Narrative Technique in The Crucible<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Each
stage production of The Crucible differs from every other in two areas. First,
directors stage the play according to their own styles, using various props and
costumes while suggesting numerous interpretations of characters. Secondly,
individual actors read the lines differently, using diverse voice inflections,
gestures, and body language to give each interpretation its own style. Miller
also provides yet another opportunity for variety, not just for the director
and actors, but also for the audience and reader. Lengthy exposition pieces
that are not glossed as stage directions periodically appear in the written
play. For example, at the beginning of Act I, Miller provides stage directions
for the set, props, and position of Parris and Betty on stage. However, Miller
also includes an extensive psychological profile of Parris prior to beginning
the action of the play. Before Parris speaks, a narrator says that "in
history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for
him." Later, the narrator interrupts the action in Scene 1 to include
background information on Putnam, and the narrator does the same for Proctor in
Scene 3, Rebecca in Scene 4, and Hale and Giles in Scene 5. In addition to
historical background on significant characters, the interruptions also include
social commentary within the exposition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
question arises whether or not a director should include these narrative
sections, some of which are four pages long, within the play itself. At first
glance, it appears that they are to be included within the actual production.
If so, then a narrator character must read the narrative sections to the
audience. If this is done, however, the continual interruptions in the play's
action make engaging the audience in the play difficult. Therefore, the
narrative sections should clearly serve only as a tool to provide directors and
actors with background information.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">The
explicative passages allow directors and actors to focus on character
motivation, providing them a better understanding of the characters and the
historical period. Characters are more engaging because a genuine basis for
tension between them exists. For example, obvious tension exists between Thomas
Putnam and several other characters in the play, especially Francis Nurse. An
actor playing Thomas Putnam must create a persona driven by greed. If the actor
knows the passage that states that Putnam was "a deeply embittered
man" who attempted to challenged his father's will because his father left
the largest portion of money to his stepbrother, then the actor can internalize
this quality of Putnam. These background passages result in a more effective
portrayal of greed and a more believable character.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Tahoma","sans-serif";"><span style="font-size: large;">Individuals
reading the play will have a different experience than the traditional audience
because they will read the background information, which will inevitably affect
their interpretation of the characters and the play's events. Within the
exposition sections Miller addresses the reader directly, in the comfortable,
reliable voice of a trusted narrator. As a result, the reader internalizes the
information and responds to the characters and their actions based upon it. For
example, a reader will discover the same information as a potential actor in
regard to Putnam — that Putnam's father left the largest amount of money to
Putnam's stepbrother. The reader will also benefit from the narrator's
commentary. The narrator tells the reader that the real Putnam accused a large
number of people during the trials, often as a method of retaliation or
personal gain. After revealing Putnam's historical background, the narrator
begins to suggest that Putnam's character will falsely accuse someone within
the play. Although the narrator does not finish the suggestion — he only says,
"especially when" — the reader automatically expects Putnam to
falsely accuse someone in the play. As a result, the reader projects the
narrator's commentary onto Putnam's character and anticipates Putnam's false
accusations against rival landowners.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-1353930330056623132015-12-06T20:51:00.000+05:002015-12-06T20:51:12.971+05:00The Crucible: Arthur Miller's Style<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Arthur Miller had a reputation for being pedantic.
He maintained, and his estate continues to maintain artistic control over his
plays. Miller never ever let anyone else have more creative input than himself.
He was a visually descriptive playwright both in his stage directions and
settings. Miller’s plays, including The Crucible include pages of detailed
information addressing the concerns of both the actors and the audience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In preparation for writing The Crucible, he studied
pages and pages of court transcripts of the Salem witch hunts in order to
develop ideas and to create an authentic dialect. He took small ideas from the
testimonies given in the courts and fleshed them out into stories. In fact, the
basis for John Proctor’s and Abigail Williams’ affair was based on the tension
he discovered that the two of them shared throughout the actual court
proceedings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">'This play is not history in the sense in which the
word is used by the academic historian. Dramatic purposes have sometimes
required many characters to be fused into one; the number of girls involved in
the 'crying out' has been reduced; Abigail's age has been raised; while there
were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in
Hathorne and Danforth. However, I believe that the reader will discover here
the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human
history. The fate of each character is exactly that of his historical model,
and there is no one in the drama who did not play a similar-and in some cases
exactly the same-role in history.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">As for the characters of the persons, little is
known about most of them except what may be surmised from a few letters, the
trial record, certain broadsides written at the time, and references to their
conduct in sources of varying reliability. They may therefore be taken as
creations of my own, drawn to the best of my ability in conformity with their
known behaviour, except as indicated in the commentary I have written for this
text.' <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Plays can be classified in two major varieties:
plays of episodic action and plays of continuous action. Shakespeare's plays
are episodic. No one scene is very long, and the action jumps from place to
place, sometimes skipping over years in between. On the other hand, Greek tragedies
like Oedipus Rex and some modern plays such as Eugene O'Neil's Long Day's
Journey into Night, follow what are called the three unities: of time-the
action usually takes place within a 24-hour period; of place- there is only one
location,, and of action-there is no break in the action from beginning to end.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Crucible falls somewhere in between. The time
span is about three-and-a-half months; the action occurs in four different
places, although it never leaves Salem; and there is a gap of at least a week
between each act (between Acts III and IV almost three months elapse). But
within each act the action is continuous from curtain to curtain. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">One advantage of the continuous-action method is
that it allows the author to build tension or suspense gradually. It also can
be less confusing for an audience, because we don't have to stop and figure out
where we are every few minutes. And, finally, it allows us to get to know the
main characters very well, by letting us watch them for a long time at a stretch.
This is especially important in The Crucible, where we come to understand what
happened in Salem in 1692 through the experience of one man, John Proctor. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Crucible was written in an historical style,
marking a shift in Miller's preferred writing style from the "naturalistic
dialogue of the American middle class" in his first three plays, to a
formal, New-England-Puritan style. Miller "makes exemplary use of this new
style, its biblical echoes, its metaphorical richness, and its ethical
basis". The Crucible concerns the dilemma of "making moral choices in
the face of community pressure and about the irrational basis of that
pressure". The similarity between the Communist and Puritan witch-hunts
allows Miller to formulate an explanation for their inception, along with the
destructive effect that speculations can have on individuals when brought
before an unsympathetic, judgmental and irrational public. The public's
trepidation toward the subject matter of The Crucible was due to the play's
remarkable similarity to the political pulse at the time, causing critics to
give it "polite, lukewarm reviews", and closed after only a few
months. Ironically, The Crucible was successful in an off-Broadway production
five years later and was given ample praise by the same critics who previously
rejected it. This performance ran over six hundred shows, establishing it as
Miller's second most popular play.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Miller’s style is very simple. He uses simple
sentences and sentence structure with a simple vocabulary. While using the
simple style, Miller does not take away from the suspense in he plot. The
dialogues of his characters are like actual speech. His words are used
effectively and does not include anything not necessary to convey the idea. He
makes the plot and idea interesting by foreshadowing future events. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In The Crucible, the characters do not speak in
fragments, and some do occasionally string together phrases. Also, they do form
their thoughts carefully before speaking. The sentences are simple and the structure
does not vary too much. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the first passage spoken by Reverend Parris, the
speech is more formal that speeches spoken by other characters. This displays
that Reverend Parris is more educated than the others. It has a somewhat
fatherly, yet commanding tone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The second passage spoken by Abigail is markedly
different from the first passage. The sentences are less thought out and more
fragmented. She repeats the phrase “I know you” several times. This shows less
education but more deep emotion than the first passage. The tone for this line
is moving, but when compiled with Abigail's character, becomes deceiving. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The third passage spoken by Elizabeth shows a
clearly though out idea. It shows that while Elizabeth may not be as educated
as someone like Parris, this is a subject that she has thought about a long
time. This gives a tone of something like a bottom line or an ultimatum. While
Elizabeth does not give a specific choice to Proctor, it is obvious that he
must make a decision on what to do. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Miller does not rely too much on imagery. There are
few cases of imagery in this play. One remarkably memorable one is the
statement by Abigail about the way John Proctor “sweated like a stallion.”
