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POETRY IV
ALFRED LORD TENNYSON: A BRIEF
BIOGRAPHY
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was regarded by many in his generation as the greatest poet of
Victorian England. A superb craftsman in verse, he wrote poetry that ranged from confident
assertion to black despair.

His early days

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was born on August 6, 1809, in the village of Somersby,
Lincolnshire, England. His parents were the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson and
Elizabeth Fytche Tennyson. He had seven brothers and four sisters. His father was an
educated man, but was relatively poor. He was a country clergyman (church official). Though
he was not very wealthy, he did have a large library. Alfred read widely in this library, and he
learned to love reading, especially poetry at an early stage.
As Tennyson's father grew older, he became more passionate and melancholy (sad). He
began drinking heavily, suffered from lapses of memory, and once even tried to kill his eldest
son. Misfortune, not surprisingly, haunted the whole Tennyson family. The year he died, the
elder Tennyson said of his children, "They are all strangely brought up."

Early poetry and Cambridge

Tennyson began writing poetry as a child. At twelve he wrote a six-thousand-line epic (a long
poem about a real or fictional heroic figure) in imitation of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832).
Other models were Lord Byron (1788–1824), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). In
1827 there appeared a small volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers. The book, despite its
title, included poems by three of the Tennyson brothers, a little less than half of them
probably by Alfred. That same year he entered Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Tennyson's undergraduate days were a time of intellectual and political turmoil in England.
He belonged to a group called the Apostles. The institutions of church and state were being
challenged, and the Apostles debated these issues. He also took up the cause of rebels in
Spain.
Those who knew Tennyson as a university student were impressed by his commanding
physical presence and his youthful literary achievements. In 1831 his father died, and
Tennyson left the university without taking a degree.

Love of beauty and obligation to society

In the volume entitled Poems, which Tennyson published in 1832, a recurring theme is the
conflict between a selfish love of beauty and the obligation to serve society. The collection
includes "The Lady of Shalott," a narrative set in the England of King Arthur (a mythical
king of England). Tennyson was saddened by some of the reviews of this book and by the
death of a close friend. For the next ten years he did not publish anything. In 1840 he invested
what money he had inherited in a plan to make woodworking machinery. By 1843 he had lost
his small inheritance.

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Turning point
Poems, Two Volumes (1842) signaled a change in Tennyson's fortunes. It contained one of
the several poems that would eventually make up the Idylls of the King. Other poems in this
collection are "Ulysses," a dramatic monologue (speech given by one person) in which the
aging king urges his companions to undertake a final heroic journey. In "The Two Voices" he
wrote of an interior debate between the wish to die and the will to live. Poems, Two
Volumes was well received. The prime minister (head of government) of England, who was
particularly impressed by "Ulysses," awarded Tennyson a pension (a fixed annual amount of
money) that guaranteed him two hundred pounds a year.

In Memoriam
The greatest year of Tennyson's life was 1850. On June 1 he published In Memoriam, the
long elegy (an artistic piece expressing sadness over someone's death) inspired by the death
of his friend Arthur Hallam. Less than two weeks later he married Emily Sellwood, with
whom he had fallen in love fourteen years before. Finally, in November, he was appointed
poet laureate (official poet of a country) to succeed William Wordsworth (1770–1850).
Tennyson's years of uncertainty and financial insecurity were over. He became the highly
regarded poetic spokesman of his age.
In Memoriam is a series of 129 lyrics (short poems) of varying length, all composed in the
same form. The lyrics may be read individually, rather like the entries in a journal, but the
poem has an overall organization. It moves from grief through acceptance to joy. The poem
combines private feeling with a confusion over the future of Christianity, which was a feeling
many of Tennyson's age group shared.
Although Tennyson was now settled and prosperous, his next book, Maud and Other
Poems (1855), is notable for another study in sadness. Tennyson described the poem as a
"little Hamlet," a reference to the play written by William Shakespeare (1564–1616). It
almost certainly expresses some of the author's youthful anxieties as recollected in his middle
age. Of the other poems in the 1855 volume, the best-known are "The Charge of the Light
Brigade" and "The Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," perhaps the greatest of the
poems written by Tennyson in his capacity as poet laureate.

The Idylls of the King

Between 1856 and 1876 Tennyson's principal concern was the composition of a series of
narrative poems about King Arthur and the Round Table. He worked on this project for more
than twenty years. One section was written as early as 1833. Another part was not published
until 1884. As published in 1889, The Idylls of the King consisted of twelve blank-verse
(unrhymed iambic pentameter [lines of five poetic feet]) narratives (the idylls) that dealt with
Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, and other figures in the court. The individual narratives
are linked by a common theme: the destructive effect of incorrect passion on an honorable
society. The Round Table is brought down in ruins by the unlawful love of Lancelot and
Guinevere.
Some of Tennyson's peers regretted that he had expended so much attention on the legendary
past. However, it is clear that this poetic myth of a dying society expressed some of his fears
for nineteenth-century England.

Plays and last years

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Tennyson had a long and immensely productive literary career. A chronology (list of works
by date) shows that he did ambitious work until late in his life. In his sixties he wrote a series
of historical verse plays—"Queen Mary" (1875), "Harold" (1876), and "Becket"(1879)—on
the "making of England." The plays were intended to revive a sense of national grandeur and
to remind the English of their liberation from Roman Catholicism.
Tennyson's last years were crowned with many honors. The widowed Queen Victoria (1819–
1901) ranked In Memoriam next to the Bible as a comfort in her grief. In 1883 Tennyson was
awarded a peerage (rights of nobility).

MORTE D'ARTHUR
BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON\
INTRODUCTION
King Arthur. You'd have to be living under a rock for quite a while to never hear of this guy.
But in case that's you (hey, it might be quite nice to live under a rock, and Shmoop isn't one
to judge), rest easy. You're about to learn more about old Artie than you ever dreamed.

Le Morte D'Arthur is the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, beginning
with Arthur's conception and birth, and concluding with his death at the hands of his bastard
son, Mordred (perhaps due to his choice of name?). Along the way, we meet handsome
knights, beautiful ladies, and become immersed in the soap opera that is Camelot. Get ready
for juicy drama, frightening battles, and joust after joust after… well, you get the picture.

Let's start at the beginning. By the time Thomas Malory sat down to write Le Morte
D'Arthur (first published in 1485), the characters of Arthur and his knights were already well-
known in England. In the ninth century, a monk-historian named Nennius gave the name
Arthur to a sixth-century Roman-British general who waged some successful battles against
invading Saxons. It wasn't until the 1100s, though, that the Arthur craze really took off in
England. The French Normans who invaded England around that time traced their ancestry
back to Arthur, using that as an excuse for their reign in England. So, from that point on, tales
of Arthur and his knights were popular at royal courts.

In the beginning, these tales were mostly in French. The most influential group, Chrétien de
Troyes' collection of five long tales, introduced characters such as Launcelot, Gawain, and
Percival to the written world of English (okay, French) literature. By the fourteenth century,
the Arthurian tales had finally made their way into English in many-a-versions (ever heard of
the the prose romance Merlin?)

It appears our Mr. Malory had a lot of material to work with. It's no wonder this book is 800
pages long. And as it turns out, he relied on both English and French sources as he was
writing Le Morte – except for the Tale of Sir Gareth, which is his own invention. Hey, he had
to have a little fun.

While Malory was writing (probably in prison, but that's another story), England was knee-
deep in the Wars of the Roses, a fight between rival groups who claimed the English throne.
It's way too complicated to go into the whole story here, but what's important to keep in mind
is that the War of the Roses was an internal and civil war, kind of like the one between the

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rival groups of Arthur's knights (you know, the one that eventually brings his whole kingdom
down).

Besides reminding us of the dangers of in-fighting – no matter what century you're in

– Le Morte asks plenty of questions that are timeless, no matter who's reading it. For one
thing, Le Morte D'Arthur explores what it means to be a great knight, or a great man in
general. Is Launcelot, the undisputed battlefield champion, the best knight in the world? Or is
his son Galahad, who rejects earthly love and glory in favor of all things spiritual, the ideal
knight?

With questions like these and many others, Le Morte D'Arthur keeps our brains and our
hearts fully engaged and ready to rumble. En garde, awesome readers. You're about to enter
Camelot.

Character List

Arthur Son of Uther Pendragon and Igrayne, Arthur is given to Merlin the magician, who
later counsels him in all matters. Sir Ector raises the boy until he pulls the sword, Excalibur,
from the stone. He then becomes the mightiest king of his time.

Uther Pendragon The mightiest of all English kings. Uther is the father of King Arthur as
well as three daughters.

Igrayne The wife of the Duke of Cornwall. Uther Pendragon seduces and later marries her.
She is the mother of King Arthur.

Merlin The magician who counsels King Arthur.

Lot A king married to one of Uther Pendragon's daughters. Arthur seduces Lot's wife, not
knowing that she is Arthur's own sister, and they are the parents of Mordred. King Lot is one
of the eleven kings who are hostile to Arthur; he is slain by Pellanor.

Mordred Arthur's son by his sister, Lot's wife. Merlin prophesies that Mordred will destroy
Arthur; they kill each other in a battle for the throne of England. Mordred is half-brother to
Gawain, Gareth, Gaheris, and Aggravain.

Nantres A king married to one of Uther Pendragon's daughters. King Nantres is one of the
eleven kings who are hostile to Arthur.

Morgan le Fay Uther Pendragon's third daughter; she later marries King Uriens. She tries to
kill Arthur so that her lover, Accolon, can be king.

Accolon Morgan le Fay's lover.

Ector The knight who raised Arthur until the boy pulled the sword from the stone and
claimed his right to the throne. Ector goes on the Grail Quest but fails.

Kay Sir Ector's son. He is knighted by Arthur and later goes with Arthur on a pilgrimage to
St. Michael's Mount.

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Ban and Bors Two kings from overseas who are loyal to Arthur. Bors goes on the Grail
Quest and assists Galahad.

Lionel Bors' brother. Bors chooses to save a maiden from rape instead of saving Lionel from
a beating, and Lionel tries unsuccessfully to kill Bors in revenge.

Lodegreaunce A king aided by Arthur, Ban, and Bors.

Gawain One of King Lot's sons, he is knighted by Arthur and sits at the Round Table. He is
good friends with Launcelot, who later kills him in a battle. He goes on the Grail Quest but
fails.

Gareth Another of King Lot's sons and the most noble. He arrives at the court anonymously,
but he proves himself in battle, beating six thieves, two knights, the Black Knight, the Green
Knight, Sir Persaunt of Inde, the Red Knight of the Red Lands, and the Brown Knight
without Pity. Launcelot kills Gareth at the failed execution of Guinevere, even though Gareth
was unarmed and against the execution.

Gaheris, Aggravain Two of King Lot's sons. Gaheris kills his own mother and is slain by
Launcelot at Guinevere's failed execution. Aggravain spreads the news of Launcelot's and
Guinevere's affair and is later killed by Launcelot.

Pellanor Hunter of the Questing Beast.

Gryfflet A young squire whose father is killed by Sir Pellanor. He asks to be made a knight
to avenge his father's death.

