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ISC Class XII Notes 2020 : Elective English

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Edited in Mayank Raj PC Bavarian Gentians The poem is a symbolism of death for the poet and is represented by Bavarian gentians, dark blue flowers. Throughout the poem, various imageries are included to describe the symbolism and depth of the poem s sense. Written in wonderful allegorical reference, this is the supreme of Laurence s work. The first two lines express the poet s insistence on telling his readers that not everyone has gentian in their house. Gentians are small dark blue flowers. The poet also relates it to Soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas . Michaelmas is a festival celebrated in September. It is said that Michael and all other angels feast on this day. The poet expresses the thought as gloomy and sad. Now the poet describes the Bavarian gentians as big and dark and then focuses on the dark by saying big and dark, only dark darkening the daytime torch-like meaning that they are contributing and pioneers of darkness bringing darkness during the day. He then compares this darkness to Pluto s gloom. Pluto is the king of the underworld. The flowers have changed to big dark flowers filled with darkness and have become the torches of the underworld ruled by Pluto. Here the poet uses a different approach he tells us that the flames are blue like the colour of the flower and they cover all the light and darkness with their darkening blueness which has become the light of the underworld. He then describes the underworld as filled with blueness. From Pluto s dark blue gaze to lamps burning dark blue to blue darkness. Thus the blue colour of the gentians is given a much higher and deeper meaning in relation to the darkness. The poet also refers to Demeter s pale lamps .Demeter is the goddess of harvest and agriculture. The poet then asks the blue darkness or rather to the gentians to lead him to the underworld. Here the poet changes his tone from the last line of the previous stanza and says Reach me a gentian, give me a torch . He wants to be handed a gentian so that he can have the torch and thus guide himself using the blue flames or light from the torch formed by the flower as he descends slowly down the stairs into the dark underworld. Here the poet again refers to the blueness which has darkened the blue light given by the flower. Now the poet refers to Persephone the wife of Pluto whom he abducted and married. She stays on earth for six months and then returns to underworld during September. The poet again describes hell as the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark . Here even Persephone is not visible. But the imagery here becomes sexual as it is suggested that she is enfolded in the deep dark Plutonic arms filled with dense passion. In the last lines, the poet continues gives us the dark blue image even when describing the couple. He considers them as lost or rather forgotten as their tale is old and reside so deep beneath amidst the blueness. Edited in Mayank Raj PC The central theme of this poem deals with Bavarian gentians and their deep blue colour. The poem also showcases themes of darkness, longing, searching. The poem repeatedly refers to the blue colour of the gentians and compares them to the darkness. It even goes as far as to suggest these flowers to be torched in the underworld. Using strong allusions to Greek mythology of Pluto and Persephone the themes of death, male sexual dominance and perversion are shown as Pluto abducts Persephone and marries her. This poem was written at a time when he found out that he had TB and he was going to die. We find the poets desire to be led by someone to the underworld rather than walking in alone. He calls on to the Bavarian gentians. He sees them as torches throwing blue flames and covering every thing with their darkening blueness. He wants this darkness to lead him to the underworld where he sees these flowers to be covering the entire underworld with their blueness. The poet also brings out the theme of male sexual dominance, perversion through the use of allusions of Pluto and Persephone. The poem also brings out the gloom of September calling it to be sad as Persephone as returned to the underworld leaving the world infertile and dull. We can see the poets close interaction with the theme of death. This is because he himself was experiencing something similar. The poem thus in itself is a realization of darkness in human motivation. The Setting of Bavarian Gentians: The setting of the poem is late September as Michaelmas is celebrated on 29th September. It starts on earth with poet talking about Bavarian gentians and then takes a darker turn towards underworld. Where the poet asks the gentians to lead him to the underworld. The rest of the poem is set in the underworld as it covers the journey of the poet as he descends into the darker, deeper regions of the underworld. At last lines, the poem describes the place where the lost bride and groom i.e.Pluto and Persephone lives. The Tone of Bavarian Gentians: The tone s melancholic in nature. The flowers are symbolism of death and the theme of male domination and perversion is also prevalent. This focuses on the darkness of human mind and thus reflects on the pathos. Overall, the tone is sad and melancholic. Conclusion: Edited in Mayank Raj PC The poem uses wonderful imageries, great references to bring out the theme of death. The flower is a symbolism. This poem is having learnt imageries, conceits and ideas and thus is an epitome of wonderful and great content worth the reader s interest. Edited in Mayank Raj PC As I Walked Out One Evening As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden is a brilliant composition that portrays the strength of time, asks questions regarding the words of adoration spoken without an ounce of reality to them and expresses the poet s view of the importance of appreciating every minute of life. The poem commences with a first person account of an evening walk, but even in the first stanza Auden begins foreshadowing events later in the poem. The phrase The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat serves two purposes. The first is that it hints at human mortality. Comparing the crowd to a harvest conjures images of reaping, and this fits well with our idea of Death as a character, often portrayed as carrying a scythe. There is also the suggestion that people are no more important than harvest wheat , and their death is of no more consequence, although Auden does not clarify the metaphor any further. The second purpose of these lines is that they strike a balance between the urban pavement and the rural fields , and indeed this is a poem of balance. Optimism and pessimism. Life and death. Auden begins the contradictions subtly, building up to the stream of paradoxes in the second half of the poem and the ultimate irresolvable conflict between love and Time. The second stanza introduces the lover a stranger to the narrator and a vessel for all the positivity in the poem. It is perhaps significant that the narrator cannot provide this positivity himself. The emphatic opening line of the song Love has no ending is in itself something the reader might want to believe, but it becomes more difficult to take seriously as the song continues and the lover s claims get more outrageous; I ll love you / Till China and Africa meet, /And the river jumps over the mountain / And the salmon sing in the street , till the ocean / Is folded and hung up to dry / And the seven stars go squawking / Like Geese about the sky . The hyperbole throws into doubt the enduring nature of love, and considering what follows we might see the lover as na ve. The heightened language here is balanced by the harsh realism to come, and eventually mirrored in Auden s fantastical land of the dead . With the end of the lovers song comes the end of the poem s optimistic half, and the original statement about enduring Time is challenged by all the clocks in the city chiming out the reminder You cannot conquer Time . This is the antithesis of the lover s optimism and what follows is a list of cases where Time has the upper hand. Auden begins by describing the burrows of the Nightmare / Where Justice naked is this image is particularly unsettling because we like to imagine Justice personified as a composed and upright woman, but to imagine her as naked almost connotes violation and certainly vulnerability. While this happens, Time ominously watches from the shadow / And coughs when you would kiss . These lines are a reminder of mortality and the inevitability of Edited in Mayank Raj PC wastage and illness. As is the case in If I Could Tell You , Time is portrayed as a superior onlooker. The sinister passage of Time continues as Vaguely life leaks away and threaded dances and brilliant bow[s] are broken. Every line is rife with pessimism and Auden s wording brilliantly connotes the misery of aging. We then reach an interesting stanza where the clocks chiming becomes an instruction; plunge your hands in water, / Plunge them in up to the wrist . This has been the topic of much debate, but could be a reference to suicide. It would not be surprising, considering the tone of the poem thus far and the fact that suicide is the only sure way to avoid the slow and painful degradation that has been described (Auden himself considered suicide as a right of choice for anyone who, certain of defeat, wished to end their game with life . If it is indeed suicide that is being discussed, then to wonder what you ve missed would likely be a person, in their dying moments, wondering what life would have held for them had they decided to continue. Alternatively, this stanza could simply be capturing a mundane moment where a person washes their hands and is suddenly overcome with a feeling of insignificance, and wonder[s] about the many things that they will not have Time for in their short life. The following stanza contains natural scenes on a gigantic scale and simple domestic images juxtaposed with them The glacier knocks in the cupboard , for example. This bizarre idea is only an introduction to what is to come. The surreal and disturbing lines The crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead are themselves a lane that the reader follows into the land of the dead that is described in the following three stanzas. Auden s underworld is full of unsettling and uncomfortable paradoxes, Where the beggars raffle the banknotes and children s stores are twisted so that the Giant is enchanting to Jack (suggesting sexual appeal) and Jill goes down on her back , which again seems sexual and suggests promiscuity. Amid these dark and disturbing images comes another reminder that Life remains a blessing that we are powerless to bless ourselves with. In other words, life and death are beyond our control and the land of the dead is our final destination, no matter how distress[ing] we might find this. Again the chiming instructs us You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart . This is a paradox because we would think a crooked neighbour could not be loved while a crooked heart cannot harbour love. It could be that Auden is suggesting that only a crooked heart could love a crooked neighbour , and this seems to expose a lack of faith in humanity. The frustration and confusion of this idea might be the cause of the tears that scald and start and which are anticipated by the chimes. The final stanza finally moves back to the narrator s voice rather than the chiming of the clocks. We are told that it is now late, late in the evening and that the lovers were Edited in Mayank Raj PC gone . This implies that a significant amount of Time has passed since the start of the poem, and we can easily imagine the narrator standing on the riverbank, absorbed in these thoughts about life and death even after the clocks had ceased their chiming , in much the same way that this poem stays with the reader. The last line is incredibly poignant, as the narrator notes The deep river ran on , despite the lack of chiming clocks. Time continues whether or not we count it. The river imagery is a common way to express the passage of Time simply because it is inevitable and by describing it as deep Auden reminds us for a final time that it is ultimately incomprehensible. It is down to the reader to decide whether it is more disturbing to contemplate the same issues that the narrator does, or to understand that the dark response of the clocks is the narrator s own interpretation of the otherwise innocent sound. In either case, this poem is an evocative examination of a basic human fear, brilliantly structured for maximum emotional impact. Edited in Mayank Raj PC As the Team s Head Brass is an account by Edward Thomas of the effects of war on the simple routine of everyday lives. Comment 20 Edward Thomas s wrote his poetry before he embarked for the Front in late January 1917. As opposed to the recording of the horrors of war from first-hand experience, Thomas writes of the effects of the First World War upon those whose routines at home continued away from the heat of actual battle. As the Team s Head Brass was written on May 27, 1916, an account of what Thomas saw of the countryside that he so loved walking in. The ominous shadow of war is brought out through the description of its disruptive impact on the peaceful lives in the English countryside. On the persuasion of good friend Robert Frost, Thomas began writing poetry later on in his literary career that began with prose writing primarily to earn income. His frustration at being no better than a hack and his temperament made him susceptible to melancholy, depression and even suicidal thoughts, much to his wife Helen s fear. When the war began, he was still recording every moment and observation in note books for prose pieces, some of which he re-wrote as poems. Having enlisted with the Artists Rifles in July 1915 Thomas was based at High Beech in Essex before being moved to Hare Hall camp where he acted as a map-reading instructor. As the Team s Head Brass was composed a few weeks before he applied for a commission in the Royal Artillery at a stage in decision-making about war. Acceptance into it would lead him to France in the early months of the following year and his death in April 1917 in the Battle of Arras. He wrote to Helen that he set out from Hare Hall camp on a long walk and sat down at an inn and in fields, passed the same pair of lovers three or four times, and wrote some lines them and re-wrote them. He composed this poem using enjambment and iambic pentameter, echoing the rhythmic movement of the plough across the field of charlock, interspersing the dialogue between the ploughman and the poetsoldier. This dialogue, deceptively casual, conveys Edward Thomas s reflections on the war and his love for his native countryside. When asked why he had enlisted, it is said he picked up a pinch of earth and said, Literally, for this. The jagged line turns themselves indicate the intrusion of the war