While this statement is also a simile, it provides an unforgettable image in
the minds of the audience. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The most memorable case of simile is the line, “I
know how you clutched my back behind your house and sweated like a stallion
whenever I came near!” This statement compares Proctor with a stallion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Miller rarely uses metaphors or personification in
this work. His people generally referred to as people and items as items.
Occasionally he alludes to some portion or person in the Bible, but rarely to
anything else. For example, while John Proctor is speaking with Rebecca in
prison, she alludes to the martyred apostles. Rebecca says, “Let you fear
nothing! Another judgment waits us all.” This is an allusion to idea from the
Bible that man is judged by God in heaven. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Miller has few cases of verbal irony. He uses it in
act 3 while Elizabeth tell she court that Proctor did not sleep with Abigail
she knows that he did. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">All parts with the girls lying about witches and
ghosts are cases of dramatic irony since, while the audience knows that the
girls are lying, most of the characters do not. For example, in court, Abigail
and the other girls pretend to be attacked by spirits and the people in court
fear them to be in danger. However, the audience knows that they are faking it.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Miller’s attitude towards witchcraft is satirical.
The tone is serious, cynical, and formal. He achieves this tone by the terrible
tragedy of the innocent people executed, and the mental struggles of John
Proctor. Miller shows the irony and the unjustness of the witch trials, and
thereby the irony and the unjustness of the McCarthy trials.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-51659829872554159772015-12-06T16:59:00.003+05:002015-12-06T16:59:30.188+05:00Hemingway's Code Hero<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The major characters in Hemingway’s novels and
short stories are divided into two groups. There are certain round characters
who find themselves at cross-ends with the world around them and they are tying
to come to some convincing terms with their environment but do not know the way
out. They learn with the passage of time and evolve a new set of values, which
make their survival possible. There are certain other characters that do not
need any education because when they appear before us they are perfect in
themselves. These characters appear with different names in different novels.
But they share so many characteristics in common that critics identify them
collectively as the Code Hero or in Earl Rovit’s terms “the Tutor”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Hemingway’s code hero is usually an older man,
tremendously courageous and blindly confident who has realized his
potentialities and know his area of operations. He is perfectly skilled and
experienced in his art and executes his jobs full-boldly. He is usually a
bullfighter, a fisherman, a veteran soldier or a prized fighter who is dead
sure of his success and acknowledgement in his particular department.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Hemingway’s code hero is an incarnation of those
values, which make for the void of life caused by the First World War. The code
hero is fully aware of the fact that if a man wishes to live most intensely
only in confrontation and death by showing his coolness, endurance, grace and
discipline he can assert his moral integrity and manliness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Wilson, Pedro Romero, Santiago etc. are different
examples of the code hero. Santiago fights the battle with courage and dignity
to defend his prize against the sharks in the big sea especially when the
Marlin is bleeding but as to give is unmanly. So he sustains his stature in the
face of heavy and even insurmountable odds. He proves that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Though the field is lost everything is not lost.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">And<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Romero, the code hero, in “The Sun Also Rises” is
presented as the“Messiah” who has come to save not only full fighting from
decadence but also“The Lost Generation”. He demonstrates to them through his
actions how one can live with dignity and grace while facing death. Jake Barnes
is greatly impressed by Romero when the former says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“After Romero has kill his first bull “Montoya”,
caught my eye and nodded his head. This was a real one. There had not <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">been a real one for a long time. He knows
everything when he started. The other cannot learn what he was born with.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The encounter of Robert Cohn and Pedro Romero, the
encounter of the code hero and the romantic hero present the difference between
physical and moral victory between chivalric stubbornness and real self
respect. Thus Pedro fights to repair an affront to his dignity and though he is
badly beaten yet his spirit is untouched by disappointment, whereas Cohn’s
spirit is completely smashed. Though the next day Romero’s eyes were
discolored, lips and face were swollen yet he beats Belmote in particularly
every sphere of the sport. Cohn had based his skill at boxing or upon a women’s
love, so he fails when neither love nor skill supports him but Romero’s manhood
is a thing independent of women. Even in his courtship of Brett Ashley there is
no loss of his pride and self respect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">He appears for a brief span of time but he has
taught Jake Barnes to face the realities of life with stoic endurance and made
Brett say:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding
not to be a bitch.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">And<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is sort of what we have instead of God.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Brett’s declaration is a prove that Romero indeed
had the greatness within the bullring and outside of it.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-76572491222660094092015-12-06T16:58:00.002+05:002015-12-06T16:58:20.397+05:00Hemingway's Hero<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Barnes, Nick Adam, Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan
etc. are all Hemingway’s typical heroes who remain continuously under great
stress because they are living in absolutely unsatisfactory conditions.
Hemingway’s hero is always in some war or war like conditions but the notable
point is that he enters war without any social, political or ideological
obligation. That is why he is basically a disinterested spectator of war
instead of a vehement participant. Romantic ideals and abstractions like
sacred, glory, bravery etc. do not fascinate him and we cannot help wondering
why he offers himself to serve in war.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Hemingway’s hero leads a private life as an
isolated individual because during war he very closely observes the nothingness
of life, cruelty of man against man, temporality, emptiness and meaninglessness
in human relationship and extremely realizes that looking for permanence in
human relations is to meet utter disappointment. However, we should not assume
that he is a misanthrope but he has a great ability to recognize another member
of his breed and establishes an immediate understanding with him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Although, he is a tough man and loves outdoor
activities, yet he is equally sensitive and his wounds add fuel to fire to his
sensitiveness. Secondly, he suffers from Nada which always keeps him restless
and the darkness at night intensifies the feeling of nothingness in life. That
is why he keeps on thinking and cannot sleep at night and even if he sleeps, he
is disturbed by nightmares. However, it is worth mentioning that a typical
Hemingway’s hero is not volunteer thinker or philosopher rather he wants to
avoid these troublesome haunts. He takes pleasure in spending most of his time
in going on for hunting or fishing trips, reaming about different restaurants
and enjoying free sex or drinking. The restlessness of the typical Hemingway’s
Hero continues until he searches out a solution of present agony. At last, he
succeeds in formulation a code which may work effectively as a bolster for the
dome of his life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Jake Barnes is the typical Hemingway’s hero who
leaves his own country America and lives in Paris and he works as a journalist
in an American Newspaper. He voluntarily takes part in the First World War and,
like other Hemingway’s heroes, is wounded. However, the nature of Barnes’
injury is quite different and unique because he is injured in such a way that
he can feel sexual desire but consummation of this desire is not possible. To
aggravate the situation, an English volunteer nurse Brett Ashley falls in love
with him and ironically enough, she is near nymphomaniac. Jake is fully aware
of the irony of fate and remains restless day and night. Brett Ashley moves
from one man to another in pursuit of her physical satisfaction and Jake is a
silent spectator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">He nervously moves from one hotel to another, one
dancing club to another but to no avail. He cannot overcome his grief because
it penetrates to the depth of his soul. In Hotel Monty at Pamplona in Spain he
meets Pedro Romero, the greatest bullfighter who is born with great qualities
of tolerance and patience. Romero is severely beaten by the boxing champion
Robert Cohn, but his soul remains untouched and he des not loose his integrity
and performs his duty in the ring stoically. In his fiesta in Pamplona Jake
looses his sweetheart Brett Ashley and his friend Montoya, but he learns the
greatest lesson of his life that a great amount of patience and tolerance is
required to lead life and it is possible only through manly encounter with
death. This is the lesson which enables him to receive a telegram from his
disloyal beloved and respond to her stoically and patiently.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-21704129822200347822015-12-06T16:54:00.002+05:002015-12-06T16:54:45.571+05:00Aristotle's concept of catharsis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle writes that the function of tragedy is to
arouse the emotions of pity and fear, and to affect the Katharsis of these
emotions. Aristotle has used the term Katharsis only once, but no phrase has
been handled so frequently by critics, and poets. Aristotle has not explained
what exactly he meant by the word, nor do we get any help from the Poetics. For
this reason, help and guidance has to be taken from his other works. Further,
Katharsis has three meaning. It means ‘purgation’, ‘purification’, and
‘clarification’, and each critic has used the word in one or the other senses.