Percival Welsh son of Pellanor who, along with his brother, Lamerok, is among the most
valiant knights at the Round Table. He goes on the Grail Quest and assists Galahad. Percival
later experiences religious conversion with the help of his aunt and holy man; he embraces
the New Law (faith, hope, belief, and baptism), renounces the Devil, and becomes a hermit.

Lamerok Welsh son of Pellanor and brother of Percival; a highly regarded knight at the
Round Table. Lamerok sends a magical cup to King Mark to test whether Mark's wife, Isode,
is loyal. Lamerok later falls in love with Lot's widow, who is killed by her son Gaheris.
Gaheris and Gawain later murder Lamerok.

Tor Bastard son of Pellanor who is dubbed a knight by King Arthur and later promoted to the
Round Table.

Bagdemagus A minor knight who is angry when Tor is admitted to the Round Table. He
leaves the court, intent on proving his worth. He finds Merlin in the cave, but Merlin tells him
to ride on.

Royns of North Wales A powerful king who vanquishes the eleven kings who are hostile to
Arthur. He is killed by Balyn and Balan.

Nero King Royns' brother, who is out to avenge his brother's death. An ally of King Lot's.

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The Lady of the Lake The woman who gives Arthur his new sword, after he loses it in a
fight with Pellanor. It belonged to her lover, who was killed his own brother. She then takes
the sword to Lady Lyle of Avilon, who misused it.

Lady Lyle of Avilon A woman who wears a sword and scabbard at all times; she searches
for the best and hardiest man in the kingdom to pull it out. Sir Balyn is that man.

Balyn He pulls out the Lady of Avilon's sword, and then beheads the Lady of the Lake, who
killed his mother. This act loses Arthur's respect for Balyn. He kills Launceor and Launceor's
lady, and he kills Garlon. He is also called The Knight of the Two Swords, and he both kills
and is killed by his brother, Balan.

Balan Sir Balyn's brother.

Launceor of Ireland One of Arthur's knights; he sets out after Balyn to avenge the Lady of
the Lake's death, but is killed by him, instead.

Mark A relative of Launceor's who wants to avenge his death. Merlin tells King Mark that
Launcelot du Lake and Tristam (Mark's nephew) will one day fight the greatest battle ever
fought between two knights. Mark's unchecked jealousy of Tristam is his downfall.

Bodwyne Mark's brother and a noble fighter whom Mark murders him in a fit of jealousy.
Bodwyne's child, Alexander, grows up to be a knight who seeks revenge on Mark, but Mark
is able to kill him first.

Garlon An invisible knight who kills other knights; Garlon lives with King Pellam, his
brother. Balyn kills Garlon.

Pellam Garlon's brother; Pellam fights with Balyn to avenge Garlon's death. Having lost his
sword, Balyn uses a spear to fight, and when he does, Pellam's castle falls, killing everyone
except Pellam and Balyn. Merlin later reveals that the spear was used to kill Christ and
predicts that Pellam will not be whole again until Galahad heals him in the Grail Quest.
Pellam is also called the Maimed King.

Guinevere Arthur's wife and Launcelot's lover. Guinevere encourages moral and chivalrous
behavior from the knights, and she dearly loves and is loved by both Arthur and Launcelot.

Laudegreaunce Guinevere's father, who gives Arthur the Round Table.

Laucelot du Lake Ban's son, who is considered the greatest knight in the world and remains
devoted to Guinevere throughout his life. Because of his deep friendship with Tristam,
Launcelot gives Tristam his castle, Joyous Gard, so that Tristam can live there with Isode in
peace. Launcelot is later tricked into sleeping with Elayne, who bears his son, Galahad, the
celebrated knight who succeeds in the Grail Quest. As a result of his affair, Guinevere
banishes Launcelot from Camelot, and he goes half-mad with grief. Elayne arranges for his
healing by the Grail, and Launcelot is welcomed back to Camelot.

Elayne Pellas' daughter who bears Launcelot's son, Galahad.

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Galahad Elayne's and Launcelot's son. Galahad fills the Sege Perilous, the seat at the Round
Table that no man has been worthy enough to fill. He also pulls the sword from the floating
stone, thus gaining the title of the best knight in the world but also accepting the sword's
curse that it will later cause a grievous wound. Galahad is the knight who achieves the Grail
Quest.

Melias A knight who rides with Galahad.

Tristam (Tristan) Son of King Melyodas de Lyones and the sister of King Mark of
Cornwall; his name means "sorrowful-born." He kills Marhault to free his uncle from a debt
owed to King Angwyssh of Ireland. He then falls in love with Isode (Isolde), Angwyssh's
daughter, for whom he fights Palomydes. Isode who later marries Tristam's uncle Mark,
although he and Isode remain lovers. Also known as The Knight with the Black Shield when
sent into exile by Mark, Tristam fights and beats many of Arthur's knights. Through a series
of tricks and misunderstandings, he fights Launcelot beside the old tomb of Lanceor, where
Merlin earlier prophesied that the two greatest knights — and greatest friends — would duel.
They recognize each other and stop fighting; Lancelot takes Tristam back to Camelot, where
he is made a knight at the Round Table.

Palomydes Isode's suitor, whom Tristam defeats over and over. They are imprisoned
together, along with Dynadin. Palomydes later protects King Mark when no one else will,
although he, too, soon becomes disgusted with Mark. Palomydes avenges the death of the
king of the Red City and eventually befriends Launcelot and Tristam.

Andret Tristram's cousin, who sides with Mark.

Nineve A maiden brought by Pellanore into court. Merlin falls in love with her, but she
refuses him. She does, however, learn much of his magical secrets and kills him by magically
sealing him in a cave. She is also called the Damsel of the Lake.

Pellas King Pellam's son. Nineve puts a spell on him, and they live happily together.

King Damas A cowardly king who seizes knights and tries to force them to fight against his
brother.

Ywain Morgan le Fay's son; he keeps her from killing her husband, King Uriens. He and
Gawain are close friends. Arthur banishes Ywain from Camelot, but he later welcomes him
back. On the Grail Quest, Gawain unintentionally kills Ywain.

Manessen Accolon's cousin, whom Morgan le Fay saves from an execution.

Marhault A man who is said to scorn all women. In a tournament with Gawain and Ywain,
he is valiant.

Cador A knight at the Round Table who relishes honorable wars. He travels with Launcelot
to take Roman prisoners to Paris.

Gains A knight at Emperor Lucius' court who is beheaded by Gawain after mocking him.

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Priamus A Saracen knight who fights Gawain and aids the knights as they fight the Roman
soldiers.

Aunowre A sorceress who captures Arthur and tries to destroy him when he remains faithful
to Guinevere.

Sir La Cote Male Tale (The Knight with the Ugly Coat) This man in a tattered coat saves
Guinevere from a lion, and he is knighted for his bravery.

Damsel Meledysaunt (Ugly-Talking) A young woman who constantly mocks others, she is
scolded by Launcelot and, as a result, changes her behavior. He renames her Damsel Beau-
Pensaunt (Beautiful of Thought).

Dynadin A knight who is thrown in prison with Tristam and Palomydes.

Evelake (Mordrayns) A four-hundred-year-old wounded knight whose prays to remain alive

until he sees the knight who will achieve the Grail Quest. When he embraces Galahad, he
dies.

Pinel A knight who tries to poison Gawain to avenge Lamerok's murder.

Lady of Astalot A maiden in love with Launcelot; he wears her token of love on his sleeve
because he is trying to disguise himself. She dies of grief when Launcelot leaves her.

Lavine The brother of the Lady of Astalot; he fights on Launcelot's side.

Urry A knight who is healed from his wounds by Launcelot; Urry pledges his devotion to
Launcelot.

Melliagaunce A knight who lusts after Guinevere and kidnaps her. He is later killed by
Launcelot.

Lucan and Bedivere The last two knights left standing with Arthur in his battle against
Mordred.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes

Obedience is Important

Specifically, unquestioning obedience to one's king is important. It is implied

that Arthur's wound grows cold and uncurable because Sir Bedivere hesitates to
obey Arthur in throwing Excalibur into the water.

More broadly, obedience to God and laws are important. Camelot is destroyed
through a combination of Launcelot disobeying his king when he commits
adultery with Guinevere, and Mordred's disobedience and betrayal. Mordred's
existence is due to disobedience to the laws regarding incest.

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Adultery is Destructive

Though Uther Pendragon conceived Arthur in an act of adultery, for the most
part, adultery is not only against chivalric codes, but ultimately destructive.
First there is Sir Launcelot and Guinevere's adulterous affair, which while an
example of true love, is selfish and brings destruction onto Camelot. Mordred is
also a product of adultery, as well as incest.

Motifs

The number 3

Sir Bedivere goes to throw Excalibur into the water three times, succeeding the
third time. This resembles Peter denying Christ three times before the cock
crows, but unlike Peter, Sir Bedivere redeems himself the third time.

In addition, though there are many women on the barge weeping for Arthur,
three of them are queens.

The number three is important because once is an occurance, twice is a

coincidence, but three is a portent.

Symbols

Excalibur is not just a sword, nor even just a magical sword. It represents might
and right. In other words, it represents Arthur's reign. By returning Excalibur,
Arthur is admitting that he will rule no more. Sir Bedivere's refusal to throw
Excalibur into the water may not be motivated by greed so much as denial of
what is to come. He is bereft when Arthur leaves him by going into the water
(like Excalibur). Not only has Sir Bedivere lost his king and a safe kingdom, but
he has lost his purpose. He therefore goes into a hermitage.
Summary
King Arthur makes peace with Lancelot. He himself is injured and is lifted in a
litter by the brothers Sir Lucan and Sir Bedivere. As soon as he is lifted, Arthur
faints. Sir Lucan also faints as his guts from a wound spill out. When Arthur
recovers consciousness, he sees Sir Lucan's state and feels ashamed that
someone worse off than him would still try to help him.

Arthur commands Sir Bedivere to help him throw his sword Excalibur into the
water. Sir Bedivere goes to do so, but feels that such a noble sword would do no
one any good in the water, and so hides it. When he goes back to Arthur and
said the task was done. When Arthur asks him what he say, he says only "waves
and wind." Arthur then becomes angry and commands Sir Bedivere once again
to throw the sword into the water. Sir Bedivere still cannot bring himself to do
so, so the same thing happens again. This time, Arthur threatens to kill Sir
Bedivere if he does not do as Arthur commands.

The third time, Sir Bedivere threw the sword into the water as hard as he can.

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Before it falls into the water, an arm rises out of the water to catch it and waves
it three times before disappearing into the water again.

When Sir Bedivere reports to Arthur what happened, Arthur asks him to take
him to the waterside. When they get there, a barge with many maidens dressed
in black appears. Three of the maidens were queens, and one was Arthur's
sister. Arthur was laid in a maiden's lap and his sister asked him why he had
come so late, as his wound had grown cold.

As the barge was being rowed away, Sir Bedivere asked Arthur what would
become of him, now that Arthur was going away. Arthur replied that Sir
Bedivere should do what he think best, for though Arthur was going to Avolon
to try to heal, it was not certain that he would live. Sir Bedivere watches until
Arthur is gone. He starts weeping, and makes his way through a forest, to a
chapel and hermitage.