into the pastoral. Instead of ignoring the newcomer settled on the branch of a fallen elm, the farmer would lean across the handle and talk to him as the plough turned at the end. It began as a desultory conversation about the weather, and then moved on to the war. The ploughman informed the poet that the elm on whose boughs he sat perched had been felled by a blizzard. When asked when it would be taken away, he replied, When the war s over. The conversation thus veered to the war. Talk would last a minute and have an interval of ten as the plough went across and returned to this end of the field. The interested question Have you been out? was followed by a comment on the soldier perhaps not wanting to go. The poet replied he would not mind if he returned: he would not mind losing an arm, would hate to lose a leg and, in a show of dry humour, said if he lost his head, he should want nothing more . The talk then shifted to the losses, that area of the country having lost a good few men, including the ploughman s mate who died on his second day in France. There is a tone of wistfulness as the ploughman said the tree would have been moved had his mate been there. Then, they discussed how things would have been different and the opportunity for the soldier to sit there would not have been there: Everything Would have been different. For it would have been Another world. The suggestion that it might have been a better world is quickly dispensed with. At that moment the lovers who had disappeared into the woods earlier emerged, and the poem ends on the note of continuity as the ploughman and his stumbling team return to their task. While there is no direct reference to the brutality of war, the violence is brought out in the farmer s revelation that his area has lost many men, including the mate who died soon after he joined the Edited in Mayank Raj PC fighting in France. War is indifferent and futile and it leaves a void, which is apparent, since Only two teams work on the farm this year and the elm has been left there for there is no one to help remove it. Thomas uses his love for and observation of nature to show how the peaceful life of the English countryside has been disrupted by the war in Europe. The elm, itself a symbol of destruction and tellingly felled by a blizzard , signifying the tumult and storm of killing miles away, still lies there serving as a reminder of the harsh truth. Thomas steers clear of denouncing the war-torn world and does not develop the idea of the world being better without it, possibly because it may be seen as a blasphemy against the scheme of an all-powerful Creator. Hence, though If we could see all all might seem good. Without there being a judgement on good or bad, the notion of the world being different is clear. The poem does not end on the desultoriness with which it begins. The fresh clods of earth turned up by the plough, the act of ploughing itself and the young lovers who emerge from the woods just as the discussion has turned to the world being affected by war all signify hope of a new life and beginning, regeneration and strength to survive the threat to the life as known till then. Analyse W.H. Auden s The Unknown Citizen as a socio-political statement. In a mild satirical tone, Auden is critiquing the state s determination to define the meaning of a citizen s life in just a few facts collected by technology. He is suggesting that much more important information about a human life is left uncollected and, therefore, unconsidered by the state and society. The result of this accumulation of facts is an incomplete picture. These statistics do not get to the essence of the man. That there was a time when individuals were known by their names rather than by their social security numbers seems almost incomprehensible. Neither Auden nor the reader has any sense of who this modern man is. He is truly unknown to both poet and reader. Auden wrote this twenty-nine line poem about the nameless, middle-class man in the middle of the twentieth century.. The poem is a dark satire about what can possibly happen if political and bureaucratic principles corrode the creative and revolutionary spirit of the individual. The poem was also titled after tombs of the unknown soldiers , tombs that were used to represent soldiers who were impossible to identify since the end of World War I. Auden wrote the poem shortly after becoming a citizen of the United States. He came to the U. S. to escape what he thought was the repressive nature of Britain. Before arriving in the States, Auden left his hometown of Britain for the country Berlin. He said that it was there that he first experienced the social and political problems that later became a centre-piece for the majority of the themes of his poetry. After staying in Berlin, he temporarily moved to Spain where he had a job broadcasting propaganda. This experience made him feel even more morally ambiguous regarding his typically far-left viewpoints. His background suggests that he provides the character of the Unknown Citizen as a symbol for many of the people who mythically come to America to be free, but are later surprised when they learn that capitalism and bureaucracy have been ineffective systems that enslaved people in greater ways than the dominance of the status quo might affect issues related to human independence. The Unknown Citizen is given a reference to be identified by in the beginning epigram of the poem, but the point of reference is not a human name but a number. The epigram reads, To JS/07/M/378, this Marble Monument is erected by the State. This is a striking metaphor for the individual being reduced down to a number. Upon the first read it is difficult to realise the absolute significance of that combination of letters and numbers. There s not even a point of reference about whom that identification number belongs to. However, on closer readings it becomes evident that in this instance the number is part of a slight rhyming scheme that gracefully sets up the rhythm and meter that follows throughout the stanza that encompasses the majority of the poem. The only part of the poem that deviates from that one stanza is the question that concludes the poem. In this sense the poem reads almost like an obituary, especially with its downto- Edited in Mayank Raj PC earth and conversational rhythm and rhyming scheme. The protagonist is represented as being a very dull and pitiful person. He s portrayed as someone who doesn t take risks such as disobedience or holding his own opinions. Auden writes in one line that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way . Also the main character has served in a recent war from around the time that the poem is set in, but ends up making ends meet by being employed at an automotive factory. The factory is called Fudge Motors, Inc. in the poem. The pun on the brand name of a car factory shows even more of Auden s attitudes towards capitalism, its treatment of the downtrodden blue-collar worker, and capitalism s reduction of the working-class into nullified labourers with less capability for having attitudes or opinions of their own. The poem says, He held the proper opinions for the time of year. He also is compared to the modern man in that he has a phonograph, a car, a radio, and a Frigidaire just like many other people around him do, but he does not have much of any possessions to call his own. As was the norm at the time, he was aware of the Instalment Plan . He was no burden on the social security system, since his insurance was paid and his health card revealed that he was hospitalised once and he left cured . He complied with the Eugenist ideal of adding five children to the population. He did not interfere with their education, accepting whatever was provided by the system . The main character of the poem appears to be trying his best to conform. It appears as if the main character of the poem actually is not happy. He spends his entire life trying to find approval but he doesn t look inward to himself for his own opinions and solutions. The biting question at the end that the poet asks: Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. The poet s tone is satiric and ironic, as he paints a picture of a non-descript, unintelligible member of a legion of such conformists. This is Auden s comment on the Capitalist society that he found in America. Edited in Mayank Raj PC One of the surprises of the play is that Krogstad is not really the central antagonist. Trace how this transition occurs. [20] Although on the diabolic side, Nils Krogstad from A Doll s House does not have the same passion for evil expected of a central antagonist. He seems ruthless at first, but experiences a change of heart early on in Act Three. At first it may seem that Krogstad is the play s main antagonist. Nora Helmer is a happy wife. She s been out Christmas shopping for her lovely children. Her husband is just about to receive a raise and a promotion. Then the audience learns that Krogstad, a lawyer who attended school with Torvald and a co-worker, has the power to blackmail Nora. She forged the signature of her dead father when she obtained a loan from him, unbeknownst to her husband. Now, Krogstad wants to secure his position at the bank. If Nora fails to prevent Krogstad from being dismissed, he will reveal her criminal actions and desecrate Torvald s good name. When Nora is unable to persuade her husband, Krogstad grows angry and impatient. Throughout the first two acts, Krogstad serves as a catalyst, initiating the action of the play. He sparks the flames of conflict, and with each unpleasant visit to the Helmer residence, Nora s troubles escalate. In fact, she even contemplates suicide as a means of escaping her woes. Krogstad senses her plan and counters it: Krogstad: So if you are thinking of trying any desperate measures if you happen to be thinking of running away or anything worse . So you haven t the courage either, eh? It would also be very stupid. Krogstad, shares a great deal with Nora Helmer: both have committed the crime of forgery. Moreover, their motives were out of a desperate desire to save their loved ones. Also like Nora, Krogstad has contemplated ending his life to eliminate his troubles, but was ultimately too scared to follow through. Despite being labelled as corrupt and morally sick, Krogstad has been trying to lead a legitimate life. He complains, For the last eighteen months I ve gone straight; all the time it s been hard going. I was content to work my way up, step by step. Then he angrily explains to Nora, Don t forget: it s him who is forcing me off the straight and narrow again, your own husband! That s something I ll never forgive him for. Although at times Krogstad is vicious, his motivation is for his motherless children, thus casting a slightly sympathetic light on his otherwise cruel character. He says, Even money-lenders backs, well, a man like me, can have a little or what you call feeling Krogstad has his motives, the main being concern that his children are saved from hardship that comes with losing a job and reputation. He has suffered social stigma for a relatively minor crime, and was abandoned by the woman he loved. Sympathy for him comes when he is shown as wronged and a victim of circumstances. Near the beginning of Act Three, Krogstad has an earnest conversation with his lost love, the widow Mrs. Linde. They reconcile, and once their romance is reignited, Krogstad no longer wants to deal with blackmail and extortion. He asks Mrs.Linde if he should tear up the revealing letter that was intended for Torvald s eyes. Surprisingly, Mrs.Linde decides that he should leave it in the mailbox so that Nora and Torvald can finally have an honest discussion about things. He agrees to this, but minutes later he chooses to drop off a second letter explaining that their secret is safe and that the IOU is theirs to dispose. Krogstad occasionally lets his compassion shine through his bitterness. Playwright Henrik Ibsen provides enough hints in the first two acts to convince us that all Krogstad really needed was someone like Mrs. Linde to love and admire him for him to change from the position of an adversary or hostility. Edited in Mayank Raj PC Narrate the confrontation of Mrs. Linde and Krogstad in Act III of the play. What, in your opinion, is the significance of this confrontation in the play? [20] It is the night of the party and dance music can be heard from upstairs. Nora and Torvald are at the party and Mrs Linde sits alone in their apartment, waiting for someone. Krogstad arrives; it is he whom she was expecting. He reproaches Mrs. Linde for jilting him, but she says she had no choice; she had family to support and he was poor. She tells him that only today did she discover that it is his job that she is due to take. He asks her if she will give it back to him, but she says this would not benefit him. She needs someone to look after, and suggests that they get back together. He cannot believe that she can overlook his past life, but she has faith in his essential goodness and believes his previous claim that he would be a better man if he were with her. He is delighted. He realises that she knows what steps he has taken with the Helmers, and suggests that he ask for his letter back. But Mrs. Linde insists that Torvald must know Nora s unhappy secret. They must give up concealment and grow to a full understanding. Krogstad leaves. Mrs. Linde is overjoyed that at last she will have someone to care for. Torvald enters, dragging Nora in with him. Mrs. Linde is a foil (contrast) to Nora in that her route to self-fulfilment is the reverse of Nora s. Nora chooses to leave her family, but Mrs. Linde, who has led just such an independent life as the one Nora is embarking upon, decides to give it up to look after the man she loves and his children. Some critics have commented that Mrs. Linde s decision undermines Nora s and implies that Nora will come to regret her course of action. However, Ibsen does not suggest that Nora s action in leaving her family is the only route for a woman to find her true identity. The important thing is that Nora, having lived in a sham marriage, makes a conscious choice of independence, and that Mrs. Linde, having once given up the man she loved to support her relations, makes a conscious choice to look after him. Both are being true to themselves after a period of denying their true natures. In terms of the plot, Krogstad mellows and shows a noble side to his nature so it appears Nora will be saved. However, the decision to let the truth be revealed, leads to the clash between Torvald and Nora, Nora s realisation of Torvald s hypocrisy and hollow vows, and her decision to leave him. Candidates can present any reasonable opinion on significance in terms of plot, character and theme but it must emerge from confrontation. Write short notes on the symbolism of: [20] (a) The Christmas tree (b) The Tarantella (a) The Christmas tree The Christmas Tree, a festive object meant to serve a decorative purpose. It symbolises Nora s position in her household as a plaything who