All agree that Tragedy arouses fear and pity, but there are sharp differences
as to the process, the way by which the rousing of these emotions gives
pleasure. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Katharsis has been taken as a medical metaphor,
‘purgation’, denoting a pathological effect on the soul similar to the effect
of medicine on the body. This view is borne out by a passage in the Politics
where Aristotle refers to religious frenzy being cured by certain tunes which
excite religious frenzy. In Tragedy: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“…pity and fear, artificially stirred the latent
pity and fear which we bring with us from real life.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the Neo-Classical era, Catharsis was taken to be
an allopathic treatment with the unlike curing unlike. The arousing of pity and
fear was supposed to bring about the purgation or ‘evacuation’ of other
emotions, like anger, pride etc. As Thomas Taylor holds:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“We learn from the terrible fates of evil men to
avoid the vices they manifest.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">F. L. Lucas rejects the idea that Katharsis is a
medical metaphor, and says that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The theatre is not a hospital.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Both Lucas and Herbert Reed regard it as a kind of
safety valve. Pity and fear are aroused, we give free play to these emotions
which is followed by emotional relief. I. A. Richards’ approach to the process
is also psychological. Fear is the impulse to withdraw and pity is the impulse
to approach. Both these impulses are harmonized and blended in tragedy and this
balance brings relief and repose.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The ethical interpretation is that the tragic
process is a kind of lustration of the soul, an inner illumination resulting in
a more balanced attitude to life and its suffering. Thus John Gassner says that
a clear understanding of what was involved in the struggle, of cause and
effect, a judgment on what we have witnessed, can result in a state of mental
equilibrium and rest, and can ensure complete aesthetic pleasure. Tragedy makes
us realize that divine law operates in the universe, shaping everything for the
best.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">During the Renaissance, another set of critics
suggested that Tragedy helped to harden or ‘temper’ the emotions. Spectators
are hardened to the pitiable and fearful events of life by witnessing them in
tragedies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Humphrey House rejects the idea of ‘purgation’ and
forcefully advocates the ‘purification’ theory which involves moral instruction
and learning. It is a kind of ‘moral conditioning’. He points out that,
‘purgation means cleansing’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">According to ‘the purification’ theory, Katharsis
implies that our emotions are purified of excess and defect, are reduced to
intermediate state, trained and directed towards the right objects at the right
time. The spectator learns the proper use of pity, fear and similar emotions by
witnessing tragedy. Butcher writes: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The tragic Katharsis involves not only the idea of
emotional relief, but the further idea of purifying the emotions so relieved.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The basic defect of ‘purgation’ theory and
‘purification’ theory is that they are too much occupied with the psychology of
the audience. Aristotle was writing a treatise not on psychology but on the art
of poetry. He relates ‘Catharsis’ not to the emotions of the spectators but to
the incidents which form the plot of the tragedy. And the result is the
“clarification” theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The paradox of pleasure being aroused by the ugly
and the repellent is also the paradox involved in tragedy. Tragic incidents are
pitiable and fearful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">They include horrible events as a man blinding
himself, a wife murdering her husband or a mother slaying her children and
instead of repelling us produce pleasure. Aristotle clearly tells us that we
should not seek for every pleasure from tragedy, “but only the pleasure proper
to it”. ‘Catharsis’ refers to the tragic variety of pleasure. The Catharsis
clause is thus a definition of the function of tragedy, and not of its
emotional effects on the audience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Imitation does not produce pleasure in general, but
only the pleasure that comes from learning, and so also the peculiar pleasure
of tragedy. Learning comes from discovering the relation between the action and
the universal elements embodied in it. The poet might take his material from
history or tradition, but he selects and orders it in terms of probability and
necessity, and represents what, “might be”. He rises from the particular to the
general and so is more universal and more philosophical. The events are
presented free of chance and accidents which obscure their real meaning.
Tragedy enhances understanding and leaves the spectator ‘face to face with the
universal law’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Thus according to this interpretation, ‘Catharsis’
means clarification of the essential and universal significance of the
incidents depicted, leading to an enhanced understanding of the universal law
which governs human life and destiny, and such an understating leads to
pleasure of tragedy. In this view, Catharsis is neither a medical, nor a
religious or moral term, but an intellectual term. The term refers to the
incidents depicted in the tragedy and the way in which the poet reveals their
universal significance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The clarification theory has many merits. Firstly,
it is a technique of the tragedy and not to the psychology of the audience.
Secondly, the theory is based on what Aristotle says in the Poetics, and needs
no help and support of what Aristotle has said in Politics and Ethics. Thirdly,
it relates Catharsis both to the theory of imitation and to the discussion of
probability and necessity. Fourthly, the theory is perfectly in accord with
current aesthetic theories. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">According to Aristotle the basic tragic emotions
are pity and fear and are painful. If tragedy is to give pleasure, the pity and
fear must somehow be eliminated. Fear is aroused when we see someone suffering
and think that similar fate might befall us. Pity is a feeling of pain caused
by the sight of underserved suffering of others. The spectator sees that it is
the tragic error or Hamartia of the hero which results in suffering and so he
learns something about the universal relation between character and destiny. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">To conclude, Aristotle's conception of Catharsis is
mainly intellectual. It is neither didactic nor theoretical, though it may have
a residual theological element. Aristotle's Catharsis is not a moral doctrine requiring
the tragic poet to show that bad men come to bad ends, nor a kind of
theological relief arising from discovery that God’s laws operate invisibly to
make all things work out for the best.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-54766932910754691822015-12-06T16:43:00.002+05:002015-12-06T16:43:55.689+05:00Aristotle's concept of ideal tragic hero: Hamartia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">No passage in “The Poetics” with the exception of
the Catharsis phrase has attracted so much critical attention as his ideal of
the tragic hero.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The function of a tragedy is to arouse the emotions
of pity and fear and Aristotle deduces the qualities of his hero from this
function. He should be good, but not perfect, for the fall of a perfect man
from happiness into misery, would be unfair and repellent and will not arouse
pity. Similarly, an utterly wicked person passing from happiness to misery may
satisfy our moral sense, but will lack proper tragic qualities. His fall will
be well-deserved and according to ‘justice’. It excites neither pity nor fear.