CRITICAL APPRECIATION
Le Morte d’Arthur

05SEP
This is THE definitive King Arthur story. I’m a serious King Arthur nerd, and a fan of both
the historical (Lawhead, Cornwell) and fantastical (Sutcliff, Green) approaches to his
influential life. So when I saw “Le Morte d’Arthur” – the seminal Arthurian tome – on a shelf
at my local library, I figured now was as good a time as any to read it. Authored by Sir
Thomas Malory in 1485, “The Death of Arthur” tells Arthur’s story from birth to death.
For starters, this is a LONG book. Very long. At more than 900 pages, it’s not exactly beach
reading. But, length really isn’t that much of a concern…is it? After all, “Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix” was more than 850 pages long, and that was still a pretty quick read.
How hard can it be…really?
To put it bluntly, “Le Morte d’Arthur” makes Shakespeare or the King James Version look
positively modern. Consider the following passage:
“And then the bishop made semblaunt as though he would have gone to the sacring of the
mass. And then he took an ubblie which was made in likeness of bread. And at the lifting up
there came a figure in likeness of a child, and the visage was as red and as bright as any fire,
and smote himself into the bread, so that they all saw it that the bread was formed of a fleshly
man; and then he put it into the Holy Vessel again, and then he did that longed to a priest to
do to a mass.”
Umm….yeah.
There’s a 500-page chunk in the middle of the book that is dry as dust. There just aren’t that
many ways of describing jousts, tournaments, and one-on-one duels. Things get really old,
really fast. (This is the part having to do with Sir Tristram after his flight from Cornwall, and
his feud with Sir Palomides.) It’s tedious, dull, and probably the most difficult book I’ve ever
read.
“Le Morte d’Arthur” is NOT easy reading. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t
give it a try.
Fans of Roger Lancelyn Green’s “King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,” will find
much to like here. The stories and characters are classics – King Arthur, Sir Launcelot, Sir
Gawaine, Sir Tristram, Sir Galahad, Sir Percivale, and countless others. Virtually every
conceivable Arthurian adventure is covered (the only notable omissions being the stories of

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“Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” and “Geraint and Enid.”) The climax of the book is
definitely the search for the Sangreal (Holy Grail). This adventure makes up for the lengthy
boring stretches earlier in the book. It’s exciting, fast-paced, spiritually provocative, and
deeply triumphant.
Morally, “Le Morte d’Arthur” is an interesting case. The adulterous love between Sir
Tristram and Queen Isoud of Cornwall is held up as a tragic love story in the vein of “Romeo
and Juliet.” However, a similar relationship between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever is
portrayed as dangerous and treasonous. Romantic relationships outside of wedlock are
seemingly condoned in some of the early adventures…yet the ideals of purity and chastity are
crucial parts of the quest for the Holy Grail.
Character development is handled in an interesting way. Readers almost never get any insight
into the inner feelings of the knights of the Round Table, but their moral convictions are
developed through their actions. By the end of the book, it’s clear that Launcelot is a
temptation-troubled champion, Tristram is a melancholy romantic, Gawaine is a hot-
tempered blowhard, Palomides is a vengeful and brooding warrior, and Gareth is a quiet
leader. This extends to probably ten or fifteen other knights as well. The only character
whose motivations are ambiguous is King Arthur himself. Arthur is a bit of a cardboard
character – he doesn’t often leave Camelot, and when he does, he’s inevitably beaten in battle
by one of his best knights.
I could go on and on, but I’ll move on to the big question: is it worth reading?
For Arthurian nuts like me: yes. Anyone incensed by the mutilation of the King Arthur story
in popular media might also find it interesting.
For everyone else: read Roger Lancelyn Green’s version. It’s shorter, snappier, simpler, and
more fun to read.
VERDICT: 7/10
Obtuse? Yes. Difficult? Yes. Rewarding? Yes.
This is THE definitive King Arthur story. I’m a serious King Arthur nerd, and a fan of both
the historical (Lawhead, Cornwell) and fantastical (Sutcliff, Green) approaches to his
influential life. So when I saw “Le Morte d’Arthur” – the seminal Arthurian tome – on a shelf
at my local library, I figured now was as good a time as any to read it. Authored by Sir
Thomas Malory in 1485, “The Death of Arthur” tells Arthur’s story from birth to death.

For starters, this is a LONG book. Very long. At more than 900 pages, it’s not exactly beach
reading. But, length really isn’t that much of a concern…is it? After all, “Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix” was more than 850 pages long, and that was still a pretty quick read.
How hard can it be…really?

To put it bluntly, “Le Morte d’Arthur” makes Shakespeare or the King James Version look
positively modern. Consider the following passage:

“And then the bishop made semblaunt as though he would have gone to the sacring of the
mass. And then he took an ubblie which was made in likeness of bread. And at the lifting up
there came a figure in likeness of a child, and the visage was as red and as bright as any fire,
and smote himself into the bread, so that they all saw it that the bread was formed of a fleshly
man; and then he put it into the Holy Vessel again, and then he did that longed to a priest to
do to a mass.”

Umm….yeah.

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There’s a 500-page chunk in the middle of the book that is dry as dust. There just aren’t that
many ways of describing jousts, tournaments, and one-on-one duels. Things get really old,
really fast. (This is the part having to do with Sir Tristram after his flight from Cornwall, and
his feud with Sir Palomides.) It’s tedious, dull, and probably the most difficult book I’ve ever
read.

“Le Morte d’Arthur” is NOT easy reading. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t
give it a try.

Fans of Roger Lancelyn Green’s “King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,” will find
much to like here. The stories and characters are classics – King Arthur, Sir Launcelot, Sir
Gawaine, Sir Tristram, Sir Galahad, Sir Percivale, and countless others. Virtually every
conceivable Arthurian adventure is covered (the only notable omissions being the stories of
“Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” and “Geraint and Enid.”) The climax of the book is
definitely the search for the Sangreal (Holy Grail). This adventure makes up for the lengthy
boring stretches earlier in the book. It’s exciting, fast-paced, spiritually provocative, and
deeply triumphant.

Morally, “Le Morte d’Arthur” is an interesting case. The adulterous love between Sir
Tristram and Queen Isoud of Cornwall is held up as a tragic love story in the vein of “Romeo
and Juliet.” However, a similar relationship between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever is
portrayed as dangerous and treasonous. Romantic relationships outside of wedlock are
seemingly condoned in some of the early adventures…yet the ideals of purity and chastity are
crucial parts of the quest for the Holy Grail.

Character development is handled in an interesting way. Readers almost never get any insight
into the inner feelings of the knights of the Round Table, but their moral convictions are
developed through their actions. By the end of the book, it’s clear that Launcelot is a
temptation-troubled champion, Tristram is a melancholy romantic, Gawaine is a hot-
tempered blowhard, Palomides is a vengeful and brooding warrior, and Gareth is a quiet
leader. This extends to probably ten or fifteen other knights as well. The only character
whose motivations are ambiguous is King Arthur himself. Arthur is a bit of a cardboard
character – he doesn’t often leave Camelot, and when he does, he’s inevitably beaten in battle
by one of his best knights.

Context and Influence

Sir Thomas Malory spent about 20 years in prison compiling and translating the
stories of King Arthur from French and Middle English into something
resembling Modern English. He also wrote a new story about Sir
Gareth. Malory called his collection The hoole booke of kyng Arthur & of his
noble knyghtes of the rounde table (The whole book of king Arthur and of his
noble knights of the round table). It was completed in 1470. He died, soon after,
in 1471.

Information on Malory is mostly speculative. Though we know Sir Thomas

Malory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, there is dispute over which Sir Thomas
Malory it was. According to notes in the published book Le Morte d'Arthur, he
was a "prisoner knight." His family was rich enough for him to have been
educated in French.

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The most common theory states that Malory was Sir Thomas Malory of
Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, born sometime 1415-1418. This Malory was a
soldier and member of Parliament. He was also a thief, bandit, kidnapper, and
rapist, which is probably why he ended up in prison. After many accusations, he
finally went to prison in 1451. He then tried to escape many times, sometimes
succeeding, until the price his prison guards would have to pay if he escaped
again was set at 1000 pounds, which is a record for his time. He was pardoned
by King Edward the IV (York) in 1461. He then entered into a plot to remove
King Edward the IV, and so went back to prison in 1468. King Henry the VI
(Lancaster) became king of England again in 1470 and released Malory again.
King Henry the VI was deposed as king of England in 1471, but by then Malory
had died.

Sir Thomas Malory lived through and took part in two major wars. One
was The Hundred Years' War, lasting from 1337 to 1453, which was fought
over the French throne and involved English royalty as well. The second
was the resulting War of the Roses, lasting from 1455-1485, which was fought
over the English throne. The two contenders where the House of Lancaster
(represented by a red rose) and the House of York (represented by a white
rose). All this fighting over who was really king probably motivated Malory to
write about a story where there is one true king was is good and brings peace to
his land.

In addition, as a knight of the time period, Malory was well-versed in chivalry

and courtly love, even if he practiced neither. It is possible that his time in
prison made him more religious and repent his ways. There are strong Christian
overtones in Le Morte d'Arthur.

Since Le Morte d'Arthur is the first Modern English version of the King Arthur
legend, it is the basis for many other Arthurian works of literature,
especially Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1885) and T.H.
White's The Once and Future King (1958).

Summary
King Arthur makes peace with Lancelot. He himself is injured and is lifted in a
litter by the brothers Sir Lucan and Sir Bedivere. As soon as he is lifted, Arthur
faints. Sir Lucan also faints as his guts from a wound spill out. When Arthur
recovers consciousness, he sees Sir Lucan's state and feels ashamed that
someone worse off than him would still try to help him.

Arthur commands Sir Bedivere to help him throw his sword Excalibur into the
water. Sir Bedivere goes to do so, but feels that such a noble sword would do no
one any good in the water, and so hides it. When he goes back to Arthur and
said the task was done. When Arthur asks him what he say, he says only "waves
and wind." Arthur then becomes angry and commands Sir Bedivere once again
to throw the sword into the water. Sir Bedivere still cannot bring himself to do
so, so the same thing happens again. This time, Arthur threatens to kill Sir

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Bedivere if he does not do as Arthur commands.

The third time, Sir Bedivere threw the sword into the water as hard as he can.
Before it falls into the water, an arm rises out of the water to catch it and waves
it three times before disappearing into the water again.

When Sir Bedivere reports to Arthur what happened, Arthur asks him to take
him to the waterside. When they get there, a barge with many maidens dressed
in black appears. Three of the maidens were queens, and one was Arthur's
sister. Arthur was laid in a maiden's lap and his sister asked him why he had
come so late, as his wound had grown cold.

As the barge was being rowed away, Sir Bedivere asked Arthur what would
become of him, now that Arthur was going away. Arthur replied that Sir
Bedivere should do what he think best, for though Arthur was going to Avolon
to try to heal, it was not certain that he would live. Sir Bedivere watches until
Arthur is gone. He starts weeping, and makes his way through a forest, to a
chapel and hermitage.