is pleasing to look at. It adds charm to the home. Parallels can be drawn between Nora and the Christmas tree in the play: Just as Nora instructs the maid that the children cannot see the tree until it has been decorated, she tells Torvald that no one can see her in her dress until the evening of the dance. In the beginning of the second act, after Nora s psychological condition has begun to erode, the stage directions indicate that the Christmas tree is correspondingly dishevelled. In Norway, Christmas is an important family celebration, but the focus of the festivities and the opening of presents occur on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day is something of an anti-climax. Edited in Mayank Raj PC At the beginning of the play on Christmas Eve, Nora still believes her marriage to be happy. We see her ordering the Christmas tree to be brought in and insisting that it is hidden until she has decorated it. Symbolically, this alerts us to the fact that there are hidden aspects to life in this household, that a carefully created appearance is what matters, and that Nora is the keeper of appearances. Significantly, when she is trying to wheedle Torvald into keeping Krogstad in his job, she draws his attention to how pretty the flowers on the tree look. By Christmas Day, the tree is stripped of its ornaments and its candles have burnt out (a link with the symbol of light). By this point, Torvald has refused to keep Krogstad in his job and Nora feels sure that Krogstad will reveal all to him. The carefully maintained appearance of the happy marriage is disintegrating under the encroachment of truth. (b) The Tarantella: The Tarantella was a wild southern Italian dance, generally danced by a couple or line of couples. The dance was named after the tarantula spider, whose poisonous bite was mistakenly believed to cause tarantism , an uncontrollable urge for wild dancing. The cure prescribed by doctors was for the sufferer to dance to exhaustion. Modern psychologists speculate that the true cause of the disorder, which achieved its highest profile in the nineteenth century and which involved symptoms of what would not be called hysteria, was not the spider s bite but the repressed morals of that age. The only outlet for passionate self-expression, they reason, was the Tarantella. In this light, it is significant that Torvald tells Nora to practice the Tarantella while he shuts himself away in his office: I shall hear nothing; you can make as much noise as you please . While Torvald is ostensibly being indulgent towards his wife, the image of her practising this passionate dance alone and unheard emphasizes her isolation within her marriage. She persuades him to watch her practise the dance in order to prevent him opening Krogstad s letter. He tries to rein in her wildness with his instructions, but she ignores his comments and dances ever more wildly, her hair coming loose. The mythology of tarantism suggests that she is dancing in order to rid herself of a deadly poison. Depending on how we wish to interpret this symbolism, the poison may be the threat posed by Krogstad s revelations, or the poison of deception and hypocrisy that characterizes the Helmer marriage. Edited in Mayank Raj PC THE THOUGHT FOX Analyse The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes as a poetic account of the act of writing poetry and seeking inspiration. 20 The Thought Fox is a frequently anthologised poem from Ted Hughes first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). The poem is set in the late hours of the night, partly in a room in which the speaker is staring hopelessly at a blank sheet of paper before him, and partly in the snowy woods outside as a fox emerges from the trees. The atmosphere is one of desperation, as the speaker longs to concretise an idea in his mind and capture it on paper, and of an almost eerie presence of a creature outside, a creature that is a mix of violent ferocity and delicate grace. The poem is short and crisp, consisting of six stanzas (quatrains), consisting of varying lengths of lines and no uniform rhyme pattern, although rhyme, eye rhyme and half rhyme is carefully placed at points (darkness / loneliness, snow / now). The movement of the lines and enjambment are intrinsic to the images created, conveying the quick movement or drawing it out. Images are visual, tactile and climax in brilliantly enthralling the sense of smell, sometimes emerging through alliteration and repetition. A hauntingly descriptive poem, it functions at a literal level of vivifying a creature gracefully yet ferociously emerging in the night and moving towards its lair, as well as at a symbolic level of an idea taking shape in the artist s mind and emerging in its forefront with a quick violent movement. The opening stanza paints of a picture of the silence of the night broken by the sound of the clock ticking that accentuates the loneliness . The page before the speaker is blank; he can sense the presence of a creature in the dark forest outside. The alliteration midnight moment s hints at the symbolism that is to follow the imagination senses something else is moving and the dark forest of the moment is to take on a wider connotation. The speaker searches for ideas, the star symbolising inspiration. The repetition of loneliness heightens the solitude, even as he senses something moving out of the darkness. The alliteration brings out how that something is deeper within the darkness and yet closer than the star. The slow line and the simile of the third stanza echo the slow movement of the fox as its cold wet nose first emerges cautiously, the touch of the nose keenly felt as it touches the twig and leaf as delicately as the dark snow . The darting eyes and the repeated and now similarly mirrors the quicker movement of the searching eyes. Edited in Mayank Raj PC Enjambment follows this repetition and the animal now walks slowly out of the protective cover of the trees, its neat prints in the snow visible as it stumbles in the layer of snow, a shadow approaching a stump. The image is sharp, as bold as the animal that decides to emerge into the clearing. Yet another enjambment as the animal dares to come out and the poem moves into the fifth stanza that paints a vivid image of the creature s widening green eyes Brilliantly, concentratedly looks around, taking in the surroundings before moving ahead. It is probably so close that the pair of eyes is now seen as a single eye. The last stanza begins with a Till that comes almost as a shock. The sudden sharp hot stink of fox is virtually a physical sensation, the line, its quickness and sound effective in communicating the rapid dashing thrust of the fox as it enters its den the dark hole of the head . By the end of the poem, although the silence punctuated by the clock remains and there is still no star outside, the page is no longer blank but printed . The poem is a rich description of a fox as it moves out of a clump of trees in a forest into the clearing and rapidly into the fox hole. The fox is more than a fox it is a symbol of a faint idea stirring in the deep recesses of a writer s imagination, the forest , its presence sensed yet the concrete though tantalising and out of reach. Just as the fox is cautious and delicate at first, the idea then is weak and tentative. It is first shadowy, just as the fox is first a shadow walking unsteadily in the snow. The progress of the fox is that deep hidden inspiration evolving into a thought that the writer finally can grasp and put down on paper, as it comes out from the darker recesses of the mind into the forefront. The suddenness and unexpectedness with which it does so leaves one gasping. The inspiration is within the artist or the writer, although he seeks in vain for it outside as he notes the starless sky. It is for him to coax the formless stirring into concrete thought. The fox is brought alive at a literal and a figurative level so keenly that Ted Hughes himself observed in Poetry in the Making, that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them. The beauty of the poem is that the metaphor can be extended beyond a writer s imagination to the sublimity of any creative process. Poetic or any other creation involves discomfort, unease, sensation, wariness emerging into bold rush and flow. The symbolic element in the poem makes the fox almost mythical, and indeed Hughes animal poems have been read as both narratives for children as well as mythmaking compositions for those who wish to see more into them. PIANO Give a critical analysis of the poem Piano by D.H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence s Piano shows a man experiencing nostalgia as he listens to a woman singing which reminds him of his childhood. The poem starts with the man hearing the soft singing of a woman which takes him on a mental journey down memory lane and he sees visions of his childhood flashing in front of him. The memory he focuses on is that of a small child who is sitting beneath a grand piano as his mother plays it, taking his mother s elegant feet into his small hands and listening to the loud chords of music. The man is reluctant to remember those days and be affected by them, but the song which the woman is singing seems to have a slow subtle impact on him and despite his hesitance he gives in to his emotions and yearns for the days of childhood: the cold Sunday evenings in winter when it used to snow outside and they, mother and son used to sit in the warm comfortable indoors and sing Edited in Mayank Raj PC melodious hymns with the help of the piano. The man who was listening to the lady singing now thinks that it would be useless for her to continue as he is already so affected by his memories that he is just physically present, his mind elsewhere. Without any thought of his adulthood, he bursts into tears remembering the blissful ignorance and innocence of his infant years. He starts weeping, thus bridging the gap between his past and his present. Lawrence uses words in such an intricate manner throughout the poem that they end up creating vivid and delightful imagery. By using the word vista he propels the images of the reader s own childhood in front of his eyes so that one experiences the same thing that man experienced. These images take him back down into the memories of his childhood. Onomatopoeia used in describing the boom of the tingling strings of the piano indicates that the man in the poem is none other but Lawrence himself, as the tiny detail that the piano would sound loud to a small child and consequently would be described as booming when later remembered even as an adult is so simply portrayed and thus removes all doubts that Lawrence is writing from personal experience. Further, the man remembers that his mother s feet were poised betraying the respect and awe a little child has for its parents. Even at that tender age, the child identifies dignified elegance with his other. The words in spite of myself and the alliteration betrays me back show the immense struggle that the man goes through with his own warring desires. The need to remain solidly footed in his adulthood and the yearning to give that up for the innocence and joys of childhood tear him apart and he goes against his own desires by giving in to the latter. Again, the words used are so simple yet effective in describing the evenings spent by the fire that they paint a vivid image in the readers mind: one of comfort, warmth and unlimited acceptance. This scene casts a melancholy shadow over the poem of bygone happy memories. This poem achieves that delicate balance between being clich , sentimental and being full of selfpity; and expressing empathy. This is done because though the overview of the poem is simple and direct, there are some strong words which are sprinkled throughout with such apt accuracy that they intensify the powerful feelings that a man experiences when he is torn between his past and present lives. The title of the poem, Piano suits as music is proven to be the strongest trigger of memories. Also it implies that playing the piano, and subsequently music, played a large role in the man s life: his mother used to play and sing hymns on the piano in his childhood, and even as an adult he finds the time to escape the responsibilities for a few hours by attending musical concerts as the woman singing and playing the piano could be seen as such. The piano was their guide in his childhood, and it still continues to show him the way through life. Nostalgia is the central idea behind the poem, but one would not be wrong to say that it also throws light on the pains of growing up. The man in the poem has travelled the road of life and has reached his adulthood, a phase of life which is associated with freedom of will and power of right. But he still contemplates giving all that up; his heart weeps to belong and his manhood is cast down a flood of remembrance as the glamor of childish days overcomes him emotionally. He throws away the confines of his manhood , breaking the unspoken rule that men aren t supposed to show emotions by crying for his childhood. The metaphor creates an image of a deluge of emotions. The idea of manhood being cast down leads to Lawrence s central concern that social conditioning was distancing man from his natural impulses and instincts. He loathed the imposition of norms that supressed man s innate nature. Thus, is Piano another one of Lawrence s masterpieces, as he once again portrays the complex workings and dealings of the human heart in such a refined, elegant yet simple manner that he pulls at all the right heartstrings and one finds oneself tearing up while remembering one s own childhood days. The poem is short and concentrated, rising to the crescendo of feeling like the woman at the piano. Edited in Mayank Raj PC WILD OATS Critically examine the poem Wild Oats by Philip Larkin. The title 'Wild Oats' comes from a common euphemism for sex: "sow your wild oats". It was an encouragement for men to sleep around prior to getting married whilst women were told to remain chaste. This is ironic in that Larkin details only a rather mild flirtation instead of any promiscuity. Larkin s poem is based upon the only woman Larkin came close to marriage with: his first girlfriend Ruth Bowman. She had a friend called Jane, who is the model for the bosomy English rose , while sixteen-year-old Ruth was her friend in specs I could talk to . Two stereotypical images of women appear in the poem- the "bosomy English rose" and "her friend in specs". Larkin reduces the women to stereotypes and objectifies them. Whilst the "English rose" (based on Jane Exall) was exceedingly pretty, pale and what would be thought to be typically more attractive, the friend (Ruth Bowman) is described in an unflattering manner. However, the friend is easier to "talk to" and makes Larkin more comfortable while the symbolic "rose" represents unattainable beauty and sexuality and for this reason, Larkin started a relationship with the attainable friend instead-ironic. This raises the debate of love versus lust as it appears that