Thus entirely good and utterly wicked persons are not suitable to be tragic
heroes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Similarly, according to Aristotelian law, a saint
would be unsuitable as a tragic hero. He is on the side of the moral order and
hence his fall shocks and repels. Besides, his martyrdom is a spiritual victory
which drowns the feeling of pity. Drama, on the other hand, requires for its
effectiveness a militant and combative hero. It would be important to remember
that Aristotle’s conclusions are based on the Greek drama and he is lying down
the qualifications of an ideal tragic hero. He is here discussing what is the
very best and not what is good. Overall, his views are justified, for it
requires the genius of a Shakespeare to arouse sympathy for an utter villain,
and saints as successful tragic heroes have been extremely rare.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Having rejected perfection as well as utter
depravity and villainy, Aristotle points out that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The ideal tragic hero … must be an intermediate
kind of person, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune,
however, is brought upon him not by vice or depravity but by some error of
judgment.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The ideal tragic hero is a man who stands midway
between the two extremes. He is not eminently good or just, though he inclines
to the side of goodness. He is like us, but raised above the ordinary level by
a deeper vein of feeling or heightened powers of intellect or will. He is
idealized, but still he has so much of common humanity as to enlist our
interest and sympathy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The tragic hero is not evil or vicious, but he is
also not perfect and his disaster is brought upon him by his own fault. The
Greek word used here is “Hamartia” meaning “missing the mark”. He falls not
because of the act of outside agency or evil but because of Hamartia or
“miscalculation” on his part. Hamartia is not a moral failing and it is
unfortunate that it was translated as “tragic flaw” by Bradley. Aristotle
himself distinguishes Hamartia from moral failing. He means by it some error or
judgment. He writes that the cause of the hero’s fall must lie “not in
depravity, but in some error or Hamartia on his part”. He does not assert or
deny anything about the connection of Hamartia with hero’s moral failings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It may be accompanied by moral imperfection, but
it is not itself a moral imperfection, and in the purest tragic situation the
suffering hero is not morally to blame.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Thus Hamartia is an error or miscalculation, but
the error may arise from any of the three ways: It may arise from “ignorance of
some fact or circumstance”, or secondly, it may arise from hasty or careless
view of the special case, or thirdly, it may be an error voluntary, but not
deliberate, as acts committed in anger. Else and Martian Ostwald interpret
Hamartia and say that the hero has a tendency to err created by lack of
knowledge and he may commit a series of errors. This tendency to err
characterizes the hero from the beginning and at the crisis of the play it is
complemented by the recognition scene, which is a sudden change “from ignorance
to knowledge”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In fact, Hamartia is a word with various shades of
meaning and has been interpreted by different critics. Still, all serious
modern Aristotelian scholarship agreed that Hamartia is not moral imperfection.
It is an error of judgment, whether arising from ignorance of some material
circumstance or from rashness of temper or from some passion. It may even be a
character, for the hero may have a tendency to commit errors of judgment and
may commit series of errors. This last conclusion is borne out by the play
Oedipus Tyrannus to which Aristotle refers time and again and which may be
taken to be his ideal. In this play, hero’s life is a chain or errors, the most
fatal of all being his marriage with his mother. If King Oedipus is Aristotle’s
ideal hero, we can say with Butcher that: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“His conception of Hamartia includes all the three
meanings mentioned above, which in English cannot be covered by a single term.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Hamartia is an error, or a series of errors,
“whether morally culpable or not,” committed by an otherwise noble person, and these
errors derive him to his doom. The tragic irony lies in the fact that hero may
err mistakenly without any evil intention, yet he is doomed no less than
immorals who sin consciously. He has Hamartia and as a result his very virtues
hurry him to his ruin. Says Butcher: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Othello in the modern drama, Oedipus in the
ancient, are the two most conspicuous examples of ruin wrought by character,
noble indeed, but not without defects, acting in the dark and, as it seemed,
for the best.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle lays down another qualification for the
tragic hero. He must be, “of the number of those in the enjoyment of great
reputation and prosperity.” He must be a well-reputed individual occupying a
position of lofty eminence in society. This is so because Greed tragedy, with
which alone Aristotle was familiar, was written about a few distinguished royal
families. Aristotle considers eminence as essential for the tragic hero. But
Modern drama demonstrates that the meanest individual can also serve as a
tragic hero, and that tragedies of Sophoclean grandeur can be enacted even in
remote country solitudes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">However, Aristotle’s dictum is quite justified on
the principle that, “higher the state, the greater the fall that follows,” or
because heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes, while the death of
a beggar passes unnoticed. But it should be remembered that Aristotle nowhere
says that the hero should be a king or at least royally descended. They were
the Renaissance critics who distorted Aristotle and made the qualification more
rigid and narrow.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-74699598740608114112015-12-06T16:42:00.000+05:002015-12-06T16:42:03.424+05:00Aristotle's theory of imitation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle did not invent the term “imitation”.
Plato was the first to use the word in relation with poetry, but Aristotle
breathed into it a new definite meaning. So poetic imitation is no longer
considered mimicry, but is regarded as an act of imaginative creation by which
the poet, drawing his material from the phenomenal world, makes something new
out of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In Aristotle's view, principle of imitation unites
poetry with other fine arts and is the common basis of all the fine arts. It
thus differentiates the fine arts from the other category of arts. While Plato
equated poetry with painting, Aristotle equates it with music. It is no longer
a servile depiction of the appearance of things, but it becomes a
representation of the passions and emotions of men which are also imitated by
music. Thus Aristotle by his theory enlarged the scope of imitation. The poet
imitates not the surface of things but the reality embedded within. In the very
first chapter of the Poetic, Aristotle says: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and
Dithyrambic poetry, as also the music of the flute and the lyre in most of
their forms, are in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ
however, from one another in three respects – their medium, the objects and the
manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The medium of the poet and the painter are
different. One imitates through form and colour, and the other through
language, rhythm and harmony. The musician imitates through rhythm and harmony.
Thus, poetry is more akin to music. Further, the manner of a poet may be purely
narrative, as in the Epic, or depiction through action, as in drama. Even
dramatic poetry is differentiated into tragedy and comedy accordingly as it
imitates man as better or worse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle says that the objects of poetic imitation
are “men in action”. The poet represents men as worse than they are. He can
represent men better than in real life based on material supplied by history
and legend rather than by any living figure. The poet selects and orders his
material and recreates reality. He brings order out of Chaos. The irrational or
accidental is removed and attention is focused on the lasting and the
significant. Thus he gives a truth of an ideal kind. His mind is not tied to reality:
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is not the function of the poet to relate what
has happened but what may happen – according to the laws of probability or
necessity.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">History tells us what actually happened; poetry
what may happen. Poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.
In this way, he exhibits the superiority of poetry over history. The poet freed
from the tyranny of facts, takes a larger or general view of things, represents
the universal in the particular and so shares the philosopher’s quest for ultimate
truth. He thus equates poetry with philosophy and shows that both are means to
a higher truth. By the word ‘universal’ Aristotle signifies: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“How a person of a certain nature or type will, on
a particular occasion, speak or act, according to the law of probability or
necessity.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The poet constantly rises from the particular to
the general. He studies the particular and devises principles of general
application. He exceeds the limits of life without violating the essential laws
of human nature. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Elsewhere Aristotle says, “Art imitates Nature”. By
‘Nature’ he does not mean the outer world of created things but “the creative
force, the productive principle of the universe.” Art reproduce mainly an
inward process, a physical energy working outwards, deeds, incidents,
situation, being included under it so far as these spring from an inward, act
of will, or draw some activity of thought or feeling. He renders men, “as they
ought to be”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The poet imitates the creative process of nature,
but the objects are “men in action”. Now the ‘action’ may be ‘external’ or
‘internal’. It may be the action within the soul caused by all that befalls a
man. Thus, he brings human experiences, emotions and passions within the scope
of poetic imitation. According to Aristotle's theory, moral qualities,
characteristics, the permanent temper of the mind, the temporary emotions and
feelings, are all action and so objects of poetic imitation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Poetry may imitate men as better or worse than they
are in real life or imitate as they really are. Tragedy and epic represent men
on a heroic scale, better than they are, and comedy represents men of a lower
type, worse than they are. Aristotle does not discuss the third possibility. It
means that poetry does not aim at photographic realism. In this connection R.