THE TWO VOICES

"The Two Voices" is a poem written by future Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom Alfred,
Lord Tennyson between 1833 and 1834. It was included in his 1842 collection of Poems.
Tennyson wrote the poem, titled "Thoughts of a Suicide" in manuscript, after the death of his
friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833. The poem was autobiographical.

Background
Tennyson explained, "When I wrote 'The Two Voices' I was so utterly miserable, a burden to
myself and to my family, that I said, 'Is life worth anything?'" (Hill, 54). In the poem, one
voice urges the other to suicide ("There is one remedy for all" repeated on lines 201 and 237);
the poet's arguments against it range from vanity to desperation, yet the voice discredits all.
The poem's ending delivers no conclusions, and has been widely criticized[according to whom?]—
the poet finds no internal affirmation, invoking "solace outside himself" (Tucker). "The Two
Voices" was published following a ten-year span (1832-1842) in which Tennyson did not
publish anything, coinciding with what some call "one of the deafening silences of Victorian
literary history" [2]

Analysis
Poetic structure
The poem is written in Iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme consisting of tercets (three
lines of matching end rhyme).[3] It is 205 stanzas long (615 lines). It was praised for its depth
and style.
The poem is believed to have been written in an experimental form of poetic dialogue:
"Tennyson's chief purpose in writing the poem: the creation of a sustained poetic dialogue—
the exploration of a road ultimately not taken in Tennyson's career."[4]
The poem follows the poet's struggle to argue convincingly against the voice that suggests
suicide, which twice in the poem declares that "there is one remedy for all":

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Then comes the check, the change, the fall,
Pain rises up, old pleasures pall,
There is one remedy for all. (ll. 163-165)
"Cease to wail and brawl!
Why inch by inch to darkness crawl?
There is one remedy for all.” ((ll. 199-201)[5]

Response
"The Two Voices" attracted the attention of scholar Herbert Spencer, who believed some of
the theories between the poem and his own book, The Principles of Psychology, were
interconnected.[6]
Jerome Buckley asserted that the poem is "tinged with Satanic irony", and "the voice of
negation, cynical and realistic, puncturing a desperate idealism, forced upon the reluctant ego
an awareness of man’s fundamental insignificance" and that it "remains intense as the
colloquy of denial with doubt in the dark night of the soul".[7]
Basil Willey claimed: "Tennyson, in my view, should not be blamed…for failing to find a
solution where no solution exists; nor should he be accused of wishful thinking when he
asserts... that the Heart has its reasons of which Reason knows nothing."[8]
William R. Brashear's "Tennyson's Third Voice: A Note" points out that the argument is
between "Dionysian" (emotional human nature) and "Socratic" (intellectual) voices. The
Dionysian ("the still small voice") is of conscious, subjective fact. It "does not call upon the
poet to reason, only to see that "it were better not to be".
The Socratic voice, whose "optimistic arguments are all objective", "utilizes a full assortment
of rationales ranging from scientific faith in progress to Platonic ideas of immortality. But...it
is feeble and impotent against the subjective fact."
The third voice is "hopeful rather than optimistic" and "simply bolsters the poet against the
overpowering vision of futility".[9]
The poem has also received quite a bit of criticism as one of Tennyson's less impressive
poems. Published after a ten-year dry spell, being a more experimental poem for Tennyson,
there are those who believe it does not exemplify his poetic genius as well as some of his
other pieces. "The Two Voices" has been criticized as unnecessarily long and lacking any sort
of literary resolution, that it "seems to be one of those works whose end cycles back to the
beginning" [10] The ambiguity between all the voices involved has been considered to be too
much for even the experienced reader to interpret and the meaning is too difficult to decipher.

Tennyson's Poems Summary and Analysis of "The Two Voices"

The speaker hears a voice in his ear telling him that he is so miserable that perhaps it would
be better not to live, but he says he should not throw away what God has made. The voice
replies that he saw a dragonfly come from the well where he was waiting, and burst out of his
“old husk” into sleek brilliance. The speaker replies that when the world began man was
created on the sixth day and was given mind and dominion. The voice scoffs at him and says
he is blinded by pride and that there are sure to be better creatures than men in the “hundred
million spheres of the universe.” The speaker says all men are unique, but the voice says it
would be irrelevant if one man were removed from the world.

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The voice repeats that the speaker is clearly so miserable that perhaps it would be better not
to exist. His anguish will prevent him from sleep as well as his exercise of reason. The
speaker says that if he cuts his life short now he would potentially not get a “happier chance.”
He thinks maybe his “sickness” will turn. The voice replies that the speaker will grow old and
gray. The speaker says that every month of life brings some new development, and perhaps it
is better to wait and bide his time to see if things change. The voice says that remaining on
earth will not illuminate its mysteries no matter how long one remains; he suggests the
speaker “forerun thy peers,” to go beyond the sublunary life and “be set / In midst of
knowledge, dream’t not yet.” The voice reminds the speaker he is not close to the infinite yet
and that it would be better to cease to exist than grow weak and continue to seek on earth but
never find.

The speaker wonders if other men will think ill of him for not waiting until his time to die,
and the voice replies that it is viler to live and loathe then to die because he wants his pain to
end. He tells the speaker he is a coward because he cares what other men think, and that his
memory will fade much faster than he thinks it will. The speaker cries that it is hard to pull up
his resolve from this emptiness. He remembers his earlier days when he was fearless and
happy and wanted to “War with falsehood” and “not to lose the good of life.” He wanted not
to rot “like a weed” but achieve some glorious goal. He does not want to die for a “merely
selfish cause”; he wants to die like a noble warrior hearing his country’s war song.

The voice mocks him and says that was a valid dream when he was young, but now it is not;
he explains that there soon comes a check and a change and the fall, and pain replaces
pleasure. Death is the only remedy. The voice tells the speaker he has not “dissolved the
riddle of the earth,” and his labor has been in vain. He tells the speaker that he must journey
to knowledge, that he should cease his wailing and his protesting and take that one remedy
now. The speaker mournfully calls the voice “dull, one-sided,” and wonders “wilt thou make
everything a lie, / To flatter me that I may die?” He says he knows life is difficult and it is
sometimes “rowing hard against the stream” but that the man who does this hard work and
toil in life can gaze upon God’s glory when it is his time to die.

The voice is sullen, but the speaker continues, saying that he toils under the curse of
humanity but says that since he does not know precisely how the universe works he wonders
if ending his life will take him from “bad to worse.” Perhaps undoing one riddle will open
hundreds more, or the potentially transient pain he feels now might ossify into permanence.
The voice evokes the memory of the speaker’s dead friend, saying that the man is gone and
cannot answer, cannot feel emotion, and is “chill to praise or blame.”

The speaker listens and responds, commenting that the “vague voice” cannot truly prove the
dead are dead. The speaker says he knows the signs of death and he knows about the realities
of life. He knows about the sense of mystery and eternity, the war of baseness and good, and
the heaven within oneself. After a brief pause, the voice replies that the speaker’s father’s
life, like many lives on earth, was full of “nothings, nothing-worth, / From that first nothing
ere his birth / To that last nothing under earth!”

The speaker tells the voice his words are ambiguous, and he proceeds to wonder at his own
origins. He wonders if he came from a “nobler place, / Some legend of a fallen race” or rather
“thro’ lower lives.” He feels like something remains for him on earth; there are glimpses of
dreams and something not yet done. The voice laughs and says he is concerned with not
dreams but the reality of the speaker’s pain. The speaker realizes that no man that “breathes

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with human breath / Ha ever truly long’d for death,” and he decides he wants a full life. He
falls quiet. The voice says scornfully it is the Sabbath morn.

The speaker sees the freshness of dawn and hears the pealing of the church bells. He observes
people passing on their way to church, particularly a grave man with his demure and gentle
wife and his charming child. The family “made unity so sweet” that the speaker’s frozen
heart begins to beat again. The voice is gone. Another voice whispers to him to be cheerier.
The speaker cries out, wondering what that new voice knew; it replies, “a hidden hope.” The
speaker glories in his realization that every cloud has revealed love, and Nature has lent the
“pulse of hope to discontent.” The speaker marvels at the flowers and the rain and feels like
there could be no wrong. He cannot believe his mind was captured by that “one gloomy
voice” and that he did not instead listen to the one that said, “Rejoice! Rejoice!”

Analysis
“The Two Voices” is a difficult poem; its subject matter—wondering whether or not to
commit suicide out of grief for a loved one’s death—is easily accessible, but the images and
metaphysical arguments are often quite complex. The poem is also one of Tennyson’s longer
works, featuring 154 stanzas of three lines each. The poem was written between 1833 and
1834 but published in the 1842 volume of Poems. It was written after the death of
Tennyson’s closest friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. Tennyson explained, “When I wrote ‘The
Two Voices’ I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family that I said, ‘Is
life worth anything?’”
The poem is set up, as the title suggests, as a debate between two voices in one man’s head.
The speaker wonders whether he should commit suicide, but he maintains that it is probably
not the right thing to do for various reasons. The voice persuasively encourages him to end
his suffering by ending his life. The speaker has lost his religious convictions and thus feels
like he has lost his artistic productivity and his reason for existence. He remembers when he
was young and felt noble stirrings in his blood; those are now gone. The poem is renowned
for the tension between his two voices; even though by the end it appears that the speaker has
chosen life, that conclusion is not entirely predictable throughout the conversation.

In particular, the speaker tries to provide reasons to live: the uniqueness and grandness of the
human will (“No compound of this earthly ball / Is like another, all in all”); his hopefulness
that his misery will eventually abate (“Some turn this sickness yet might take, / Ev’n yet”);
that it is better to wait because each month brings changes (“Each month is various to present
/ The world with some development”); that other men will look down upon him for departing
before his time (“men will say / Doing dishonour to my clay”); that dying now might be
selfish and he should wait for natural death; that dying nobly is better (“But looking upward,
full of grace, / He pray’d, and from a happy place / God’s glory smote him on the face”); and
that maybe he does not truly wish for death (“Whatever crazy sorrow saith, / No life that
breathes with human breath / Has ever truly long’d for death”).

The Mephistophelean voice, which critics and modern readers tend to argue is more
persuasive, has its own arguments to combat the speaker’s hesitation and hopefulness: the
misery is so great that it is better not to exist; that one human being is meaningless in the
grand scheme of things (“Or will one beam be less intense, / When thy peculiar difference / Is
cancell’d in the world of sense?”); that he should go before his peers and discover great
knowledge (“Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let / Thy feet, millenniums hence , be set / In
midst of knowledge, dream’t not yet”); that growing old and infirm is terrible (“’Twere better
not to breathe or speak, / Than cry for strength, remaining weak”); that men will barely

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remember his name after he is gone (“Do men love thee? Art thou so bound / To men, that
how thy name may sound / Will vex thee lying underground?”); that death is the only remedy
for pain; that dreams of glory on earth are for the young; that Truth can be found beyond the
confines of earthly life only; and that the speaker should join his deceased friend in the
beyond. The voice’s last words are nihilistic and extreme: “A life of nothings, nothing-worth,
/ From that first nothing ere his birth / To that last nothing under earth.”