the feelings faces "sparked" were based entirely on appearance and Larkin seems to aim for women above his level. Over time, Larkin's relationship with the friend progresses but is cut off when he is given back the "tenguinea ring", suggesting a broken engagement. The relationship also seems distant and Larkin cannot help but think of the two times he met "beautiful". These meetings are particularly memorable for Larkin and most likely allude to the lunch dates Larkin shared with Jane in Leicester and Shrewsbury. However, his uncertainly and low self-confidence are displayed when he believes that both times she was trying "not to laugh". He cannot help but think that a woman like her will be mocking him. Either way, it is clear to see why the "seven" year engagement between Larkin and Ruth Bowman ended if Larkin was so distracted by communicating with Jane. In the end, an "agreement" is reached, suggesting a mutual business contract and alluding to the idea that there were no feelings present in the relationship, only lust. Larkin acknowledges that he does not have the right character traits for the relationship and is "selfish, withdrawn, and easily bored". The colloquial language used throughout the poem and the flippant tone highlight that Larkin was dismissive of his relationship with Ruth. He merely states that it was "useful to get that learnt" and to move on with his life, implying that the relationship was just an education-purely learning, not feeling. Even though the poem is a reflection on the past, Larkin still has "two snaps" of Jane in his wallet which are described as "unlucky charms". This sarcastic and trivial end note reaches the conclusion that the persona is still single because he kept the photos and it could be argued that this is a portrayal of the fact that nothing will ever match up to Larkin's high standards of the "English rose"-the unrealised fantasy outlives the real affair. Yet, the light-hearted conclusion is discredited by the last word "perhaps", implying that there is a darker, more serious reason for Larkin's lonely existence. The poem ends, like so many others, on a miserable and depressing note and suggests that love can never match its expectations. Imagery appears in Wild Oats when describing the women as a "rose" as roses are often viewed as fragile but beautiful and sensual also. Larkin uses very little rhyme in the poem (e.g. "out" and "doubt) and few poetic techniques so as to create a personal and intimate conversational piece. Enjambment also appears to show the rush of feelings when describing Jane Exall. The persona in the poem is assumed to be Larkin himself. He is narrating an incident from his life. In this poem, Larkin appears to feel inferior and unconfident of himself from the start. Many critics also say that Edited in Mayank Raj PC Larkin reveals himself as a misogynist in the poem Wild Oats, as he writes about women as things to desire. As much as he tries (initially, at least) to resist the beautiful "bosomy rose," he cannot, as in her, he sees an object that will satisfy his needs, as well as an object that is gratifying to look at. Larkin concludes that the photographs of the beautiful woman in his wallet may be "Unlucky charms," as they constantly reminded him that he would succumb to the beauty of the woman, and not be rebellious in this aspect, try as he may. The photographs are also unlucky because he knows that the woman is unattainable to him, yet he continues to relentlessly pursue her and think about her. Herealizes that the photographs serve him no purpose but to remind him of his shortcomings, which is why they are unlucky. The last word of the poem ("perhaps") leaves the reader with an uncertain feel. It implies that Larkin is unsure about his feelings and about the effect that the beautiful woman has on him. We can therefore conclude that the poem Wild Oats is one about social norms and propaganda, and how Larkin is constantly trying to rebel against them, yet he finds this quite hard. He uses an example of having to choose between two women; one very beautiful, and one less beautiful, and how (once he has made his decision of romancing the less beautiful one), he is unable to resist the more beautiful woman. This symbolizes Larkin's struggles with resisting the tendency to conform to society's guidelines and expectations, and exposes Larkin for the slightly insecure and unconfident person he is. Refugee Blues Analyse W.H. Auden s Refugee Blues as a touching account of a social and political problem from his times, which is as relevant today This is a poem about the plight of a specific group of refugees displaced and arriving in a country that is generally hostile to their situation, even if well-meaning. Auden focuses on the German Jews arriving in the US at that time, though the poem has taken in a timeless quality due to the commonality of its subject. Indeed, it is not until stanza 8 that Auden identifies his refugees. Possibly he is trying to show the reluctance of the persecuted to identify themselves for fear of further persecution, possibly he is allowing the narrator to present the key ideas of his poem without the idea of Jewishness in some way getting the way of a universal message. He has chosen the title Refugee Blues to link to the protest and subculture of the enslaved Blacks, who developed this musical formin the Southern USA, and has written a poem in which the rhythm and rhyme scheme (AAB) reflects the musical style. This is another way of linking the fate of the Jews with a more universal theme of suffering. The Blues of this title is a pun referring to the musical form and despondency. There is a wide range of powerful imagery used to build up the overall picture. In the opening line, the choice of the word souls is important since it not only suggests a religious or sacred connotation, but also serves to remove barriers between peoples all are souls whether in mansions or holes . Auden points out the artificial nature of human segregation here. He refers to a Yew tree in stanza 3, but also setting up, by means of the reference to the Spring blossoms, an idea of hope for the future which must be allowed to permeate this poem, negative though it is. The tree is carried into the reference in the next line to old passports which suggests that hope may not actually exist for all the people of the world. Auden uses pathetic fallacy in stanzas in stanzas 7 and Edited in Mayank Raj PC 10 with great effect. Hitler s speeches are metaphorically linked with thunder and therefore with threat and destructive power and in the final stanza the snow serves to provide chill and a bleaching of emotion to accompany the remarkable prediction of the events in Russia some years later. In a huge population of ten million souls of varying wealth and status, the refugees have no peace neither mansion nor hold. The social and political element comes through i8n Once we had a country and the detachment eternally and in tone of it now being just in an atlas, denied to them. Yew trees can blossom but their passports cannot be renewed and without passports even the consul of a friendly country considers them officially dead , bureaucracy denying their physical state of being alive. The committee for them is polite but overrun and cannot help refugees soon. An insecure host society is worried about jobs and daily bread being taken away. The fear of persecution back home, symbolised by the thunder of Hitler in Europe, keeps them here. Poodles and cats get more warmth and welcome than the German Jews. Fish in the harbour, a mere ten feet away , swim freely and birds are at ease, chirping away. Auden here passes a critical comment on politicians and the human race : animals are both better and better off than humans. Refugees yearn for a home but cannot get one not a single space or corner is theirs while hostile soldiers back home are searching for them. This poem from Another Time (1940) brings out the tragic predicament of German Jews being forced to escape their homes as Hitler rose to power and finding no comfort in countries in which they sought refuge. The repeated my dear is sad and helpless as well as a jibe at human compassion. The Signpost Edward Thomas explores a number of related themes in The Signpost. Discuss these in the light of your understanding of the poem. The Signpost (7 December 1914): Frost's Road Not Taken a parody of Thomas and his hesitant personality in Gloucestershire in 1914, Frost and Thomas would take long walks after choosing a path, Thomas would regret the choice and sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a 'better' path in Frost's poem sigh is an ironical implication that no real difference is at stake. Edward Thomas s poem The Signpost explores a number of related themes, including those of life and death, youth and age, and decision and indecision. The poem opens by describing a wintry seascape, thereby establishing the idea of the passage of time. Seascapes represent spring or summer, not winter, but this poem reminds us that even the sea and beaches are overcome by the kind of death associated with winter. Choice of literal path and moral path (choice between enlisting and going to America) excessive deliberation or retrospection echo of folk-tales in which travellers fatefully choose road, the poem gives Thomas's poetic journey in after himself an archetypal starting point hint at personal tumult and clinical depression that he suffered from [Explanation of poem must cover scene, description, signpost, two voices, hint of troubled years, heaven, return to point flawed heaven no decision] Scene: wintry, dull sea is dim chill weeds frost on grass long grass, rough tuft of traveller s joy over hawthorn berry and hazel at the hilltop, a finger-post as the dialogue progresses, a hazel leaf drops down the setting enhances the mood of the poem I read the sign. Which way shall I go? Edited in Mayank Raj PC The voices one reminds poet he would not have hesitated at the younger age of twenty a second voice sparks off the dialogue scornfully reminds him that at twenty he wished he had never been born the first voice wishes to know what it would be like to be sixty and faced with the same choice the second voice is amused, bitterly poet joins the laughter The message conveyed is whatever happens or befalls the inevitability is the mouthful of earth to end a life that may be full of regrets or aspirations the end of life may itself be marked by regrets and aspirations as if in judgement one may wish for heaven and indeed attain it but there is a possibility that it is not as expected there may be a flaw in that heaven At that point, the person may wish to retrace steps to the point when the choice had to be made indecisiveness out of the fear of what might be or there may have been a better choice, and such regret and wishes could afflict anyone rich or poor, at any age between death and birth , at any time or season and at any place on land or in the sea the difficulty of making choice is true for all. The poem ends with a note of anguish as the poet s inner voice brings out the agonising over a choice and not arriving at one till that point the image of someone standing at that signpost and Wondering where he shall journey, O where? In his diary Thomas wrote life without death, decay, weariness or regret cannot be easily imagined by earthly men, and that perfect happiness even if possible would be dull it would be refused by many because it wipes out the desire and conscious memory of the earth - he often referred to Wordsworth's belief that the world or the earth is where we find our happiness or not at all lines 2129 indicate homesickness for earth - by the end, in coming to a full circle, the poem confirms a preference for earthly doubts over heavenly answers - a use of narrative and of different voices which releases the imagination and leads towards a dialogue of different parts of the self. Church Going In the poem Church Going, Philip Larkin has raised pertinent questions regarding the relevance of the church in our lives. Express what the poet has said from your understanding of the poem. The speaker of the poem sneaks into a church after making sure it s empty. The narrator is both clumsy and ignorant. In this stanza, the narrator talks about the present state of the church. Given that the narrator is an agnostic, he makes sure that no one is around before he enters the church; he wants to be able to explore the mysticism of the church by himself. He lets the door thud shut behind him and glances around at all the fancy decorations, showing his ignorance of or indifference to how sacred all this stuff is supposed to be. The narrator sounds bored when he utters: another church, he seems to be uninterested in the church, but if that s that case then why did he stop at the church to begin with? After a short pause, he walks up to the altar and reads a few lines from the notes that are sitting on a lectern. After this, he walks back out of the church and slides an Irish sixpence into the collection box which is basically like donating an old shirt button. The speaker thinks that the place wasn t worth stopping to see, but he also admits that he did stop, and that this isn t the first time he s done so. He cannot help but wonder what he is looking for when he keeps coming back to this place, and also asks himself about what will happen to churches when there are no believers left in the world. He wonders if they will make museums out of the churches, or if they will just Edited in Mayank Raj PC leave the buildings doors open so that sheep can graze rent free . He wonders about disbelief taking the place of belief superstitions and the occult with women of ill-repute coming there to seek cures and stones, so people being advised to wait there for a dead loved one. The speaker asks what will happen to the world when religion is gone altogether. Then he wonders what the very last religious person will be like. It could be a crew of archaeologists or a ruin-bibber even one nostalgic for incense and myth as a Christmas-addict, who arrives there knowing what the original building and purpose, now obscure , was or it could be one like the speaker, someone who is bored and ignorant about the church. The church becomes more and more unrecognizable each week as the trees and plants overtake the structure. He ponders who will be the very last person to seek out the church for its original purpose. Finally, the speaker just comes out and admits that he s pleased by the church because it is a serious place for serious questions. Humanity, he concludes, will always have a hunger to ask this. The theme of Philip Larkin s poem Church Going is the erosion of religions abutments. Despite being an agnostic and deliberately avoiding church rituals, Larkin or the persona that speaks arrives at a conclusion about the value of the church in its sacramental function. it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation marriage, and birth And death, . So, while he was indifferent, even irreverent, earlier, it now pleases him to stand in