A. Scott-James points out that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Aristotle knew nothing of the “realistic” or
“fleshy” school of fiction – the school of Zola or of Gissing.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Abercrombie, in contrast, defends Aristotle for not
discussing the third variant. He says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is just possible to imagine life exactly as it
is, but the exciting thing is to imagine life as it might be, and it is then
that imagination becomes an impulse capable of inspiring poetry.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle by his theory of imitation answers the
charge of Plato that poetry is an imitation of “shadow of shadows”, thrice
removed from truth, and that the poet beguiles us with lies. Plato condemned
poetry that in the very nature of things poets have no idea of truth. The
phenomenal world is not the reality but a copy of the reality in the mind of
the Supreme. The poet imitates the objects and phenomena of the world, which
are shadowy and unreal. Poetry is, therefore, “the mother of lies”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle, on the contrary, tells us that art
imitates not the mere shows of things, but the ‘ideal reality’ embodied in very
object of the world. The process of nature is a ‘creative process’; everywhere
in ‘nature there is a ceaseless and upward progress’ in everything, and the
poet imitates this upward movement of nature. Art reproduces the original not
as it is, but as it appears to the senses. Art moves in a world of images, and
reproduces the external, according to the idea or image in his mind. Thus the
poet does not copy the external world, but creates according to his ‘idea’ of
it. Thus even an ugly object well-imitated becomes a source of pleasure. We are
told in “The Poetics”: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we
delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity; such as the forms
of the most ignoble animals and dead bodies.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The real and the ideal from Aristotle's point of
view are not opposites; the ideal is the real, shorn of chance and accident, a
purified form of reality. And it is this higher ‘reality’ which is the object
of poetic imitation. Idealization is achieved by divesting the real of all that
is accidental, transient and particular. Poetry thus imitates the ideal and the
universal; it is an “idealized representation of character, emotion, action –
under forms manifest in sense.” Poetic truth, therefore, is higher than
historical truth. Poetry is more philosophical, more conducive to understanding
than Philosophy itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Thus Aristotle successfully and finally refuted the
charge of Plato and provided a defence of poetry which has ever since been used
by lovers of poetry in justification of their Muse. He breathed new life and
soul into the concept of poetic imitation and showed that it is, in reality, a
creative process.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-81667257109446626542015-12-06T16:39:00.002+05:002015-12-06T16:39:36.939+05:00 Aristotle's concept of tragedy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The Poetics” is chiefly about Tragedy which is
regarded as the highest poetic form. Abercrombie says: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“But the theory of Tragedy is worked out with such
insight and comprehensions and it becomes the type of the theory of
literature.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle reveals that imitation is the common
basis of all the fine arts which differ from each other in their medium of
imitation, objects of imitation and manner of imitation. Poetry differs from
music in its medium of imitation. Epic poetry and dramatic poetry differs on
the basis of manner of imitation. Dramatic poetry itself is divisible in Tragic
or Comic on the basis of objects of imitation. Tragedy imitates men as better
and comedy as worse then they are. Thus, Aristotle establishes the unique
nature of Tragedy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle traces the origin and development of
poetry. Earlier, poetry was of two kinds. There were ‘Iambs’ or ‘Invectives’,
on one hand, which developed into satiric poetry, and ‘hymns’ on the gods or
‘panegyrics’ on the great, on the other, which developed into Epic or heroic
poetry. Out of Heroic poetry developed Tragedy, and out of satiric came the
Comedy. Both Epic and Tragedy imitate serious subjects in a grand kind of verse
but they differ as Epic imitates only in one kind of verse both for Choral odes
and dialogue. The Epic is long and varied but the Tragedy has greater
concentration and effectiveness. The Epic lacks music, spectacle, reality of
presentation and unity of action which the Tragedy has. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“All the parts of an epic are included in Tragedy;
but those of Tragedy are not all of them to be found in the Epic.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle comes to a consideration of the nature
and function of tragedy. He defines tragedy as: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“the imitation of an action, serious, complete, and
of a certain magnitude, in a language beautified in different parts with
different kinds of embellishment, through actions and not narration, and
through scenes of pity and fear bringing about the ‘Catharsis’ of these
emotions.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The definition separates tragedy from other poetic
forms. Firstly, its objects of imitation are serious actions unlike Comedy
which imitates the non-serious. ‘Serious’ means important, weighty. Secondly,
Tragedy on the basis of manner differs from Epic which narrates and does not
represent through action. Thirdly, on the basis of medium it differs from
Lyric. It employs several kinds of embellishments. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle considers plot as the soul of tragedy.
Tragedy imitates ‘actions’ and its plot consists of a logical and inevitable
sequence of events. The action must be a whole. It must have a beginning, a
middle and an end. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The tragic plot must have a certain magnitude or
‘length’. ‘Magnitude’ here means ‘size’. It should be long enough to allow the
change from happiness to misery but not too long to be forgotten before the
end. Action, too short, cannot be regarded as proper and beautiful for its
different parts will not be clearly visible. Its different parts must be
well-related to each other and to the whole. It must be an ‘organic’ whole.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle divides the tragic plot into ‘Simple’ and
‘Complex’. In Simple Plot the change in the fortunes of hero takes place
without Peripety and Discovery; while the Complex Plot involves one or the
other, or both. The Peripety is the change in the fortunes of the hero, and the
Discovery is a change from ignorance to knowledge. Aristotle prefers complex
plot for it startles, captures attention and performs the tragic function more
effectively. He regards episodic plot, lacking probability and necessity, as
worst of all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle lays great emphasis on the probability
and necessity of the action of a tragedy. It implies that there should be no
unrelated events and incidents. They must follow each other inevitably. No
incident or character should be superfluous. The events introduced must be
probable under the circumstances.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">By various embellishments in various parts,
Aristotle means verse and song. Tragedy imitates through verse in the dialogue
and through song in the Choric parts. Verse and song beautify and give
pleasure. But Aristotle does not regard them as essential for the success of a
tragedy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle points out that the function of tragedy
is to present scenes of ‘fear and pity’ and to bring about a Catharsis of these
emotions. It would be suffice to say that by Catharsis of pity and fear, he
means their restoration to the right proportions, to the desirable ‘golden
means’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle lists six formative or constituent parts
of Tragedy; Plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle and song. Two of these
parts relate to the medium of imitation, one to the manner of imitation, and
three to the object of imitation. Song is to be found in the Choric parts of a
tragedy. The Spectacle has more to do with stagecraft than with the writing of
poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">'Thought' is the power of saying what can be said,
or what is suitable to the occasion. It is the language which gives us the
thoughts and feeling of various characters. The language of Tragedy must be
unusually expressive. The Language of Tragedy ‘must be clear, and it must not
be mean’. It must be grand and elevated with familiar and current words. ‘Rare’
and ‘unfamiliar’ words must be set in wisely to impart elevation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle stresses four essential qualities for
characterization. First, the characters must be good, but not perfect. Wicked
characters may be introduced if required by the plot. Secondly, they must be
appropriate. They must have the traits of the profession or class to which they
belong. Thirdly, they must have likeness. By likeness he means that the
characters must be life-like. Fourthly, they must have consistency in development.