At the end of the poem the speaker is able to throw off the insidious voice urging him to end
his life by using his senses to observe the happy family attending church and to listen to the
melody of the church bells. A new “sweet” voice offers a “hidden hope.” He wonders why he
let one evil voice hold sway over him when other voices urge him to rejoice. The Victorian
Web argues, “If the tomb and suicide are valid symbols, so are the family and the church. The
very fact that they are balanced, in this world, is cause for joy.” Indeed it seems that the
speaker has more than hope to go on; he can cleave to the actual, present joy of human
relationships.

ROBERT BROWNING
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose
mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are
known for their irony, characterization, dark humor, social commentary, historical settings, and
challenging vocabulary and syntax.
Browning's early career began promisingly, but was not a success. The long poem Pauline brought
him to the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and was followed by Paracelsus, which was praised
by Wordsworth and Dickens, but in 1840 the difficult Sordello, which was seen as wilfully obscure,
brought his poetry into disrepute. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which
time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period and developed a more personal
style.
In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better
known than himself. So started one of history's most famous literary marriages. They went to live
in Italy, a country he called 'my university,' and which features frequently in his work. By the time
of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women. The
collectionDramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and
made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but today it is largely the poetry
he had written in this middle period on which his reputation rests.
Browning's admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about the length and
difficulty of his most ambitious poems, particularly The Ring and the Book. Nevertheless, they
have included such eminent writers as Henry James, Oscar Wilde,George Bernard Shaw, G. K.
Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov. Among living writers, Stephen
King's The Dark Tower series and A.S. Byatt's Possession make direct reference to Browning's
work.
Today Browning's most critically esteemed poems include the monologues Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi,Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last Duchess. His most popular
poems include Porphyria's Lover, How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,
the diptych Meeting at Night, the patriotic Home Thoughts from Abroad, and the children's
poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin. His abortive dinner-party recital of How They Brought The Good
News was recorded on an Edison wax cylinder, and is believed to be the oldest surviving recording
made in England of a notable person.

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Critical analysis of Andrea Del Sarto By Browning
This poem represents yet another of Browning’s dramatic monologues spoken in the voice of an
historical Renaissance painter. Andrea del Sarto, like Fra Lippo, Lippi lived and worked in
Florence, albeit a little later than Lippo, and was later appointed court painter by Francis, the King
of France. Under the nagging influence of his wife Lucrezia, to whom he speaks in this poem, he
left the French court for Italy but promised to return; he took with him some money that Francis
had given him to purchase Italian artworks for the court, and also the money advanced to him for
his own commissioned paintings. However, he spent all of the money on a house for himself and
his wife in Italy and never returned to France.
This poem finds Andrea in the house he has bought with the stolen money, as he thinks back on
his career and laments that his worldly concerns have kept him from fulfilling his promise as an
artist. As he and Lucrezia sit at their window, he talks to her of his relative successes and failures:
although Michelangelo (here, Michel Agnolo) and Raphael (Rafael) enjoyed higher inspiration
and better patronage—and lacked nagging wives—he is the better craftsman, and he points out to
her the problems with the Great Masters’ work. But while Andrea succeeds technically where
they do not (thus his title “The Faultless Painter”), their work ultimately triumphs for its
emotional and spiritual power. Andrea now finds himself in the twilight of his career and his
marriage: Lucrezia’s “Cousin”—probably her lover—keeps whistling for her to come; she
apparently either owes the man gambling debts or has promised to cover his own. The fond,
weary Andrea gives her some money, promises to sell paintings to pay off her debts, and sends
her away to her “Cousin,” while he remains to sit quietly and dream of painting in Heaven.
Andrea del Sarto Analysis

“Andrea del Sarto” is a meandering poem of 267 lines in blank verse, broken unevenly into three
stanzas of 243, 23, and 1 line(s). The title identifies the subject of the poem, Andrea del Sarto, a
distinguished artist of the Florentine School of painting. The poem is written in the first person,
the speaker being Andrea, not Robert Browning. Andrea, conversing with his silent wife,
Lucrezia, reflects on his life and art, thereby dramatically revealing his moral and aesthetic
failure.

Andrea del Sarto Themes

“Andrea del Sarto” is a poem about success and failure in life and art, as expressed through the
unconscious self-analysis of a sensitive, intelligent artist.

Andrea’s mediocrity stresses the truth of a common Browning motif: “A man’s reach should
exceed his grasp.” Unfortunately, such a premise negates success for Andrea (known in history as
the “faultless painter”), for he possesses an ability for technique that others “agonize” to reach.
Significantly, this excellence comes facilely: “I can do with my pencil what I know,/ What I see, .
. ./ Do easily, tooperfectly.” Yet, as Andrea theorizes, “In this world, who can do a thing will not;/
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive.” Therefore, since Andrea is one who “can,” he is
ineffective.

His plaintive observation that others whose works lack precision “reach many a time a heaven”
denied him reveals frustration; however, his very expertise, according to Browning’s credo,
signifies baseness and superficiality. Andrea’s cognizance of his own ennui as, amoebalike, he is
indifferent to criticism or praise, is indicative of a paralysis precluding an essential motivation,
which would empower transcendence. Andrea should be “reaching that heaven might so replenish
him/ Above and through his art.”

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Inextricably intertwined with the preceding theme is another, focusing on the balance
between mind (art) and heart (love). For Andrea, love takes.

“ANDREA DEL SARTO”

Summary
This poem represents yet another of Browning’s dramatic monologues spoken in the voice of
an historical Renaissance painter. Andrea del Sarto, like Fra Lippo Lippi, lived and worked in
Florence, albeit a little later than Lippo, and was later appointed court painter by Francis, the
King of France. Under the nagging influence of his wife Lucrezia, to whom he speaks in this
poem, he left the French court for Italy but promised to return; he took with him some money
that Francis had given him to purchase Italian artworks for the court, and also the money
advanced to him for his own commissioned paintings. However, he spent all of the money on
a house for himself and his wife in Italy and never returned to France. This poem finds
Andrea in the house he has bought with the stolen money, as he thinks back on his career and
laments that his worldly concerns have kept him from fulfilling his promise as an artist. As he
and Lucrezia sit at their window, he talks to her of his relative successes and failures:
although Michelangelo (here, Michel Agnolo) and Raphael (Rafael) enjoyed higher
inspiration and better patronage—and lacked nagging wives—he is the better craftsman, and
he points out to her the problems with the Great Masters’ work. But while Andrea succeeds
technically where they do not (thus his title “The Faultless Painter”), their work ultimately
triumphs for its emotional and spiritual power. Andrea now finds himself in the twilight of
his career and his marriage: Lucrezia’s “Cousin”—probably her lover—keeps whistling for
her to come; she apparently either owes the man gambling debts or has promised to cover his
own. The fond, weary Andrea gives her some money, promises to sell paintings to pay off her
debts, and sends her away to her “Cousin,” while he remains to sit quietly and dream of
painting in Heaven.

Form
“Andrea del Sarto” unrolls in pentameter blank verse, mostly iambic. It is a quiet poem, the
musings of a defeated man. Both in language and in form it is modest and calm. Yet it also
manages to mimic natural speech quite effectively, with little interjections and asides.

Commentary
This poem has a most compelling premise—an artist’s comparison of his own work to that of
the Great Masters. Andrea blames his disappointing career on his inability to match his
unparalleled technical skills with appropriate subject matter: all the Virgins he paints look
like his wife, and he has never had the time at court to allow his work to blossom. While
Raphael and Michelangelo often err in their representations (while he speaks Andrea
mentally “fixes” a figure’s arm in a scene by Raphael), the intentions and the spirit behind
their work shine through so strongly that their work nonetheless surpasses his. This seems to
contradict what Browning asserts in other poems about the unconnectedness of art on the one
hand and morality or intention on the other. But perhaps we can explain this seeming
contradiction by interpreting the Great Masters’ motivation as not so much any specific
spiritual or moral purpose, but rather an all-consuming passion for their art. As Andrea notes,
Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo did not have wives: they lived for their work. For
Andrea, painting is reduced to a means to make money; he has the avaricious Lucrezia to
support. Between trying to pay her debts, buying her the things she wants, and keeping her

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attention, Andrea cannot afford to focus solely on his art. Is the creation of art incompatible
with a “normal” life, a life of mundane duties and obligations?

It may be worth considering why Browning chooses to write about painters rather than poets
in his discussions on art and the artist-figure. During the Renaissance era where Browning
sets his verses, poetry would have had a somewhat limited audience: it would have been
enjoyed by those who had both the extra money and time to spend on books, not to mention
the necessary literacy (although much poetry would have been read aloud). Painting, on the
other hand, was—and still is—a more public art form. Whether a painting hangs in a museum
or on the wall of a church, it remains constantly accessible and on display to anyone who
passes, regardless of his or her education. Moreover, particularly since most Renaissance art
portrayed religious themes, painting had a specific didactic purpose and thus an explicit
connection to moral and spiritual issues. This connection between art and morals is precisely
what most interests Browning in much of his work—indeed, it much preoccupied Victorian
society in general. Browning and his contemporaries asked, What can be forgiven morally in
the name of aesthetic greatness? Does art have a moral responsibility? Because Renaissance
painting was public and fairly representational, it highlights many of these issues; poetry is
always indirect and symbolic, and usually private, and thus makes a harder test case than
painting. Indeed, Andrea’s paintings in particular, which often depict religious scenes, get
right at the heart of the art-morality question, especially given his works’ imbalance between
technical skill and lofty intentions.

Andrea presents us with a different kind of character than we are used to seeing in
Browning’s work. Unlike the Duke of “My Last Duchess,”Fra Lippo Lippi, or Porphyria’s
Lover, Andrea expresses a resigned, melancholy outlook; his wife keeps him completely
under her thumb. He lacks the hubris of these other characters, and thus to some extent seems
to represent Browning’s insecurities. The reader should keep in mind that Browning did not
enjoy public success until the late in his career, and at the time that Men and Women was
published critics considered Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the far greater
poet. While by every indication their relationship thrived on mutual respect and support, it is
nevertheless possible that Browning may have felt, as Andrea does, that domestic life and his
wife’s presence weakened his art.
Like “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” this poem “takes place” (is spoken) after
the fact: Andrea has long since left Francis’s court, and the money he stole has long since
disappeared into the house and Lucrezia’s wardrobe. While this monologue comes across as
dramatic in nature, it does not dramatize anyone’s actions. Rather, it seeks to capture a mood
and an attitude. In this way it has more in common with Tennyson’s dramatic monologues
(such as “Ulysses”) than it does with other poems of Browning’s

Robert Browning: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Rabbi Ben Ezra"

Summary
The poem is narrated by Rabbi Ben Ezra, a real 12th-century scholar. The piece does not
have a clearly identified audience or dramatic situation. The Rabbi begs his audience to
"grow old along with [him]" (line 1). He stresses that age is where the best of life is realized,
whereas "youth shows but half" (line 6). He acknowledges that youth lacks insight into life,
since it is characteristically so concerned with living in the moment that it is unable to
consider the deeper questions.