silence there, where all our compulsions meet and are robed as destinies . In an age where going to church was reducing in importance, as were religious ceremonies of birth, death and marriage, Larkin concludes this role of the church will never be obsolete . Ambivalent, he ends on a note of proper acknowledgement of the church, where his argument ends in a contrasting tone to how it began. Discuss the major themes of Ted Hughes poetry, drawing upon Pike and Crow Tyrannosaurus as examples. The major themes of Ted Hughes poetry, drawing upon Pike and Crow Tyrannosaurus: The major theme of Hughes poetry is of course man, that is, the question of human existence, man s relation with the universe, with the natural world and with his own inner self. His subjects range from animals, landscapes, war; the problem posed by the inner world of modern man, to the philosophical and metaphysical queries about the status of man in this universe. His moods and methods of presentation reveal a similar variety. Pike and Crow Tyrannosaurus, however, refer particularly to instinct, brutality and violence in nature and how man is a part of this cycle of killing. Both poems adhere to his belief in the secret of writing poetry successfully to imagine what you are writing about. See it and love it Poems such as Pike evoke creatures with sensuous immediacy. Hughes is interested in the struggle for survival. The creatures in Pike and Crow Tyrannosaurus are predators and deaths are violent. Those who survive do so by virtue of their single-mindedness. Crow Tyrannosaurus suggests this equally the case with human beings. The two poems present a disturbing vision of existence. Hughes appears to glorify the strength and determination of the survivor rather than show pity for the prey. Edited in Mayank Raj PC Pike (Lupercal, 1959) is a powerful poem divided into three parts depicting the beauty and destructiveness of the Pike, brought out through alliteration and monosyllabic opening lines. Words have been chosen carefully: the pike is perfect , stunned by their own grandeur but it is submarine delicacy and horror that is described. Pike are killers from the egg with malevolent aged grin signifying primeval savage instinct. The three inch pike are A hundred feet long in their world , green tigering the gold . Magnificent but ferocious predators swim about in the emerald, gloomy shadows of the pond. Pike in captivity are equally brutal. Theirs is A life subdued to its instrument even in a glass tank. Suddenly three become two, and then one its belly sagging and its natural grim now triumphant indeed they spare nobody , not even their own kind. The image of one jammed in the other s gullet, the eyes filmed with death convey the concern of brutality that is natural. The final image is a mysterious and terrifying vision of an unknown, stalking force rising from stilled legendary depth . The pond, the scene, is ancient, almost mythical, as is the hypnotic fear of a large unknown monster waiting to attack. The poet is frozen in terror. Apart from the fear, the attack and the preying, this image also counts on the conventional symbolism of fishing to capture the creative act of seeking inspiration. Pike talks about instinctual violence and the human unconscious mind and consciousness. Crow Tyrannosaurus (Life and Songs of The Crow, 1970) is one of a series of poems written to accompany the engravings by American sculpture Leonard Baskin. The poem uses a sustained image of a cortege showing how evolution itself is a funeral procession of the predator killing savagely the prey. This savagery is innate, ancient, automatic and necessary for survival. Crow is conscious of the disguising and terrifying violence of existence, but is inextricably a part of it. The title hints at a primeval carnivore and the age old instinct. The swift s pulsating body is full of insects and their anguish ; the cat s body writhes, Gagging . It is like a tunnel , a darkness engulfing death struggles of all that the cat has eaten, adding sorrow on sorrow . The dog is a bulging filter bag , its own cry a blort of the voices of creatures it swallowed but whose screeching finales it could not digest. Man too is a walking Abattoir , suppressing the outcry of his victims. Crow laments and zealously wants to become the light , the noble, compassionate conscience. However, the moment his eye lights upon a grab, he lashes out. His head is trapsprung it stabs involuntarily. He joins the weeping; but the stabbing does not stop. The weeping and the stabbing are simultaneous despite the intention, the killing is inevitable, involuntary. Thus evolution ensured eyes are blind and ears deaf to cries of pain. Hence, both poems convey themes of violence in nature, the truth even if it is masked by grandeur and beauty. This instinct, which also involves man, goes back down the ages and is something creatures are born with and cannot deny. There is neither condemnation nor praise, just vivid observation and description. Somewhere in this is man s connection with himself and his quest for creative thought from deep within. Edited in Mayank Raj PC CASUALTY Explore Seamus Heaney s attitude towards the fisherman in Casualty. Casualty is an elegy for a fisherman that reflects on the implications of tribal or societal obligations and subsequent political affiliations and questions whether it is worth it to act on a moral imperative. The poem follows the uneventful life of an anonymous and unassuming dole-kept breadwinner who, according to the speaker, frequents two very different kinds of haunts . The fisherman s rightful place is on the water, and yet has his other preferred habitation, the pub. However, nightly drinking will not kill the fisherman in a conventional way, but it will cause the fisherman to patronise a bar in a Unionist neighbourhood because of the Bloody Sunday curfew, and consequently the Catholic fisherman s moral ambiguity will contribute to his death. It is clear that the speaker is an educated man, and while they would sit in the pub, they would talk. The fisherman would cut a plug of chewing tobacco, take a drink and would bring up poetry . The discussion was always politic / And shy of condescension, but the speaker would always somehow turn the talk in a different direction of the lore of the horse and cart / Or the Provisionals . Suddenly the reader learns the fate of this man the speaker so admired; out after curfew that was set for the Irish Catholics. Casualty is divided into three parts, the first two with three stanzas, the last with only two, with the final being a tercet. At first sight the poem s development seems confusing as the narrative shifts back in time once the speaker mentions the death of the fisherman in a bombing at the end of the first section. The rhyme scheme remains relatively uneven at certain points when Henry wants to highlight the significance of the passage. The next two sections shift from the funerals for the Bloody Sunday victims and the fisherman s solitary funeral, to the tranquil scene of the speaker going out to fish instead of being at his friend s funeral. However, the speaker envisions the man coming back from the dead through the light on the indolent waves, and desires for the ghost to ask him again the extent of their duty to their tribe. The title itself represents the anonymity of the subject of the poem, as the speaker describes the personal habits and shortfalls of a man who was not involved politically. And yet the fisherman is a victim of his own habitual need to have a pint in a pub, but only because of Bloody Sunday. The poem takes place in 1972, soon after British paratroopers opened fire on a group of protesters, killing thirteen. The first section leads up to this moment by explaining how the man would coyly order drinks, and the relationship between him and the speaker. The man would drink by himself in a way that earned the respect of the speaker of the poem. The speaker goes so far as to say that he loved his whole manner, / Sure-footed but too sly . The speaker in Casualty ultimately does not even attend his friend s funeral, and yet imagines it while actually on the deceased s boat. He uses fishing diction in order to describe the imagined funeral procession as people shoaling like schools of fish by the hearse. This choice of words is an extension of the many different uses of fishing and water imagery throughout the poem, which is appropriate considering how Heaney ends the elegy by desiring the dead fisherman, the Plodder through midnight rain, / Question me again . Heaney s transition from funeral to fishing boat in the penultimate stanza is fluid because the speaker cinematically shifts from the sound of the hearse s engine Purring to that of a boat. While on the water the speaker states that he teased freedom with him . Edited in Mayank Raj PC As the poem moves through its three sections, the fisherman-friend of the speaker is shown as quiet but with a native intelligence. The poet s vocation is incomprehensible to him, probably what leads to the poet questioning the role of his art in a strife-torn society. When he ponders how far the dead man was culpable by breaking Our tribe s complicity , he visualises his friend asking him to arrive at the answer. The two funerals, one of the thirteen dead and the other of the fisherman, bring out the senseless violence, although Heaney does not make a direct political comment. When he misses the second funeral to go fishing, it is a suggestion of the conventional imagery of seeking inspiration. It is after this that the poet feels equal to answering questions, as he concludes with Question me again . [Key ideas to be mentioned / analysed in context of question the background event, the fisherman s description, the two funerals, the poet in the fisherman s boat, swaddling band , brothers in a ring , culpable , tribe s complicity , right answer , dawn-sniffing revenant ] Edited in Mayank Raj PC The Building The poem, The Building, by Philip Larkin, though at first seems ambiguous; till its end it turns out to be a thought-provoking one. Entitled The Building , the poem does talk about a building, but assuming it as a hospital. While all through the poem, the poet has not used the term hospital , the use of certain words like ominous nurses, patient, death, sickness, illness, ambulances, check-ups, and a few more do let us assume that he is talking about a hospital. However, when we reach at the end of the poem, we find Larkin meditating upon ideas of death, illness, religion and spirituality. Stanza 1 In opening stanza of the poem, which can be read in full here, we find Larkin sarcastically describing the building, and calling it the handsomest hotel. This comparison of the building by poet shows that the building, assumed as hospital, is not only higher but also handsomest in appearance. The use of term handsomest in first verse shows that he is going to define the building in masculine form, but the term building indicates its femininity. Defining the handsomeness of the building, Larkin says that the glass windows are shining as if a lucent comb , but it is enclosed by criss-crossing streets (close-ribbed streets). He says the vehicles arriving at the entrance gate of the building are not taxis rather they are ambulances. The building suggests medical advancement when the poet says: like a great sigh out of the last century , but that sigh could be deceptive as there lingers a frightening smell within. Stanza 2 After describing the building from outside, the poet starts comparing its inner condition to an airport lounge where people can generally be seen reading the paperbacks, drinking tea, ripped mags and sitting tamely, awaiting an arrival. But that arrival isn t as exciting as traveling and flying. The poet also notices that people have come there for check-ups in their outdoor clothes with half-filled shopping-bags , which shows that they are here to do other more important things. However, their faces are still restless and resigned as if they are about to receive a bad news related to their health. The scene becomes more serious when the poet sees nurses coming after every few minutes to fetch someone away . All these activities of the nurses make the people more fidgety and curiously neutral . Stanza 3 Edited in Mayank Raj PC In this part, the poet says that when the people enter this building they not only lose their individualities, but also build up a homogeneous group of patients; some of whom are young, whereas some are old. But they are all faceless numbers, gripped by the fear of sudden abeyance , and have come to this hospitallike-building with the last of hope, and with the end of choice in their lives. Stanza 4 Through this extract, the poet further says that some come to this building to confess that something has gone wrong with their health that is; there might have been some problems in their health. It must be an error of a serious sort . Thereafter the poet brings sudden change in his tone and starts talking about the building. He says that with a view to housing this endless number of humans, there has been an expenditure of much money for the nurturing of this building, and its staffs work here for ungodly hours. But still it is morbid. Stanzas 5-6 Here, the poet finds people looking around at one another, and see them wondering if they will also be wheeled off to the endless rooms, from where it is harder to return from . In fact they are afraid of the dark of hospitals from where some come alive, while some come dead. All the people are held with fear that will suppress all their hopes and will make them quiet. Larkin says the building has so many rooms that it is very hard to guess (not guaranteed) whether one would come safe or not. And no one knows whether, after returning from there, he/she will see them or anyone of them who he had left before getting into the numberless rooms of the building. Comparing this gloomy and serious atmosphere of the building to the outer world, the poet again changes his tone and says that out of this building, there lies normal world, where lie streets, pipes, traffic, freedom, a car park, and children playing their games. On the contrary, the hospital-like-building is as a locked church , which has no hope of divine intervention. This is, in fact, like a prison where prisoners are kept confined until they complete their imprisonment. Similarly, in a hospital, the patients are kept until they have recovered from their health problems. Stanza 7 Here we find the poet saying that the building takes the people off their identity, and clothes them in washed-to-rags ward clothes . The whole world is like a touching dream, an utterly unreal and false illusion towards which we get easily lulled, but wake up separately . The poet, Philip Larkin, says that all its loves and chances are beyond realities. There exits in it conceits and self-protecting ignorance which is engulfed with unrealism and falsehood, and the realities of the death are congealed, and its harsh realities is known when brought in these corridors . Edited in Mayank Raj PC