There should be no sudden and strange change in character. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle lays down that an ideal tragic hero
should not be perfectly good or utterly bad. He is a man of ordinary weakness
and virtues, like us, leaning more to the side of good than of evil, occupying
a position of eminence, and falling into ruin from that eminence, not because
of any deliberate sin, but because of some error of judgment of his part,
bringing about a Catharsis of the emotion of pity and fear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The plot should arouse the emotions of pity and
fear which is the function of tragedy. A tragic plot must avoid showing (a) a
perfectly good man passing from happiness to misery (b) a bad man rising from
misery to happiness (c) an extremely bad man falling from happiness to misery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">While comparing the importance of Plot and
Character, Aristotle is quite definite that Plot is more important than
Character. He goes to the extent of saying that there can be a tragedy without
character but none without plot. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle emphasizes only one of the three unities,
the Unity of Action; he is against plurality of action as it weakens the tragic
effect. There might be numerous incidents but they must be related with each
other, and they must all be conducive to one effect. As regards the Unity of
Time, Aristotle only once mentions it in relation to dramatic Action. Comparing
the epic and the Tragedy, he writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Tragedy tries, as far as possible, to live within
a single revolution of the sun, or only slightly to exceed it, whereas the epic
observes no limits in its time of action.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">According to Aristotle, the end of poetry is to
give pleasure, and tragedy has its own pleasure beside. Proper aesthetic
pleasure can be possible only when the requirements of morality are satisfied.
Verse and rhyme enhance the pleasure of poetry. Peripeteia and Anagnorisis
heighten the seductive power of the action. Pure pleasure results from the
exercise of our emotions and thoughts on the tragic action. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Such are the main features of Aristotle's theory of
Tragedy. Aristotle knew only Greek Tragedy. His conclusions are based entirely
on the drama with which he was familiar and often his views are not of
universal application. His view might have been challenged but their history is
the history of Tragedy.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-45345911443946783082015-12-06T16:36:00.003+05:002015-12-06T16:36:41.868+05:00 Aristotle's plot<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle devotes great attention to the nature,
structure and basic elements of the ideal tragic plot. Tragedy is the depiction
of action consisting of incidents and events. Plot is the arrangement of these
incident and events. It contains the kernel of the action. Aristotle says that
plot is the first principle, the soul of tragedy. He lists six formative
elements of a tragedy – Plot, character, thought, melody, diction, spectacle
and gives the first place to plot. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The Greek word for ‘poet’ means a ‘maker’, and the
poet is a ‘maker’, not because he makes verses but he makes plots. Aristotle
differentiates between ‘story’ and ‘plot’. The poet need not make his story.
Stories from history, mythology, or legend are to be preferred, for they are
familiar and understandable. Having chosen or invented the story, it must be
put to artistic selection and order. The incidents chosen must be ‘serious’,
and not ‘trivial’, as tragedy is an imitation of a serious action that arouse
pity and fear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle says that the tragic plot must be a
complete whole. It must have a beginning, a middle and an end. It must have a
beginning, i.e. it must not flow out of some prior situation. The beginning
must be clear and intelligible. It must not provoke to ask ‘why’ and ‘how’. A
middle is consequent upon a situation gone before. The middle is followed
logically by the end. And end is consequent upon a given situation, but is not
followed by any further incident. Thus artistic wholeness implies logical
link-up of the various incidents, events and situations that form the plot. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The plot must have a certain magnitude or ‘length’.
‘Magnitude’ here means ‘size’. It should be neither too small nor too large. It
should be long enough to allow the process of change from happiness to misery
but not too long to be forgotten before the end. If it is too small, its
different parts will not be clearly distinguishable from each other. Magnitude
also implies order and proportion and they depend upon the magnitude. The
different parts must be properly related to each other and to the whole. Thus
magnitude implies that the plot must have order, logic symmetry and
perspicuity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle considers the tragic plot to be an
organic whole, and also having organic unity in its action. An action is a change
from happiness to misery or vice versa and tragedy must depict one such action.
The incidents impart variety and unity results by arranging the incidents so
that they all tend to the same catastrophe. There might be episodes for they
impart variety and lengthen the plot but they must be properly combined with
the main action following each other inevitably. It must not be possible to
remove or to invert them without injuring the plot. Otherwise, episodic plots
are the worst of all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">'Organic unity' cannot be provided only by the
presence of the tragic hero, for many incidents in hero’s life cannot be
brought into relation with the rest. So there should be proper shifting and
ordering of material. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle joins organic unity of plot with
probability and necessity. The plot is not tied to what has actually happened
but it deals with what may probably or necessarily happen. Probability and
necessity imply that there should be no unrelated events and incidents. Words
and actions must be in character. Thus probability and necessity imply unity
and order and are vital for artistic unity and wholeness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">'Probability' implies that the tragic action must
be convincing. If the poet deals with something improbable, he must make it
convincing and credible. He dramatist must procure, “willing suspension of
disbelief”. Thus a convincing impossibility is to be preferred to an
unconvincing possibility.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Aristotle rules out plurality of action. He
emphasizes the Unity of Action but has little to say about the Unity of Time
and the Unity of Place. About the Unity of Time he merely says that tragedy
should confine itself to a single revolution of the sun. As regards the Unity
of Place, Aristotle said that epic can narrate a number of actions going on all
together in different parts, while in a drama simultaneous actions cannot be
represented, for the stage is one part and not several parts or places. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Tragedy is an imitation of a ‘serious action’ which
arouses pity and fear. ‘Serious’ means important, weighty. The plot of a
tragedy essentially deals with great moral issues. Tragedy is a tale of
suffering with an unhappy ending. This means that the plot of a tragedy must be
a fatal one. Aristotle rules out fortunate plots for tragedy, for such plot
does not arouse tragic emotions. A tragic plot must show the hero passing from
happiness to misery and not from misery to happiness. The suffering of the hero
may be caused by an enemy or a stranger but it would be most piteous when it is
by chance caused by friends and relatives who are his well-wishers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">According to Aristotle, Tragic plots may be of
three kinds, (a) Simple, (b) Complex and (c) Plots based on or depicting
incidents of suffering. A Simple plot is without any Peripety and Anagnorisis
but the action moves forward uniformly without any violent or sudden change.
Aristotle prefers Complex plots. It must have Peripeteia, i.e. “reversal of
intention” and Anagnorisis, i.e. “recognition of truth”. While Peripeteia is
ignorance of truth, Anagnorisis is the insight of truth forced upon the hero by
some signs or chance or by the logic events. In ideal plot Anagnorisis follows
or coincides with Peripeteia. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">'Recognition' in the sense is closely akin to
reversal. Recognition and reversal can be caused by separate incidents. Often
it is difficult to separate the two. Complex plots are the best, for
recognition and reversal add the element of surprise and “the pitiable and
fearful incidents are made more so by the shock of surprise”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">As regards the third kind of plot, Aristotle rates
it very low. It derives its effect from the depiction of torture, murder,
maiming, death etc. and tragic effect must be created naturally and not with
artificial and theatrical aids. Such plots indicate a deficiency in the art of
the poet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In making plots, the poets should make their
denouements, effective and successful. Unraveling of the plot should be done
naturally and logically, and not by arbitrary devices, like chance or
supernatural devices. Aristotle does not consider Poetic Justice necessary for
Tragedy. He rules out plots with a double end i.e. plots in which there is
happiness for one, and misery for others. Such plots weaken the tragic effect.