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Though youth will fade, what replaces it is the wisdom and insight of age, which recognizes
that pain is a part of life, but which learns to appreciate joy more because of the pain. "Be our
joys three parts pain!" (line 34). All the while, one should appreciate what comes, since all
adds to our growth towards God, and embrace the "paradox" that life's failure brings success.
He notes how, when we are young and our bodies are strong, we aspire to impossible
greatness, and he explains that this type of action makes man into a "brute" (line 44).

With age comes acceptance and love of the flesh, even though it pulls us "ever to the earth"
(line 63), while some yearn to reach a higher plane. A wise, older man realizes that all things
are gifts from God, and the flesh's limitations are to be appreciated even as we recognize
them as limitations.

His reason for begging patience is that our life on Earth is but one step of our soul's
experience, and so our journey will continue. Whereas youth is inclined to "rage" (line 100),
age is inclined to await death patiently. Both are acceptable and wonderful, and each
compliments the other.

What complicates the philosophy is that we are wont to disagree with each other, to have
different values and loves. However, the Rabbi begs that we not give too much credence to
the earthly concerns that engender argument and dissention, and trust instead that we are
given by God and hence are fit for this struggle. The transience of time does not matter, since
this is only one phase of our existence; we need not grow anxious about disagreements and
unrealized goals, since the ultimate truth is out of our reach anyway. Again, failure breeds
success. He warns against being distracted by the "plastic circumstance" (line 164) of the
present moment.

He ends by stressing that all is part of a unified whole, even if we cannot glimpse the whole.
At the same time that age should approve of youth and embrace the present moment, it must
also be constantly looking upwards towards a heaven to come and hence simultaneously
willing to renounce the present.

Analysis
"Rabbi Ben Ezra" is unique in Browning's oeuvre of dramatic monologues because though it
is written from the perspective of a historical figure, it does not contain any clear audience or
dramatic situation. As such, it is more a philosophical text than a proper poem. Much of its
meaning is dissected in the "Summary" above, though this section will provide some context
and simplification.

Rabbi Ben Ezra was a real historical figure of the 12th century, known primarily for his
philosophy that suggested good sometimes lies in its opposite (badness, or pain). Browning
often takes a figure from the past and uses dramatic irony to propose a conflict between the
words and the meaning, but here, lacking any sense of the audience to whom he speaks (a
congregation? God? Himself?) or of any stakes (what he hopes to gain), we are merely to
dissect the philosophy.

The Rabbi's philosophy is a paradox: the struggles of life hold little meaning since life is but
our soul's first step, yet the wise man should appreciate everything about life. He praises old
age as the time when our soul reaches best fruition on earth, because only in age can this
paradox be appreciated. The Rabbi is willing to admire and appreciate every stage of life,
even as he is quick to show the folly of those stages. For instance, youth operates from a

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place of carpe diem, 'siezing the day' constantly, and trying to transcend the limits of the
body. The Rabbi notes that with age comes an awareness of the pain and difficulty of life, but
he says that a wise man should not be weighted down but rather lightened by that realization.
He preaches that we should accept the present, but not let the concerns of the present
dominate us. What lies at the center of his creed is patience and complicity to what comes.
He does not deny the basic tenants of a carpe diem philosophy: time is short and transient; the
body does not keep its youth; the world is full of wonderful things to be exploited. But at the
same time, he believes that focusing on the ways of the world distracts us from our greater
goal, which is to continue growing even in the afterlife.
However, it is important to see that while he praises age as superior, it is only superior
because it recognizes the beauty of youth's yearnings. Without the latter, the former does not
have the insight to both admire and renounce such actions. The most important lesson we
learn in old age is that we can know nothing and never truly transcend ourselves. By
accepting this limitation, we learn to be content and patient as we near death, which is not an
end but a release to a greater sphere where our soul may continue to grow.

The Rabbi embraces body and soul, youth and age, death and life, pain and joy, all the while
recognizing that the contradictions are the goal. They are beyond our comprehension, and by
accepting that can we find true serenity.

FRA LIPPO LIPPI (POEM)

Introduction

We know what you're thinking, gang: why would Shmoop bother with a poem that sold badly
right out of the gate? We can't argue with you on that point. Robert Browning's 1855 Men
and Women was a two-volume collection of 51 short poems and… well, let's just say it didn't
exactly fly off the shelves.

Now, though, it's highly admired for containing some of Browning's best works—"Fra
Lippo Lippi" among them. Browning uses the real-life Fra Lippo Lippi—a monk living in
Italy between about 1412-1469—to examine some really profound concepts having to do
with art and religion and whether the twain should ever meet (maybe not in dark alleys).

Browning knew something about pairings. In fact, he was part of a literary power-couple. He
married Elizabeth Barrett in a secret ceremony in 1846 (aww, how romantic), because her
pops wasn't too keen on having Robert as a son-in-law. Not surprisingly, he dedicated Men
and Women to Elizabeth, his main squeeze.

Even still, folks in Browning's day were more likely to say, "What, that Men and
Women rag? Oh, yeah… it's by that guy who married Elizabeth Barrett." It wasn't until he
published The Ring and the Book in 1868 that Browning started to earn any kind of poetry
cred with which we now view him. Today, "Fra Lippo Lippi" is now lauded as one of his best
works, right up there with some of Browning's most studied and respected dramatic
monologues. And all of Browning's contemporary haters are dead—so there.

Fra Lippo Lippi is an 1855 dramatic monologue written by the Victorian poet Robert
Browning which first appeared in his collection Men and Women. Throughout this poem,
Browning depicts a 15th-century real-life painter, Filippo Lippi. The poem asks the question
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whether art should be true to life or an idealized image of life. The poem is written in blank
verse, non-rhyming iambic pentameter.
A secondary theme of the dramatic monologue is the Church's influence on art. Although Fra
Lippo paints real life pictures, it is the Church that requires him to redo much of it,
instructing him to paint the soul, not the flesh. ("Paint the soul, never mind the legs and
arms!"). Aside from the theme of the Church and its desires to change the way holiness is
represented artistically, this poem also attempts to construct a way of considering the secular
with the religious in terms of how a "holy" person can conduct his life. Questions of celibacy,
church law, and the canon are considered as well by means of secondary characters.
Summary
“Fra Lippo Lippi,” another of Browning’s dramatic monologues, appeared in
the 1855 collection Men and Women. Fra (Brother) Lippo Lippi was an actual Florentine
monk who lived in the fifteenth century. He was a painter of some renown, and Browning
most probably gained familiarity with his works during the time he spent in Italy. “Fra Lippo
Lippi” introduces us to the monk as he is being interrogated by some Medici watchmen, who
have caught him out at night. Because Lippo’s patron is Cosimo de Medici, he has little to
fear from the guards, but he has been out partying and is clearly in a mood to talk. He shares
with the men the hardships of monastic life: he is forced to carry on his relationships with
women in secret, and his superiors are always defeating his good spirits. But Lippo’s most
important statements concern the basis of art: should art be realistic and true-to-life, or should
it be idealistic and didactic? Should Lippo’s paintings of saints look like the Prior’s mistress
and the men of the neighborhood, or should they evoke an otherworldly surreality? Which
kind of art best serves religious purposes? Should art even serve religion at all? Lippo’s
rambling speech touches on all of these issues.
Form
“Fra Lippo Lippi” takes the form of blank verse—unrhymed lines, most of which fall roughly
into iambic pentameter. As in much of his other poetry, Browning seeks to capture colloquial
speech, and in many parts of the poem he succeeds admirably: Lippo includes outbursts, bits
of songs, and other odds and ends in his rant. In his way Browning brilliantly captures the
feel of a late-night, drunken encounter.

Commentary
The poem centers thematically around the discussion of art that takes place around line 180.
Lippo has painted a group of figures that are the spitting image of people in the community:
the Prior’s mistress, neighborhood men, etc. Everyone is amazed at his talent, and his great
show of talent gains him his place at the monastery. However, his talent for depicting reality
comes into conflict with the stated religious goals of the Church. The Church leadership
believes that their parishioners will be distracted by the sight of people they know within the
painting: as the Prior and his cohorts say, “ ‘Your business is not to catch men with show, /
With homage to the perishable clay.../ Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh. / Your
business is to paint the souls of men.’ ” In part the Church authorities’ objections stem not
from any real religious concern, but from a concern for their own reputation: Lippo has
gotten a little too close to the truth with his depictions of actual persons as historical
figures—the Prior’s “niece” (actually his mistress) has been portrayed as the seductive
Salome. However, the conflict between Lippo and the Church elders also cuts to the very
heart of questions about art: is the primary purpose of Lippo’s art—and any art—to instruct,
or to delight? If it is to instruct, is it better to give men ordinary scenes to which they can
relate, or to offer them celestial visions to which they can aspire? In his own art, Browning
himself doesn’t seem to privilege either conclusion; his work demonstrates only a loose

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didacticism, and it relies more on carefully chosen realistic examples rather than either
concrete portraits or abstractions. Both Fra Lippo’s earthly tableaux and the Prior’s preferred
fantasias of “ ‘vapor done up like a new-born babe’ ” miss the mark. Lippo has no aspirations
beyond simple mimesis, while the Prior has no respect for the importance of the quotidian.
Thus the debate is essentially empty, since it does not take into account the power of art to
move man in a way that is not intellectual but is rather aesthetic and emotional.
Lippo’s statements about art are joined by his complaints about the monastic lifestyle. Lippo
has not adopted this lifestyle by choice; rather, his parents’ early death left him an orphan
with no choice but to join the monastery. Lippo is trapped between the ascetic ways of the
monastery and the corrupt, fleshly life of his patrons the Medicis. Neither provides a wholly
fulfilling existence. Like the kind of art he espouses, the Prior’s lifestyle does not take basic
human needs into account. (Indeed, as we know, even the Prior finds his own precepts
impossible to follow.) The anything-goes morality of the Medicis rings equally hollow, as it
involves only a series of meaningless, hedonistic revels and shallow encounters. This
Renaissance debate echoes the schism in Victorian society, where moralists and libertines
opposed each other in fierce disagreement. Browning seems to assert that neither side holds
the key to a good life. Yet he concludes, as he does in other poems, that both positions, while
flawed, can lead to high art: art has no absolute connection to morality.

fra lippo lippi themes

Freedom and Confinement
When you feel the need to rip up all the sheets and curtains in your room and sneak out your
window, it's clear you're feeling pretty confined. In "Fra Lippo Lippi," that's the situation we
find Bro Lippo in. He's taken the vows of a monk to get himself out of a life of poverty (he's
literally starving, which is itself a type of confinement). Confinement works on two levels
here. On the literal level, Lippo is confined to the monastery and its rules. On a more
figurative level, though, he's confined by the artistic philosophy of the Church and can't really
let his painter's flag fly high. And while being patronized by the Medicis (a very rich and
powerful Italian family), this too is a type of confinement. He's also bounded by their desires
when it comes to art.
Art and Culture
"Fra Lippo Lippi" is all about what the definition of art is and who gets to define it. Lippo's
idea of art seems to be that his type of realism elevates his subjects and makes people see the
wonder in the everyday things they've passed by hundreds of times, but haven't really looked
at twice. The Church's idea is that the painter shouldn't bother with getting the details right—
that what matters is the entire impression and how the images should prompt people to pray
and contemplate higher spiritual subjects. Browning engages in speculation relating to what
makes up artistic objectivity and subjectivity. The poem is a highly ekphrastic one, which is
a $10 word that basically means it's concerned with art and artistic representation.
Lust
As a monk, Lippo has been forced to take a vow of chastity, swearing that he'll remain
celibate for the rest of his life. Is it fair that he was forced to take such a vow at the age of
eight, primarily to avoid starving to death? Well, no—it really isn't. In "Fra Lippo Lippi,"
Lippo demonstrates both implicitly and explicitly how it's unnatural to take such vows, and
that the flesh will out no matter what. This is clear in how he sneaks out of his cloister to
meet with "sportive women." And lest we think it's just the lower monks like Lippo who get
up to this type of thing, he lets us know by sly hints that the Prior is not above the sins of the
flesh himself. His so-called niece is really his mistress, and this becomes part of Lippo's
fantasy fodder and the subject of his artwork.
Religion

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"Fra Lippo Lippi" is all about the conflict between art and religion. And Browning uses our
good friend Bro Lippo as his mouthpiece. Lucky for us, Lippo is a pretty outspoken
mouthpiece whose gift for gab has been lubricated somewhat by the wine that he's been
partaking. At its center, the poem seems to suggest (again through Lippo) that the Church
uses art as a propaganda tool that teaches orthodox doctrine.