Stanza 8 Larkin further says that some are fortunate enough to escape the death, and come out early from this building, but others may have to join the non-discriminatory unseen congregations whose white rows lie set apart. When the poet says: Each gets up and goes At last, he may mean that one day everybody has to leave this world. The poet, through these lines, gets a little spiritual and religious. But others who are not aware of it may have to join The unseen congregations . Stanza 9 In this concluding stanza, the poet says death is a bitter truth, and we must not be afraid of it. No matter, whether, we offer prayers, flowers, or confess our sins or evil deeds to transcend the thought of dying , all our efforts will go wasteful, weak, propitiatory until God contravenes. However, fear of death makes life much more valuable. In the same ways the nurse instructs and encourages us as a grim reaper, and summons us to die though her intention is never so. She even doesn t offer any hope of faint maternal comfort, but reaches us with frigidity. She is in fact performing her duty. Death is a guarantee. It cannot be placated until the idea of its preventability gets morphed into an acceptance of its inescapability. So, the main purpose of the building is to awaken the realization of a clean sliced cliff whereby we will all be inescapably falling from. Edited in Mayank Raj PC The Building The poem, The Building, by Philip Larkin, though at first seems ambiguous; till its end it turns out to be a thought-provoking one. Entitled The Building , the poem does talk about a building, but assuming it as a hospital. While all through the poem, the poet has not used the term hospital , the use of certain words like ominous nurses, patient, death, sickness, illness, ambulances, check-ups, and a few more do let us assume that he is talking about a hospital. However, when we reach at the end of the poem, we find Larkin meditating upon ideas of death, illness, religion and spirituality. Stanza 1 In opening stanza of the poem, which can be read in full here, we find Larkin sarcastically describing the building, and calling it the handsomest hotel. This comparison of the building by poet shows that the building, assumed as hospital, is not only higher but also handsomest in appearance. The use of term handsomest in first verse shows that he is going to define the building in masculine form, but the term building indicates its femininity. Defining the handsomeness of the building, Larkin says that the glass windows are shining as if a lucent comb , but it is enclosed by criss-crossing streets (close-ribbed streets). He says the vehicles arriving at the entrance gate of the building are not taxis rather they are ambulances. The building suggests medical advancement when the poet says: like a great sigh out of the last century , but that sigh could be deceptive as there lingers a frightening smell within. Stanza 2 After describing the building from outside, the poet starts comparing its inner condition to an airport lounge where people can generally be seen reading the paperbacks, drinking tea, ripped mags and sitting tamely, awaiting an arrival. But that arrival isn t as exciting as traveling and flying. The poet also notices that people have come there for check-ups in their outdoor clothes with half-filled shopping-bags , which shows that they are here to do other more important things. However, their faces are still restless and resigned as if they are about to receive a bad news related to their health. The scene becomes more serious when the poet sees nurses coming after every few minutes to fetch someone away . All these activities of the nurses make the people more fidgety and curiously neutral . Stanza 3 Edited in Mayank Raj PC In this part, the poet says that when the people enter this building they not only lose their individualities, but also build up a homogeneous group of patients; some of whom are young, whereas some are old. But they are all faceless numbers, gripped by the fear of sudden abeyance , and have come to this hospitallike-building with the last of hope, and with the end of choice in their lives. Stanza 4 Through this extract, the poet further says that some come to this building to confess that something has gone wrong with their health that is; there might have been some problems in their health. It must be an error of a serious sort . Thereafter the poet brings sudden change in his tone and starts talking about the building. He says that with a view to housing this endless number of humans, there has been an expenditure of much money for the nurturing of this building, and its staffs work here for ungodly hours. But still it is morbid. Stanzas 5-6 Here, the poet finds people looking around at one another, and see them wondering if they will also be wheeled off to the endless rooms, from where it is harder to return from . In fact they are afraid of the dark of hospitals from where some come alive, while some come dead. All the people are held with fear that will suppress all their hopes and will make them quiet. Larkin says the building has so many rooms that it is very hard to guess (not guaranteed) whether one would come safe or not. And no one knows whether, after returning from there, he/she will see them or anyone of them who he had left before getting into the numberless rooms of the building. Comparing this gloomy and serious atmosphere of the building to the outer world, the poet again changes his tone and says that out of this building, there lies normal world, where lie streets, pipes, traffic, freedom, a car park, and children playing their games. On the contrary, the hospital-like-building is as a locked church , which has no hope of divine intervention. This is, in fact, like a prison where prisoners are kept confined until they complete their imprisonment. Similarly, in a hospital, the patients are kept until they have recovered from their health problems. Stanza 7 Here we find the poet saying that the building takes the people off their identity, and clothes them in washed-to-rags ward clothes . The whole world is like a touching dream, an utterly unreal and false illusion towards which we get easily lulled, but wake up separately . The poet, Philip Larkin, says that all its loves and chances are beyond realities. There exits in it conceits and self-protecting ignorance which is engulfed with unrealism and falsehood, and the realities of the death are congealed, and its harsh realities is known when brought in these corridors . Edited in Mayank Raj PC Stanza 8 Larkin further says that some are fortunate enough to escape the death, and come out early from this building, but others may have to join the non-discriminatory unseen congregations whose white rows lie set apart. When the poet says: Each gets up and goes At last, he may mean that one day everybody has to leave this world. The poet, through these lines, gets a little spiritual and religious. But others who are not aware of it may have to join The unseen congregations . Stanza 9 In this concluding stanza, the poet says death is a bitter truth, and we must not be afraid of it. No matter, whether, we offer prayers, flowers, or confess our sins or evil deeds to transcend the thought of dying , all our efforts will go wasteful, weak, propitiatory until God contravenes. However, fear of death makes life much more valuable. In the same ways the nurse instructs and encourages us as a grim reaper, and summons us to die though her intention is never so. She even doesn t offer any hope of faint maternal comfort, but reaches us with frigidity. She is in fact performing her duty. Death is a guarantee. It cannot be placated until the idea of its preventability gets morphed into an acceptance of its inescapability. So, the main purpose of the building is to awaken the realization of a clean sliced cliff whereby we will all be inescapably falling from. Edited in Mayank Raj PC ST JOSEPH S CONVENT, PATNA,BIHAR ELECTIVE ENGLISH NOTES SUGGESTIONS FOR CANDIDATES The basis of study should be text and classroom discussion rather than watered down essays on the internet Practice in writing answers of different kinds is essential Relevant and accurate quotes are necessary Introduction should be related to the question and should be concise Understanding the focus of the question is imperative careful reading of the question will help Structure and coherence of answers must be paid heed to Grammar, spelling and punctuation rules must be followed Write in paragraphs Use a mix of study tools to gain clarity and structure for analysis (self-study notes under sub-headings, mind maps, flow charts) Mus e des Beaux Arts This fine lyrical poem, Musee des Beaux Arts, is one of Auden's most celebrated short poems. It was first published in 1939, though written by Auden during his winter sojourn in Brussels in 1938. Auden begins the lyric by praising the painters of old, like Brueghel, who understood the nature of suffering and humanity s indifference to it. This fact is well-illustrated by a number of paintings of the famous painter of Flanders. His painting shows that he realized that while individuals suffer, the daily routine of life goes on as usual undisturbed. People eat and drink and enjoy, the dogs continue to live their lives as usual, and children continue to play unconcerned even in the midst of such a great tragedy as the crucifixion of Christ. Some devout, religious minded people may care for Christ, but humanity as a whole is not much interested either in the birth of Christ or his crucifixion. This general indifference is clearly brought out by two paintings of Breughel, one depicting the birth of Christ or his crucifixion. This general indifference is clearly brought out by two paintings of Breughel, one depicting the birth of Christ, and the other his crucifixion. In the later painting as Christ is crucified, the crucifier s horse goes on rubbing his behind against a tree, totally unconcerned with the great tragedy. A third picture of Brueghel entitled Icarus brings out this indifference even more vividly. It shows Icarus falling from the sky into the sea, farmers hearing the great splash, turning to see what the matter was, and then turning once again to their work entirely at ease and undisturbed. The great disaster is also observed by the crew of a ship at sea. They are much amazed to see a boy falling from the sky, and then only two white legs rising out of the sea. This amazement is their only response to the disaster. No effort is made to rescue the fallen boy. The ship sails on unconcerned. The paintings fully bring out the indifference of humanity to individual suffering. It is taken as a matter of routine. This is the moral Auden has been able to draw from the painted scenery. Critics have taken the poem as a satire on the callous indifference to suffering of the modern humanity. However, it should be noted that Auden has universalized the truth by referring to the imagery of Brueghel s paintings. Humanity was indifferent to the suffering of others in ancient times when Icarus fell, it was indifferent at a later date when Christ was crucified, and it is also equally indifferent today. Thus, the imagery of the paintings has been used as, "objective correlative" to universalize the human condition. The poem Musee des Beaux Arts, which means Museum of Fine Arts in French, is a poem W.H. Auden composed after he visited that museum in Paris. The poem is a reflection (meditation) on the old paintings Edited in Mayank Raj PC which depict life s reality strikingly. Auden mentions three of the paintings which show the place of suffering in human life. Disasters, tragedies and sufferings are a part of life; they happen any time. But life has to go on. The poem also indirectly shows human beings' indifference towards their fellow beings. The poem begins and ends with meditation. The description in the middle is also in an ordinary language and rhythm. The poem is symbolic at places. Auden praises the painters, like Brueghel, who understood the nature of suffering and humanity s indifference to it. This fact is well-illustrated by a number of paintings of the famous painter. The paintings fully bring out the indifference of humanity to individual suffering. It is taken as a matter of routine. This is the moral Auden has been able to draw from the painted scenery. Critics have taken the poem as a satire on the soulless indifference to suffering of the modern humanity. However, it should be noted that Auden has universalized the truth by referring to the imagery of Brueghel s paintings. Humanity was indifferent to the suffering of others in ancient times when Icarus fell, it was indifferent at a later date when Christ was crucified and it is also equally indifferent today. This is an irony, but this is also the reality of life. Whether we cry and panic or not, tragedies will happen and life will still have to go on. The tone of the poem is easy and conversational. It is as if the poet were talking aloud to himself, or to some intimate friend. It is not easy to say whether the poet has intended to satirize human beings' indifference towards another. We are sometimes ignorant and blind to others' pain, like the horse. Sometimes we say not fully understand, like the children near the pond. As experienced people, we have learnt to be indifferent like the farmer or the people in the ship. We have lost sympathy and understanding due to habit. We are delicate and vulnerable ourselves like the ship in the sea. But so far as it happens to others, we cast the same look upon everything, like the sun that shines equally upon pain or pleasure. But, this is the reality. Our grumbling will not correct human nature. And at least some amount of this indifference will be necessary for us to bear the sufferings. Without any indifference at all, life would be unbearable. The poem is simple in its language. Its description is the basis for meditation, which is the poem s theme. The speaker tells everything he feels. The language is simple. The tone and tempo (speed) creates the appropriate mood for the serious theme. The poem is unforgettable in its imagery. Mus e des Beaux Arts is written in free verse, meaning that the poem is essentially free of meter, regular rhythm, or a rhyme scheme. The poem is divided into two parts, an octave and a sestet, the octave rhyming abbaabba and the sestet usually rhyming cdecde , free verse employs varying line lengths and an irregular rhyme pattern, often shunning a rhyme scheme altogether. In Auden s lyric, the long irregular lines, subtly enforced by the irregular end rhyme pattern, create a casual, conversational air more prosaic than poetic, and a somewhat blas tone which is reflective of the benign world illustrated in Brueghel s art. The casual, easy going argument the tone suggests is ironic for the topic of discussion, the human position and its seeming indifference to suffering, is anything but light and easy going. The poem 'Musee des Beaux Arts' by W.H. Auden keep his language pretty simple and straightforward and build up a fairly elaborated network