It is more proper to Comedy. Thus Aristotle is against Tragi-comedy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<br /></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-25490306586048789172015-12-06T16:34:00.002+05:002015-12-06T16:34:26.154+05:00 Swift's "Gulliver's Travels": A social satire<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Gulliver’s Travels” is a great work of social
satire. Swift’s age was an age of smug complacency. Corruption was rampant and
the people were still satisfied. Thus, Jonathan Swift tears the veil of smug
complacency off which had blinded the people to realities. In “Gulliver’s
Travels”, there is a satire on politics, human physiognomy, intellect, manners
and morality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the first voyage to Lilliput, Swift satirizes on
politics and political tactics practiced in England through Lilliputians, the
dwarfs of six inches height. He satirizes the manner in which political offices
were awarded by English King in his time. Flimnap, the Treasurer, represents
Sir Robert Walpole who was the Prime Minister of England. Dancing on tight ropes
symbolizes Walpole's skill in parliamentary tactics and political intrigues.
The ancient temple, in which Gulliver is housed in Lilliput, refers to
Westminster Hall in which Charles I was condemned to death. The three fine silk
threads awarded as prizes to the winners refer to the various distinctions
conferred by English King to his favourites. The Lilliputians were highly
superstitious:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“They bury their dead with their head directly
downwards because they hold an opinion that after eleven thousand moons they
are all to rise again.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Gulliver’s account of the annoyance of the Empress
of Lilliput on extinguishing fire in her apartment is Swift’s satirical way of
describing Queen Anne’s annoyance with him on writing “A Tale of a Tub”.
Swift’s satire becomes amusing when Gulliver speaks of the conflict between the
Big Endians and the Little Endians. In this account Swift is ridiculing the
conflicts between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants. High Heel and Low
Heel represent Whig and Tory – two political parties in England.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the second voyage to Brobdingnag, there is a
general satire on human body, human talents and human limitations. Gulliver
gives us his reaction to the coarseness and ugliness of human body. When
Gulliver gives an account, to the King of Brobdingnag, of the life in his own
country, the trade, the wars, the conflicts in religion, the political parties,
the king remarks that the history of Gulliver's country seems to be a series of
conspiracies, rebellions, murders, revolutions and banishments etc. Kind
condemns the fatal use of gunpowder and the books written on the act of
governing. King mocks at the human race of which Gulliver is the agent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The most pernicious race of little odious vermin
that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Swift here ridicules human pride and pretension.
The sight is, indeed, horrible and disgusting. Among the beggars is a woman
with a cancer in her breast. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less
than sixteen in circumference … spots and pimples that nothing could appear
more nauseous.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">There is a man with a huge tumor in his neck;
another beggar has wooden legs. But the most hateful sight is that of the lice
crawling on their clothes. This description reinforces Swift views of the
ugliness and foulness of the human body.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the third voyage to Laputa, there is a satire on
human intellect, human mind and on science, philosophy and mathematics.
However, his satire is not very bitter. We are greatly amused by the useless experiments
and researches, which are going on at the academy of Projectors in Lugado. Here
scientists wants to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers, to convert human
excrement into its original food, to build house from the roof downward to the
foundation, to obtain silk from cobwebs and to produce books on various
subjects by the use of machine without having to exert one’s brain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Their heads were inclined either to the right or
to the left, one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to Zenith.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Swift amuses us by making a fun of the people whose
sole interests are music and geometry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“They made a lot of theories but practically nill.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Swift here ridicules scientists, academics,
planers, intellectual, in fact, all people who proceed, only according to
theory which are useless when they come to actual practice. He satirizes
historian and literary critics though Gulliver’s interviews with the ghosts of
famous dead. The point f satire is that historian often distorts facts and
literary critics often misinterpret great authors like Homer and Aristotle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the fourth voyage to Houyhnhnms, there is a
bitter poignant satire on human moral shortcomings. Voyage contains some of the
most corrosive and offensive satire on mankind. The description of the Yahoos
given to us by Gulliver is regrettable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Yet I confess I never say any sensitive being so
detestable on all accounts; and the more I came near them, the more hateful
they grew.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">By contrast, the Houyhnhnms are noble and
benevolent horses who are governed by reason and lead an ordered life. It is,
indeed, a bitter criticism on the human race to be compared by the Houyhnhnms.
The satire deepens when Gulliver gives an account, to the master Houyhnhnms, of
the events in his country. He tells him that war in European countries was
sometimes due to the ambition of kings and sometimes due to the corruption of
the ministers. He speaks of the numerous deadly weapons, employed by European
nations for destructive purposes. Many people in his country ruin themselves by
drinking, gambling and debauchery and many are guilty of murders, theft,
robbery, forgery and rape. The master speaks of the Yahoo’s love of shinning
stones, their gluttony and their weakness for liquor. The master also speaks of
the lascivious behaviour of the female Yahoos. By contrast, the Houyhnhnms are
excellent beings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Here was neither physician to destroy my body not
lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions … here
were no … backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, house-breakers … politicians,
wits … murderers, robbers … no cheating shop-keeper or mechanics, no pride,
vanity or affectation.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">They hold meetings at which the difficulties of
their population are discussed and solved. They regulate their population and
do not indulge in sexual intercourse merely for pleasure. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Everything is calculated as the Plato’s Utopian
land ‘The Republican’.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Swift’s purpose here is to attribute to horses
certain qualities which would normally be expected in human beings but which
are actually lacking in them. Gulliver’s reaction o Houyhnhnms fills him so
much admiration for them and with so much hatred and disgust for human beings
that he has no desire even to return to his family.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Thus we see that “Gulliver’s Travels” is a great
piece of art containing social satire in it. Every satirist is at heart a
reformist. Swift, also, wants to reform the society by pinpointing the vices
and shortcoming in it. And he very successfully satirizes on political tactics,
physical awkwardness, intellectual fallacies and moral shortcomings.</span></div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-55730595234007467252015-12-06T16:31:00.004+05:002015-12-06T16:32:08.855+05:00 Francis Bacon: Wisest, Brightest, Meanest<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“If parts allure these think how Bacon shin’d<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The wisest, brightest and meanest of mankind.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon was the wisest because of his worldly wisdom, he was brightest
owing to his powerful intellect and the art of writing terse essays, and he was
meanest due to his treacherous character.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The above mentioned remark on Bacon was made by a renowned and
marvelous poet, “Alexander Pope”. If we observe critically, this statement
holds its validity. For Bacon appeared to be a true child of Renaissance. Undoubtedly
he was a man of wisdom and powerful intellect. But all at once he was a
calculating character, keeping an eye on the main chance. He was a true
follower of Machiavelli. He failed to harmonize his mixed motives, complex
principles and high aims together. He wanted to strive after the selfless
scientific truth but he was conscious that nothing could be done without money
and power. So, he strived after material success. Bacon belonged to the age of
glory and greatness, surprising meanness and dishonest conduct and he could not
avoid these evils.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon was a man of multi-talents. His wisdom was undeniable. The thirst
for infinite knowledge and his versatility was truly astonishing. He possessed
an intellect of the highest order. He was learned in Greek, French, Latin,
English, Science, Philosophy, Classics and many other fields of knowledge. He
is regarded as the creator of the modern school of experimental research. He
held that “man is the servant and interpreter of nature”. He supplied the impulse
which broke with the medieval preconceptions and set scientific inquiry on
modern lines. He emphasized on experimentation and not to accept things for
granted. Bacon was indeed an eloquent prophet of new era and the pioneer of
modern sciences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The essays of Bacon also portray his intellect and practical wisdom.