Lippo has some different ideas, though. He thinks that the artwork that's acceptable to the
Church is, well, boring. But even more problematic is that the Church-sanctioned artwork
does nothing for inspiring the individual to grow spiritually or intellectually. So, there's also
some push-and-pull between the individual and the communal values of the Church.

Fra Lippo Lippi by Robert Browning: Analysis

In the poem 'Fra Lippo Lippi', Browning emphasizes the fact that Lippi was one of the first
painters to break with formal traditions of ecclesiastical painting which Fra Angelico and
Lorenzo Monaco followed. Lippi was the first naturalist and realist in painting, selecting by
preference contemporary scenes and figures. This was of course Browning's view of his own
position in poetry in the nineteenth century.

Certainly the artistic creed which Browning attributes to Fra Lippo Lippi is much more his
own than Lippi’s. According to Browning, Lippi occupied an important place in the history
of art as the harbinger of the new manner of painters. Lippo contributed warm, naturalistic
and full of expression, as contrasted with the old, formal religious artists. Browning also
approves Lippi’s delight in painting the portraits of contemporaries in his work. Lippo’s most
important statement concerns the basis of art: should art be realistic and true- to life, or
should it be idealistic and didactic? Should art even serve religion at all? We get the gist of
Browning’s own philosophy of life in the words of Lippi when he says: “This world’s no blot
for us, / Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good.”
"Fra Lippo Lippi" is a very lively, amusing and entertaining poem. In spite of the restraints
imposed on his freedom of movement and the compulsion to paint saints, Lippi remains
cheerful and throughout the poem, speaks in a carefree and almost gay in vein. His zest for
life is unbounded. Though a monk, he speaks like a man of the world and is fond of the
pleasures that life has to offer and he justifies his defiance of the conventional theory of art
with its emphasis on ecclesiastical themes in the following interesting lines:”You should not
take a fellow eight years old/ And make him swear to never kiss the girls”. He is, of course,
referring to the manner in which he was forced, at a very early age, to take to the life of a
monk.
This poem explains not only what Browning believed to be Lippi's view of the purpose of
painting, but also the poet's own beliefs about the function of poetry. Both painter and poet
have the power of imagination. The question is what the relationship should be between the
real world around them and the ideal worlds that they can imagine. His colleagues believe
that Fra Lippo Lippi's figures are too lifelike so that by painting so realistically the painter
will cause his viewers to pay too much attention to human bodies and thereby become
distracted from their proper concern of life, their souls. Both Browning and Fra Lippo Lippi
disagree with this point of view. To them, life is the first concern of life, be it to the artist, to
the painter, or to anyone who needs to appreciate what the good God has given him. Fra
Lippo Lippi argues that beauty does not diminish piety. In lines 217 to 221, he explains that
by responding to the beauty of God's creation, human beings are led to thank God and thinks
to be aware of the soul within themselves. Though he admits that he sometimes wonders

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whether he or the Church is right, but when he paints, he insists, he always remembers the
God of Genesis, creating Eve in the Garden of Eden. That flesh that was made by God cannot
be evil. Realistic paintings actually draw the attention of human beings to real life beauty that
they might otherwise ignore. In this way, too, the artist causes human beings to praise their
creator. The central theme of "Fra Lippo Lippi" then, is that the function of art and poetry,
which should deal with real life and its beauty, for that, is its prime function, if not the only
function.
Although Fra Lippo is made to echo the ideas works of his creator, there is no suggestion of
didactics in the poem. In Fra Lippo Lippi, we are drawn to the statement by the attractiveness
of the character; the vivid appreciation of life, which Lippo says is an essential pre-requisite
for Art, is conveyed not merely by the statement, but by demonstration.

MATTHEW ARNOLD "THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY"

(1853)
The original story

Arnold prefaces the poem with an extract from Glanvill which tells the story of an impoverished
Oxford student who left his studies to join a band of gipsies, and so ingratiated himself with them
that they told him many of the secrets of their trade. After some time he was discovered and
recognised by two of his former Oxford associates, who learned from him that the gipsies "had a
traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their
fancy binding that of others." When he had learned everything that the gipsies could teach him, he
said, he would leave them and give an account of these secrets to the world.
In 1929 Marjorie Hope Nicolson identified the original of this mysterious figure as the Flemish
alchemist Francis Mercury van Helmont

Synopsis

Arnold begins "The Scholar Gipsy" in pastoral mode, invoking a shepherd and describing the
beauties of a rural scene, with Oxford in the distance. He then repeats the gist of Glanvill's story,
but extends it with an account of rumours that the scholar gipsy was again seen from time to time
around Oxford. Arnold imagines him as a shadowy figure who can even now be glimpsed in the
Berkshire and Oxfordshire countryside, "waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall",[4] and claims
to have once seen him himself. He entertains a doubt as to the scholar gypsy's still being alive
after two centuries, but then shakes off the thought. He cannot have died:
For what wears out the life of mortal men?
'Tis that from change to change their being rolls:
'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again,
Exhaust the energy of strongest souls,
And numb the elastic powers.[5]
The scholar gipsy, having renounced such a life, is
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings,[6]
and is therefore not subject to ageing and death. Arnold describes

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this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,[7]
and implores the scholar gipsy to avoid all who suffer from it, in case he too should be infected
and die. Arnold ends with an extended simile of a Tyrian merchant seaman who flees from the
irruption of Greek competitors to seek a new world in Iberia.

Critical opinions

Homer animates – Shakespeare animates, in its poor way I think Sohrab and Rustum animates –
the "Gipsy Scholar" at best awakens a pleasing melancholy. But this is not what we want.
The complaining millions of men
Darken in labour and pain –
what they want is something to animate and ennoble them – not merely to add zest to their
melancholy or grace to their dreams.
Matthew Arnold[12]
We would ask Mr. Arnold to consider whether the acceptance this poem is sure to win, does not
prove to him that it is better to forget all his poetic theories, ay,
andHomer and Sophocles, Milton and Goethe too, and speak straight out of things which he has
felt and tested on his own pulses.
The North British Review[13]
"The Scholar Gipsy" has sunk into the common consciousness; it is inseparable from Oxford; it is
the poetry of Oxford made, in some sense, complete.
John William Mackail[14]
"The Scholar Gipsy" represents very closely the ghost of each one of us, the living ghost, made up
of many recollections and some wishes and promises; the excellence of the study is in part due to
the poet's refusal to tie his wanderer to any actual gipsy camp or any invention resembling a plot.
Edmund Blunden[15]
What the poem actually offers is a charm of relaxation, a holiday from serious aims and exacting
business. And what the Scholar-Gipsy really symbolises is Victorian poetry, vehicle (so often) of
explicit intellectual and moral intentions, but unable to be in essence anything but relaxed,
relaxing and anodyne.
Among the major Victorian writers sharing in a revival of interest and respect in the second half
of the twentieth century, Matthew Arnold is unique in that his reputation rests equally upon his
poetry and his prose. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but many
of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed in his poems achieve a fuller or more
balanced formulation in his prose. This unity was obscured for most earlier readers by the usual
evaluations of his poetry as gnomic or thought-laden, or as melancholy or elegiac, and of his
prose as urbane, didactic, and often satirically witty in its self-imposed task of enlightening the
social consciousness of England.

Assessing his achievement as a whole, G. K. Chesterton said that under his surface raillery
Arnold was, "even in the age of Carlyle and Ruskin, perhaps the most serious man alive." A later
summary by H. J. Muller declares that "if in an age of violence the attitudes he engenders cannot
alone save civilization, it is worth saving chiefly because of such attitudes"—a view of Arnold's
continuing relevance which emphasizes his appeals to his contemporaries in the name of "culture"
throughout his prose writings. It is even more striking, and would have pleased Arnold greatly, to
find an intelligent and critical journalist telling newspaper readers in 1980 that if selecting three
books for castaways, he would make his first choice The Poetical Works of Matthew

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Arnold(1950), because "Arnold's longer poems may be an acquired taste, but once the nut has
been cracked their power is extraordinary." Arnold put his own poems in perspective in a letter to
his mother on 5 June 1869: "It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than
Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps
more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the
main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs."

The term modern as used by Arnold about his own writing needs examining, especially since
many readers have come to see him as the most modern of the Victorians. It is defined by Arnold
in "On the Modern Element in Literature," his first lecture as professor of poetry at Oxford in
1857. This lecture, the first to be delivered from that chair in English, marked Arnold's transition
from poet to social as well as literary critic. Stating that the great need of a modern age is an
"intellectual deliverance," Arnold found the characteristic features of such a deliverance to be a
preoccupation with the arts of peace, the growth of a tolerant spirit, the capacity for refined
pursuits, the formation of taste, and above all, the intellectual maturity to "observe facts with a
critical spirit" and "to judge by the rule of reason." This prescription, which he found supremely
fulfilled in Athens of the fifth century B.C., is of course an idealized one when applied to any age,
as is obvious when Arnold writes that Athens was "a nation the meanest citizen of which could
follow with comprehension the profoundly thoughtful speeches of Pericles."

Summary and Analysis

Summary

The speaker of "The Scholar-Gipsy" describes a beautiful rural setting in the pastures, with the
town of Oxford lying in the distance. He watches the shepherd and reapers working amongst the
field, and then tells the shepherd that he will remain out there until sundown, enjoying the scenery
and studying the towers of Oxford. All the while, he will keep his book beside him.

His book tells the famous story by Joseph Glanvill, about an impoverished Oxford student who
leaves his studies to join a band of gypsies. Once he was immersed within their community, he
learned the secrets of their trade.

After a while, two of the Scholar-Gipsy's Oxford associates found him, and he told them about the
traditional gypsy style of learning, which emphasizes powerful imagination. His plan was to
remain with the gypsies until he learned everything he could, and then to tell their secrets to the
world.
Regularly interjecting his own wonder into the telling, the speaker continues the scholar-gipsy's
story. Every once in a while, people would claim to have seen him in the Berkshire moors. The
speaker imagines him as a shadowy figure who is waiting for the "spark from heaven," just like
everyone else on Earth is. The speaker even claims to have seen the scholar-gipsy himself once,
even though it has been over two hundred years since his story first resonated through the halls of
Oxford.