of references and allusions to place, people and things behind the scene. In the beginning, there is an allusion of the miraculous birth i.e. the birth of Christ. The wise people are shown waiting for that moment and in the last stanza of the poem, the reference to the myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus is given. Auden s tone in the poem is measured, precise, and matter-of-fact. He does not use superfluous words or stick to traditional rhyme or meter. The poem is not didactic; its moralizing is delicate. The diction is certainly proletarian and accessible: When someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. The reader senses that this is Auden s quiet contemplation of a painting; one can almost see him standing before it, thinking about the nature of suffering amidst those who do not care. Auden elucidates in this poem that suffering occurs everywhere while not always seen, however, Edited in Mayank Raj PC when seen everyone is apathetic. The different pieces in the poem gives a general idea of ignorance, suffering, the idea that people undergo pain and distress. There are various themes present in the poem. The first stanza of the poem shows the theme of ignorance. Auden praises The Old Masters for their knowledge about suffering and human position, and criticizes today s common man as he is ignorant about the suffering and busy in common activities like eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . Further, Auden gives reference of the aged the wise ones who reverently, passionately waited for the arrival of the Christ but on the other hand, today s common man was busy in his illegitimate activities and did not want it to happen . The second major theme, or general message, of this poem is about the nature of human suffering. Auden recognizes that all humans have painful and traumatic experiences that can change the course of their lives, but meanwhile the rest of the world continues on in a mundane way. He is particularly impressed by how artists from past centuries capture this idea in their paintings by showing the activities of people and animals around the margins of the main subject of the paintings as Auden states that the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer s horse/ Scratches its innocent behind on a tree . While a painter might portray a martyr being killed, he also does not forget to show an oblivious dog or horse going on with its life. The last stanza is all about depicting the idea of suffering. In Breughel s Icarus, the ending of the myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus told by Ovid is depicted, in which the two fashion wings for themselves to escape imprisonment, but Icarus flies too close to the sun and the wax on the wings melts, causing him to plunge to his death in the sea. This is the disaster mentioned in the poem. Here, again we see the ignorance of people who Quite leisurely turns away from the disaster . We notice that the ploughman nearby is busy in his work. He may have heard the splash but it was not an important failure . Similarly, the expensive delicate ship must have seen a boy falling from the sky and into the sea with the splash but they had to reach their destination, so they sailed calmly on . Another theme of the poem is the importance of art and how it can reflect life. Auden praises not only the fact that the Old Masters could create paintings that look realistic, but also that they were able to make an important statement about life. The poem shows how valuable fine arts are for a culture. Auden's Mus e de Beaux Arts sets itself up as a perfect example of the types of moral reflection which art can inspire. Edited in Mayank Raj PC The Whitsun Weddings Written in October, 1958, and published as the title poem in Larkin s 1964 volume, the odelike poem The Whitsun Weddings bears formal and thematic resemblances to Church Going but shifts its focus away from the Larkin speaker and toward the collective social event that he witnesses, voyeuristically, while making A slow and stopping curve southwards from Hull to London. The poem is thus only partly about the speaker, whose presumed bachelorhood serves as foil for the dozen wedded couples who, at stop after stop, board the train to journey with him toward their separate and communal destinies. The poem is about the poet's journey to London in a train. The day is a Whitsun Day on which the British Government frees marriage taxes for one day. Therefore the day fascinates people belonging to the lower economic class because they cannot afford the payment of marriage taxes on other days. The poem on the surface level is a description of these experiences of that particular day. In the beginning the poet seems to be showing a kind of hatred for marriage or the newly married couples. Therefore, his description of physical appearances of those couples and their relatives is full of mockery. But towards the end of the poem, the poet realizes the importance of marriage. This time he realizes marriage to fertility ( the arrow shower and rain ) and thus to the continuity of the human race. The new knowledge contradicts his previous attitude towards marriage, it results in a kind of irony which affects the poet himself, therefore, the poem becomes self ironic. In the first and the second stanza, the poet describes his past experiences when he was traveling in a train. These two stanzas are full of panoramic description of the scenes; that pass by as the train moves forward. The description shows that the poet is beginning his journey from the country area to a city that is London. The important moment in the poem comes when newly married couples board on the train. These newly married couples are accompanied by their relatives and they certainly belong to a lower economic class. The description of their physical experiences with the words and phrases like pomaded girls , parodies of fashion suggest that they are from the lower economic class. In each station and platform the poet witnesses the flow of such newly married couples. The poet virtually being an unmarried man is full of disgust for marriage with the arrival of those people and the poet undergoes mystifying experiences of suffocation. He is put in Edited in Mayank Raj PC an uneasy situation and starts mocking the appearances of those married couples and their relatives. The poet after the description of the wedding couples and their relatives once again focuses on scenes outside landscape. The description can be contrasted to the description of the landscape. The turning point in the poem comes at the end shown by the lines A sense of falling, like an arrow shower sent out of sight, somewhere becomes rain . In these lines the poet expresses his realization of importance of marriage. The poem suddenly becomes ironic because his realization contradicts his previous attitude towards marriage. In these lines arrow, showers and rain relate marriage to fertility and to the continuity of life. Therefore the ultimate knowledge about marriage is finally achieved by the poet. The phrase a happy funeral and a religious wounding in the poem are noteworthy. The poet treats a marriage as a happy funeral and as a religious wounding. The implication is that, although a marriage is a happy event, it carries within the seeds of the death of happiness which is bound to occur in the course of time. Similarly, the ceremony of marriage is described here as a religious wounding, meaning that the ceremony would subsequently turn out to be a painful affair. Thus, Larkin takes a cynical view of marriage. The happiness of marriage cannot last forever according to him. This poem relies upon the careful development of the speaker s personality, with very little figurative language until the last two stanzas. As the reader travels with the speaker, the speaker s stance in relation to his country, the wedding parties, and the newlyweds both develops and changes. By participating in that development, the reader comes to share a delicately balanced view of tradition and change. The details early in the poem establish the speaker as an almost stereotypical businessman-or professional man on his long weekend getaway. He is aware of the time ( I was late getting away, the train leaves at one-twenty ) and at first wants only to ignore the noise of the weddings and continue his reading. In these same stanzas, however, the details of the scenery hint at the timeless and timely landscape of the poem. At the end of the first stanza, the three elements of sky, land ( Lincolnshire ), and water meet, establishing a sense of unified, timeless beauty despite such counterdetails as floatings of industrial froth and acres of Edited in Mayank Raj PC dismantled cars. These paradoxical elements prepare the speaker and the reader for the similarly mixed view of the wedding parties and newlyweds in the next five stanzas. As the speaker begins to pay attention to the wedding parties in stanzas 3 and 4, he assumes a superior, almost satirical tone: girls/ In parodies of fashion, and, at the next stop, fathers with seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;/ An uncle shouting smut. Yet even in this context, the speaker begins to notice some deeper significances, especially for the females. Although the girls wear nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes, they are nevertheless marked off and participating in something that is especially significant for them. The speaker moves from his satiric mood to a more sympathetic view in stanzas 5 and 6. In stanza 5, he steps back from the details and realizes that everywhere in England the wedding-days/ Were coming to an end as all down the line/ Fresh couples climbed aboard. In stanza 6, he notices, instead of the cheap clothing and unattractive bodies, each face and its ability to define/ Just what it saw departing. Watching these faces, the speaker imagines what those definitions might be and arrives at some sense of the meanings of weddings: children frowned/ At something dull; fathers had never known/ Success so huge and wholly farcical. The females, however, have more poignant and ambivalent definitions: The women shared The secret like a happy funeral;While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, staredAt a religious wounding. As stanza 7 begins, the speaker is watching the couples on the train: A dozen marriages got under way. The significance of the changes in their lives is summed up in two key similes reinforcing the paradoxical nature of marriage and its promise of fertility. First, the speaker thinks of London with Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat, using a traditional symbol of sustenance and fertility as that toward which we were aimed. Second, at the conclusion of the poem, the brakes slow the train, giving A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Edited in Mayank Raj PC Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. This simile, too, suggests aiming at something unknown and unknowable such as the future yet, somehow, leading to the life-giving rain. These gentle and generous similes demonstrate how far the speaker has come from his initial indifference. As the poem ends, he realizes, and brings the reader to realize, the immense importance of marriage, with its continuity and fertility, and the value of the traditional rites and customs within which those marriages begin. This poem invites the reader to learn along with the speaker about the depth and value of what may appear to be trivial and even outmoded ways of doing things. What the speaker first found ludicrous about the wedding parties their predictable sameness becomes for him an important indication of the continuity of the process by which individual humans are changed but the human race goes on. Ironically, the speaker of the poem is changed along with the newlyweds as he gradually modifies his initial satirical condescension and recognizes the importance of tradition. The traditions in the poem include not only the wedding days and the general roles played by family members but also the particular poignancy of marriage for women. Throughout the poem, females appear most affected by the weddings. They especially experience the religious wounding (both sexually and psychologically) because, as at a happy funeral, the bride dies (losing her name and, in the Renaissance sense of the word, her virginity). The women especially impress the speaker with their knowledge of the secret and seem to sum up within their experience much important knowledge of human life and value. Through their deaths, they are reborn as wives with new names, and with the potential for renewing the race itself by bearing the next generation of children. These specific traditions and continuities also form a part of a larger web of meaning in this poem. An entire land and culture sky and Lincolnshire and water is the setting of the poem, and the title, by placing the poem in the cycle of the year without specifying a particular year, gives the poem a sense of Edited in Mayank Raj PC timelessness. Just as the natural world renews itself every year, so does the human race change and renew itself. For the detached, cynical nonparticipant in the rituals, recognizing and appreciating them brings salutary change and a deeper understanding of the world. Edited in Mayank Raj PC Dockery and Son BY PHILIP LARKIN In Within The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin presents the reader with an unsentimental depiction of life in post-World War II Britain. Larkin was a pre-eminent literary figure within the Movement, and The Whitsun Weddings is a collection that is characteristically cynical towards the Consumer Culture of Harold Macmillan s Britain. The collection explores in depth themes such as the transiency of human life, the insignificance of social expectation, and the triviality of consumerism. In Dockery and Son , the reader is presented with a middle-aged protagonist who, whilst revisiting his alma mater, attempts to open the door of where I used to live: / Locked. The locked door signifies an unattainable past and the disconnection he feels with his former life as a student. Larkin s use of enjambment serves to emphasize the disconnection that the protagonist feels with his past. The fleeting nature of human life is contrasted by the timelessness of the world in which the protagonist lives. Despite the familiarity of this world to the protagonist, he feels comparatively anonymous, as is demonstrated when A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored. Individual lives are nothing but ranged / Joining and parting lines which reflect a strong / Unhindered moon. The railway tracks are symbolic of the fact that human lives may interweave and diverge, yet will ultimately terminate. The moon above us all is eternal, yet we are not. Again, Larkin s use of enjambment serves to emphasize this. This is a reminder of the insignificance of man in relation to the natural world, and this belief in the transiency of human existence is a key theme within The Whitsun Weddings. However, this