The varied range of subjects too expresses that ‘he had taken all knowledge to
be his province’. Bacon could utter weighty and pregnant remarks on almost any
subject, from “Greatness of Kingdoms” to “Gardens”. The essays are loaded with
the ripest wisdom of experience and observation conveyed through short, compact
and terse sentences. One cannot deny the sagacity and shrewdness of his
counsels. Bacon’s essays deal with man. He is an able analyst of human nature,
and his conduct in public and private affairs. His comments regarding man’s
behaviour may at times sound cynical but they are undeniable truths. He says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A mixture of a lie doth even add pleasure.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon is true here for most of the people would find life terrible
without false hopes and false impressions. His views about friendship, though
lacks in feelings and emotions, yet these are undeniably true to human nature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Following are a few examples of his wisdom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“One who studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">And<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Men in great places are thrice servants”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">So, like a very wise man he coin ideas and teaches them to make people
wise in worldly terms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacons brightness is best illustrated in the way in which he clothes
his wisdom into brevity and lends the readers a great pleasure. The compactness
of thought and conciseness of expression was a virtue in an age when looseness
in thought and language was the rule. The essays are enriched with maxims and
proverbs. He supports his ideas and arguments with innumerable quotations,
allusions and analogies which prove his wide knowledge and learning. The
aptness of the similes, the witty turn of phrases and the compact expression of
weighty thoughts are evidence enough of the brightness of his intellect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">§ “Suspicions among thoughts are like bats among birds.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">§ “Money is like much, except it be spread.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">§ “Virtue is like precious adours --- most fragrant, when they are
incensed or crushed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Moreover, the precise and authentic turn of sentences and the
condensation of thoughts in them have been enhanced by the antithetical
presentation. Such as:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A lie faces God and shrinks from man.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The ways to enrich are many and most of them are foul.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Through indignation, men rise to dignity.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Thus with the tool of antithesis, Bacon made his argument many times
stronger and influential than a simple sentence. He created so much wit and
strength in such precise writings that they are still valid and famous. No man
individually did provide such strength and simplicity to the English language
than Bacon. Bacon tried to reach the reader’s mind by a series of aphoristic
attacks. Therefore he is considered as the pioneer of modern prose. There is
hardly any equal of him for clear, terse and compact writing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Now, it appears to be an irony of nature that a man with such a
tremendous intellect and wisdom had such a mean character. Bacon was not mean in
the sense of being a miser. He was indeed reputed to be a very generous. The
manner in which Bacon betrayed his friends, especially Essex, proved him most
ungrateful and ignoble man. He made friendship and uprightness subordinate to
his success. He always kept his eye on the main chance, worshipping the rising
sun and avoiding of the setting one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">His marriage was also a marriage of convenience. He did not hesitate to
take part in political intrigues in order to promote his ambition. His letter
to the king and queen were also full of flattery that it was hard to believe
that they came from the pen of such an intellectual man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Though he was wise yet he showed certain incapacity of emotions and
this trait can also be witnessed in his essays. He took the purely personal and
domestic matters of a man – like marriage, friendship, love etc in terms of
pure utility. Such as:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">And<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Those that want friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their
own heart.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In short, Bacon was a man of the world – worldly wisdom and worldly
convenience. He had a “great brain” but not a “great soul”. His complex and
contradictory characters will continue to be a psychological enigma for the
readers to understand. So, he was definitely the wisest, brightest and meanest
of mankind.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Adminhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11998048511541029873noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8097525244619290990.post-7555959808217290542015-12-06T16:23:00.000+05:002015-12-06T16:28:22.056+05:00 Francis Bacon: Worldly Wisdom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon was, definitely, a worldly wise man. He was the wisest and the
meanest of mankind. He was truly of Renaissance; the age of accumulating knowledge,
wealth and power. Being a true follower of Machiavellian principles, he led his
life for worldly success. He was a man of shrewd and sagacious intellect with
his eyes fixed on the main chance. And what he preached in his essays was also
the knowledge, needed for worldly success.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">There is no doubt that Bacon’s essays are a treasure house of worldly
wisdom. The term worldly wisdom means a wisdom which is necessary for worldly
success. It does not need any deep philosophy or any ideal morality. But Bacon
was a man of high wisdom, as he himself pronounced, “I have taken all knowledge
to be my province”. Bacon also preached morality but his morality is
subordinate to worldly success and he never hesitated to sacrifice it for
worldly benefit. His essays are rich with the art which a man should employ for
achieving success in his life, such as shrewdness, sagacity, tact, foresight,
judgment of character and so on. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The subject of Bacon in his essays is the man who needs prosperity in
worldly terms. Bacon’s essays bring men to ‘come home to men’s business and
bosoms’. He teaches them, how to exercise one’s authority and much more. When
he condemns cunning, it is not because of a hateful and vile thing, but because
it is unwise. That is why the wisdom in his essay is considered a ‘cynical’
kind of wisdom. He describes his essays as ‘Counsels – civil and moral’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In his essay “Of Truth”, Bacon appreciates truth and wishes people to
speak the truth. He says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A lie faces God and shrinks from man.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">He warns human beings against the punishment for the liar on the
doomsday. But at the same time, he considers a lie as an ‘alloy’ which
increases the strength of gold and feels it necessary for the survival on
earth. He says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“A lie doth ever add pleasure.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">---this is purely a statement of a “worldly wise man”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The essay “Of Great Places” though contains a large number of moral
precepts yet in this very same essay he also preaches worldly success.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; By pains
men come to greater pains”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Then Bacon suggests that men in authority should work not only for the
betterment of public but also for their own status:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“All rising to great place is by a winding stair; and if there be
factions, it is good to side a man’s self whilst he is rising and to behave
himself when he is placed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It is purely a utilitarian advice and it surely holds a compromise
between morality and worldly success. Even when Bacon urges a man not to speak
ill of his predecessor, it is not because of high morality but because of the
fact that the man who does not follow advice would suffer with unpleasant
consequences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon’s approach towards studies is also purely utilitarian. In his
essay “Of Studies”, he does not emphasize on study for its own sake, but for
the benefit which it can provide to man to be supplemented by practical
experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an
exact man.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">And then he says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to
be chewed and digested.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon also points out the effects of different branches of studies on
a man’s mind and thinks it helpful in the cure of different mental ailments and
follies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">His essay “Of Suitors” totally reveals Bacon’s shrewd insight.
Although he suggests that a suitor should not be disloyal towards his petition
and should tell him the truth about the chances of winning the suit without
leaving him wandering in false hopes. Bacon suggests that a patron should not
charge extensive amounts for a small case. But then he dilutes all this by
saying if the patron wants to support the non-deserving party, he should make a
compromise between both of them, so that the deserving party would bear not
great loss. This is a purely utilitarian approach and it shows what Bacon
himself had been in his career, for it was his own profession.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In the essay “Of Revenge” Bacon shows a certain high morality by
saying that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Revenge is a kind of wild justice; One who studieth revenge, keeps
his own wounds green.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">He feels dignity in forgiving ones enemy. But then he says that even
revenge is just in the cases when one can save one’s skin from the hands of
law.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon showed a certain incapacity for emotions. He took the relation
of friendship for its benefit and made a purely worldly approach to the subject
which intimately deals between two persons. He gave us the uses and abused of
friendship. He says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Those that want friends to open themselves unto, are cannibals of
their own hearts.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This essay clearly shows Bacon’s cynical wisdom and that his morality
is stuffed with purely utilitarian considerations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Bacon considers love as a ‘child of folly’. In his essay “Of Love” he
says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is impossible to love and to be wise.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">He considers wife and children as hindrance in the way of success and
progress. He says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Afterwards in his essay “Of Marriage and Single Life” he tells the
‘benefits’ of a wife. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Wives are young men’s mistresses, companion to middle age and old
man’s nurse.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In his essay “Of Parents and Children” Bacon puts:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Children sweeten labour, but they make misfortune more bitter.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;">All these statements show his essentially mean and benefit seeking
attitude, even in the matters of heart. In short, Bacon’s essays are a “hand
book” of practical wisdom enriched with maxims which are very helpful for
worldly wisdom and success.</span></div>
</div>
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