feeling of alienation is not limited to the setting of the natural world. On arriving in Sheffield (an industrial city and centre for manufacturing in the UK), the protagonist is greeted by hellish fumes/ And furnace-glares , and he ate an awful pie . The awful pie is a representative detail, metonymic of not only the railway station, but of the cheap and disparaging view that Larkin holds towards mass-produced consumer-driven urban life in the early 1960 s. The protagonist feels no more attached to urban life than he does to rural life, and the narrative voice only develops a flowing rhythm when he is fleeing from place to place on the train, perhaps in the hope of finding somewhere in which he can feel a sense of belonging. This is demonstrated through the alliterative phrase Canal and clouds and colleges subside / Slowly from view. In the eyes of the protagonist the only certainty in life is death; Life is first boredom, then fear / Whether or not we use it, it goes . Consequently, the manner in which one chooses to live one s life is viewed as both unimportant and uncontrollable. For the protagonist, To have no son, no wife, / No house or land still seemed quite natural. Dockery was blinded by the misconception that our lives are shaped by our beliefs and desires, when in fact his destiny was far more predicated by the innate assumptions that society imposes upon us. Dockery was Only nineteen when he became a father. Larkin implies that Dockery s choice to become a parent was driven Not from what / We think truest, or most want to do , but out of fear of not being capable of fulfilling this social obligation in later life. This methodical attitude towards parenthood is absurd in the eyes of the narrator; if life is so fleeting, what is the point in fulfilling social expectations? In the end, all that is left is For Dockery a son, for me nothing, / Nothing with all a son s harsh patronage . Parenthood is not viewed as fulfilling, but as constricting. Larkin further satirises the innate assumption that adding meant increase by using bureaucratic terminology to describe this methodical attitude towards parenthood. The title of the poem, Dockery and Son has resonances of a business Edited in Mayank Raj PC name, and we are told that Dockery must have decided to become a father after having taken stock / Of what he wanted . Larkin s bureaucratic terminology draws a link between the rise in British consumerism and the blind pursuit of the innate assumptions that society expects of us. Like any form of mass-produced commodity, people do not have children because they want them, but because they think that they ought to have them. Dockery and Son adopts a fairly simple poetic structure. It is comprised of six stanzas which are each made up of eight lines of poetry. The poem has a relatively simple rhyme scheme; each stanza contains four pairs of poetic lines that rhyme, although the order in which the rhyme scheme unfolds varies between stanzas. This dependence upon simple poetic rhyming structures is prevalent within The Whitsun Weddings, and is typical of Larkin, who scorned the avant-garde experimentation of modernist writers of his time. He favoured more established poetic forms, which he saw as an integral part of the English literary tradition. [1] This marks a deviation from the fashionable conventions of Larkin s time, a theme which is ongoing throughout the collection. Furthermore, the use of personal pronouns is worth analysing within Dockery and Son . Up until line 36, the narrative voice only uses singular personal pronouns: I to refer to the protagonist, and he to refer to Dockery. When it sounds like the protagonist is about to make a pluralised statement in line 19, and perhaps reveal a revelation about the state of the human condition, he drifts off into slumber, and the train-of-thought is abandoned. However, once he realises that the established social expectations of those his age are nothing but trivial innate assumptions , this universal voice is finally implemented. From line 37 onwards, the narrative voice speaks in a more inclusive fashion, employing the first-person plural personal pronoun we . This implies that the protagonist s revelation regarding the triviality and transiency of human life applies not only to him, but to the reader and society as a whole. For a collection of poetry that deals with such universally relevant themes, and for such a bold statement about the purpose of existence (or lack of it), this shift in subject is not only fitting, but entirely necessary. , the reader is presented with a middle-aged protagonist who, whilst revisiting his alma mater, attempts to open the door of where I used to live: / Locked. The locked door signifies an unattainable past and the disconnection he feels with his former life as a student. Larkin s use of enjambment serves to emphasize the disconnection that the protagonist feels with his past. The fleeting nature of human life is contrasted by the timelessness of the world in which the protagonist lives. Despite the familiarity of this world to the protagonist, he feels comparatively anonymous, as is demonstrated when A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored. Individual lives are nothing but ranged / Joining and parting lines which reflect a strong / Unhindered moon. The railway tracks are symbolic of the fact that human lives may interweave and diverge, yet will ultimately terminate. The moon above us all is eternal, yet we are not. Again, Larkin s use of enjambment serves to emphasize this. This is a reminder of the insignificance of man in relation to the natural world, and this belief in the transiency of human existence is a key theme within The Whitsun Weddings. However, this feeling of alienation is not limited to the setting of the natural world. On arriving in Sheffield (an industrial city and centre for manufacturing in the UK), the protagonist is greeted by hellish fumes/ And furnace-glares , and he ate an awful pie . The awful pie is a representative detail, metonymic of not only the railway station, but of the cheap and disparaging view that Larkin holds towards mass-produced consumer-driven urban life in the early 1960 s. The protagonist feels no more attached to urban life than he does to Edited in Mayank Raj PC rural life, and the narrative voice only develops a flowing rhythm when he is fleeing from place to place on the train, perhaps in the hope of finding somewhere in which he can feel a sense of belonging. This is demonstrated through the alliterative phrase Canal and clouds and colleges subside / Slowly from view. In the eyes of the protagonist the only certainty in life is death; Life is first boredom, then fear / Whether or not we use it, it goes . Consequently, the manner in which one chooses to live one s life is viewed as both unimportant and uncontrollable. For the protagonist, To have no son, no wife, / No house or land still seemed quite natural. Dockery was blinded by the misconception that our lives are shaped by our beliefs and desires, when in fact his destiny was far more predicated by the innate assumptions that society imposes upon us. Dockery was Only nineteen when he became a father. Larkin implies that Dockery s choice to become a parent was driven Not from what / We think truest, or most want to do , but out of fear of not being capable of fulfilling this social obligation in later life. This methodical attitude towards parenthood is absurd in the eyes of the narrator; if life is so fleeting, what is the point in fulfilling social expectations? In the end, all that is left is For Dockery a son, for me nothing, / Nothing with all a son s harsh patronage . Parenthood is not viewed as fulfilling, but as constricting. Larkin further satirises the innate assumption that adding meant increase by using bureaucratic terminology to describe this methodical attitude towards parenthood. The title of the poem, Dockery and Son has resonances of a business name, and we are told that Dockery must have decided to become a father after having taken stock / Of what he wanted . Larkin s bureaucratic terminology draws a link between the rise in British consumerism and the blind pursuit of the innate assumptions that society expects of us. Like any form of mass-produced commodity, people do not have children because they want them, but because they think that they ought to have them. Dockery and Son adopts a fairly simple poetic structure. It is comprised of six stanzas which are each made up of eight lines of poetry. The poem has a relatively simple rhyme scheme; each stanza contains four pairs of poetic lines that rhyme, although the order in which the rhyme scheme unfolds varies between stanzas. This dependence upon simple poetic rhyming structures is prevalent within The Whitsun Weddings, and is typical of Larkin, who scorned the avant-garde experimentation of modernist writers of his time. He favoured more established poetic forms, which he saw as an integral part of the English literary tradition. [1] This marks a deviation from the fashionable conventions of Larkin s time, a theme which is ongoing throughout the collection. Furthermore, the use of personal pronouns is worth analysing within Dockery and Son . Up until line 36, the narrative voice only uses singular personal pronouns: I to refer to the protagonist, and he to refer to Dockery. When it sounds like the protagonist is about to make a pluralised statement in line 19, and perhaps reveal a revelation about the state of the human condition, he drifts off into slumber, and the train-of-thought is abandoned. However, once he realises that the established social expectations of those his age are nothing but trivial innate assumptions , this universal voice is finally implemented. From line 37 onwards, the narrative voice speaks in a more inclusive fashion, employing the first-person plural personal pronoun we . This implies that the protagonist s revelation regarding the triviality and transiency of human life applies not only to him, but to the reader and society as a whole. For a collection of poetry that deals with such universally relevant themes, and for such a bold statement about the purpose of existence (or lack of it), this shift in subject is not only fitting, but entirely necessary. Edited in Mayank Raj PC Snake by D H Lawrence Snake is from the series entitled Birds, Beasts and Flowers written by the American poet and novelist D H Lawrence. It is written in free verse and thus has no rhyme scheme, but it makes up for it with the prodigal use of assonance, consonance and alliteration. The poem is in the form of interior monologue The poet asserts that it was a sultry afternoon in Sicily, as it was month of July. The poet comes to the tap to collect water. As he reaches an acrob-tree in the vicinity, he is stunned to find a yellowish brown snake drinking water from the trough. It lugs its slack body over the edge of the trough. It drank water with so much dignity, that the poet was compelled by an inherent reverence for it to wait for his chance to draw water. He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently. Someone was before me at my water-trough, The snake seems to have etiquette of its own. And, at the moment the poet hailed as a rational being, was second to this creature of instinct. The snake lifted his head and looked at the poet vaguely and resumed his business of drinking water. This is the importance that the snake gives the poet. His action was as innocent as that of cattle drinking, and appears to be as harmless. The snake seemed to possess a sophistication of his own. The poet seems to question: In what way was the refinement of the Human World superior to this? He flickered his twoforked tongue assertively, and exerted his individuality in his own way. The poet s voice of education instructs him to kill the snake. For in Sicily, black snakes were deemed to be harmless, and the Golden ones venomous. The poet s voice of masculinity commanded him to kill the snake lest he be branded a coward. These two concepts are notions constructed by culture. Social customs are always relative. What may be right for one, may be wrong for another. And voices in me said, If you were a man You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off. Edited in Mayank Raj PC Ironically, the above lines, far from portraying man as a product of civilized culture, depicts him as a savage. The irony and contrast of the upheld notions of civility are brought out here.The snake, though venomous, does not hurt human beings and is harmless unless provoked. Therefore, it is an inch taller in the sense that it minds its own business, and does not unnecessarily interfere in human affairs, the way humans intrude into the lives of the snakes. At that particular moment, both the Man and the Snake are united in their need for water. Both the human and animal worlds are unified in their survival instinct. He develops a fondness for the snake who appears as a guest in his abode. This instant admiration is also purely instinctual; it is the reverence for the lord of life. One is reminded of the Freudian dictum: Civilization is the denial of instinct. When the snake turns around to recoil into his hole, the poet all of a sudden as though compelled by the Voices hurls a log at him. The snake clumsily hurries into his den. The poet then reverts to square number one. He regrets his action as mean and vulgar and placed the blame on the voice of his education to have lured him into it . He likens himself to the Ancient Mariner who killed the albatross that aided him in his endeavour, and was compelled to expiate his sin. The snake appeared to be like a king in exile in his hole, whereas in the open air he was like a king with all his sovereignty. The man who is considered a higher species of the nature is shown as the degraded human being who without any reason goes on hurting others. This realization and regret of the speaker finally gives a ray of hope in the existence of humanity. At another level, the poem symbolizes the relegation of sexuality in the form of instinct. The snake has phallic connotations. The poet gives an impression to his fellow human-beings not to put an end to their sexuality as a social taboo, not to feel remorseful about it. But to channel it in the right sprit and direction, ethically and healthily. D H Lawrence is known to challenge social conventions and to question arbitrary norms and this poem is a perfect example of it. The poet questions social teachings and explores the intricacies of human thought and action. The snake is a well anthologized poem and displays the poet s concerns of man s distancing from nature. The poem is also filled with subtle allusions to religious themes. Some critics argue that The snake by Lawrence has a few similarities to the tale of Adam and Eve, in that both deal with what is called moral corruption. . through this poem he also raises the ecological concerns through the medium of the snake.

Related ResPapers
ISC Class XII Notes 2020 : Elective English
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