Despite that length of time, the speaker does not believe the scholar-gipsy could have died, since
he had renounced the life of mortal man, including those things that wear men out to death:
"repeated shocks, again, again/exhaust the energy of strongest souls." Having chosen to repudiate
this style of life, the scholar-gipsy does not suffer from such "shocks," but instead is "free from

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the sick fatigue, the languid doubt." He has escaped the perils of modern life, which are slowly
creeping up and destroying men like a "strange disease."

The speaker finishes by imploring that the scholar-gipsy avoid everyone who suffers from this
"disease," lest he become infected as well.

Analysis

Though this poem explores one of Arnold's signature themes - the depressing monotony and toil
of modern life - it is unique in that it works through a narrative. There are in fact two levels of
storytelling at work in the poem: that of the scholar-gipsy, and that of the speaker who is
grappling with the ideas poised by that singular figure.

Both levels of story relay the same message: the scholar-gipsy has transcended life by escaping
modern life. As he usually does, Arnold here criticizes modern life as wearing down even the
strongest of men. His choice of the word "disease" is telling, since it implies that this lifestyle is
contagious. Even those who try to avoid modern life will eventually become infected.

In this way, the poem makes a comment on the perils of conformity, as other poems in this
collection do. What make the scholar-gipsy so powerful is not only that he wishes to avoid
modern life - many wish to do that. More importantly, he is willing to entirely repudiate normal
society for the sake of his transcendence. There is a slightly pessimistic worldview implicit in that
idea, since it is clearly not possible to revel in true individuality and still be a part of society. The
scholar-gipsy has had to turn his back entirely on Oxford, which represents learning and
modernity here, in order to become this great figure. And yet the poem overall is much more
optimistic than many of Arnold's works, precisely because it suggests that we cantranscend if we
are willing to pay that cost. This makes it different from a poem like "A Summer Night," which
explores the same theme but laments the cost of separation that individuality requires.
For all his admiration, the speaker clearly has not yet mustered the strength to repudiate the
world. The setting helps establish his contradictory feelings. The poem begins with images of
peaceful, serene rural life, a place where men act as they always have. They have been untouched
by the perils of modernity. Pastoral imagery has always been associated in poetry with a type of
innocence and purity, unfiltered humanity in touch with nature. The speaker is out in the field
contemplating this type of life, the possibility of acting as the scholar-gipsy did.

And yet he is also studying the towers of Oxford, which (as mentioned above) represents the
rapidly changing, strictly structured world that the scholar-gipsy renounced. Arnold deftly
expresses the speaker's split priorities through this juxtaposition. At the same time that he admires
the scholar-gipsy, he cannot fully turn his back on the modern world. It is the same contradiction
that plagues the speaker of "A Summer Night."

Thus, the poem overall represents Arnold's inner conflict, his desire to live a transcendent life but
inability to totally eschew society. At this point in his life, Arnold felt pulled in different
directions by the world's demands. He was trying to resist the infection of modernization, but it
was creeping up on him nevertheless, and the pressure to conform was negatively affecting his
poetry. Undoubtedly, Arnold wished he could escape in the way the scholar-gipsy did; however,
he was too tied down by responsibilities to ever dream of doing so.

"Dover Beach"

The sea is calm tonight.

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The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

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Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Comments on Form and Structure

"Dover Beach" [text] consists of four stanzas, each containing a variable number of verses. The
first stanza has 14 lines, the second 6, the third 8 and the fourth 9. As for the metrical scheme,
there is no apparent rhyme scheme, but rather a free handling of the basic iambic pattern. In
stanza 3 there is a series of open vowels ("Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" (l. 25). A
generally falling syntactical rhythm can be detected and continues into stanza 4. In this last stanza
one can find seven lines of iambic pentameter (l.31-37), with the rhyme scheme of abbacddcc.

According to Ruth Pitman, this poem can be seen as "a series of incomplete sonnets"
(quoted in Riede 196), and David G. Riede adds:

The first two sections each consist of 14 lines that suggest but do not achieve strict sonnet
form, and except for a short (three foot) opening line, the last section emulates the octave of a
sonnet, but closes with a single, climactic line instead of a sestet — as though the final five lines
had been eroded. (197)

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The thoughts do not appear as obviously structured and organised as in "Calais Sands",
which is accentuated by the fact that run-on lines are mixed with end-stopped lines. In the first
stanza the rhythm of the poem imitates the "movement of the tide" (l.9-14). [Roy Thomas, How to
read a Poem? (London: University of London Press Ltd, 1961) 102. Hereafter cited as "Thomas."

Terms of Art

"Dover Beach" is a melancholic poem. Matthew Arnold uses the means of 'pathetic fallacy', when
he attributes or rather projects the human feeling of sadness onto an inanimate object like the sea.
At the same time he creates a feeling of 'pathos'. The reader can feel sympathy for the suffering
lyrical self, who suffers under the existing conditions.

The repetition of "is" in lines 1-4 is used to illustrate the nightly seaside scenery:

The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast
the light Gleams and is gone; . . . [emphasis mine]

It leads up to an eventual climax with 'the light/ gleams and is gone' . The first two is portray
what can be seen. The last 'is' emphasises that the light is not there, that it cannot be seen any
longer, but is gone and leaves nothing but darkness behind. In a metaphorical sense of the word,
not only the light is gone, but also certainty. The darkness makes it hard to define both one's own
and somebody else's position, and one can never be certain that the light will ever return.

A repetition of neither...nor in stanza 4 underlines a series of denials: ". . . neither joy, nor
love, nor light/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;" (l. 33-34) [emphasis mine]. All these
are basic human values. If none of these do truly exist, this raises the question of what remains at
all. With these lines, Arnold draws a very bleak and nihilistic view of the world he is living in.

As in "Calais Sands", he uses a lot of adjectives to enrich the poem's language, such as
"tremulous cadence" (l.13) and "eternal note of sadness" (l.14). These help to increase the general
melancholic feeling of the poem.

Exclamations are used at various points of the poem with quite opposite effects. In the first
stanza, Arnold displays an outwardly beautiful nightly seaside scenery, when the lyrical self calls
his love to the window ("Come . .. !" (l.6)) to share with him the serenity of the evening. First she
is asked to pay attention to the visual, then to the aural impression ("Listen!" (l.9)).

In the fourth stanza, however, after he has related his general disillusionment with the world,
he pledges for his love to be faithful ('true') to him. ("Ah, love, let us be true/To one another! . . ."
(l. 29-30))

A simile in stanza 3 ("like the folds of a bright girdle furled," l. 13)) contrasts with "Vast
edges drear/And naked shingles of the world." (l. 27-28). Peter Hühn calls this "Kleidervergleich"
and explains:

Throughout the poem, the sea is used as an image and a metaphor. At first, it is beautiful to look
at in the moonlight (ll.1-8), then it begins to make hostile sounds ("grating roar" (l. 9); "tremulous
cadence" (l.13)) that evoke a general feeling of sadness. In the third stanza, the sea is turned into a
metaphoric "Sea of Faith" (l.21) — a symbol for a time when religion could still be experienced

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without the doubts brought about by progress and science (Darwinism). Now, the 'Sea of Faith'
and thus the certainty of religion withdraws itself from the human grasp and leaves only darkness
behind.

Theme and Subject

The first stanza opens with the description of a nightly scene at the seaside. The lyrical self calls
his addressee to the window, to share the visual beauty of the scene. Then he calls her attention to
the aural experience, which is somehow less beautiful. The lyrical self projects his own feelings
of melancholy on to the sound of "the grating roar /Of pebbles, which the waves draw back, and
fling/ At their return, up the high strand" (ll.9-11). This sound causes an emotion of "sadness"
(l.14) in him.

The second stanza introduces the Greek author Sophocles' idea of "the turbid ebb and flow
of human misery" (ll.17-18). A contrast is formed to the scenery of the previous stanza. Sophocles
apparently heard the similar sound at the "Aegean" sea (l. 16) and thus developed his ideas.
Arnold then reconnects this idea to the present. Although there is a distance in time and space
("Aegean" — "northern sea" (L. 20)), the general feeling prevails.

In the third stanza, the sea is turned into the "Sea of Faith" (l.21), which is a metaphor for a
time (probably the Middle Ages) when religion could still be experienced without the doubt that
the modern (Victorian) age brought about through Darwinism, the Industrial revolution,
Imperialism, a crisis in religion, etc.) Arnold illustrates this by using an image of clothes
('Kleidervergleich'). When religion was still intact, the world was dressed ("like the folds of a
bright girdle furled" (l. 23)). Now that this faith is gone, the world lies there stripped naked and
bleak. ("the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world" (ll. 27-28))

The fourth and final stanza begins with a dramatic pledge by the lyrical self. He asks his
love to be "true" (l.29), meaning faithful, to him. ("Ah, love, let us be true /To one another!" (ll.
29-30)). For the beautiful scenery that presents itself to them ("for the world, which seems/ To lie
before us like a land of dreams,/ So various, so beautiful, so new" (ll.30-32)) is really not what it
seems to be. On the contrary, as he accentuates with a series of denials, this world does not
contain any basic human values. These have disappeared, along with the light and religion and
left humanity in darkness. "We" (l.35) could just refer to the lyrical self and his love, but it could
also be interpreted as the lyrical self addressing humanity. The pleasant scenery turns into a
"darkling plain" (l. 35), where only hostile, frightening sounds of fighting armies can be heard:

And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where
ignorant armies clash by night." (ll.35-37).

According to Ian Hamilton, these lines refer to a passage in Thukydides, The Battle of Epipolae,
where — in a night encounter — the two sides could not distinguish friend from foe"

CRITICAL APPRECIATION

Arnold's "Dover Beach" presents the reader with a virtual journey through time. Lamenting the
transition from an age of certainty into an era of erosion of traditions - Modernism - is the
backbone of all four stanzas of the poem, brought together in our imagination by the nostalgic
image of the sea. "Misery", "sadness" and "melancholy" reign most of the poem, yet the author

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chooses to conclude it with an emotional appeal for honesty: "Ah, love, let us be true/ to one
another" - as it is the only true certainty left as the world around collapses under "struggle" and
"fight". The poet's attitude towards the subject of the poem is revealed through key words, which
are also references to a number of themes in the poem. The most obvious one of these is "the sea"
with its nostalgic nature and ability to represent time and timelessness simultaneously. "Sadness",
"misery", "melancholy", "pain" accompany this effect and reveal the overall sense of regret and
helplessness the author feels before the powers of time and inevitable change.

The tone of the piece is determined by the constant presence of "melancholy" and "misery" in the
poem that stretch on into the distance with a "long withdrawing roar..." The calmness of the
narrative voice with which the piece is set to work ("the sea is calm to-night./ The tide is full, the
moon lies fair.") is essential for the descriptive nature of the first stanza. Yet, later on its role is to
emphasise the negativity in the tone of the poem: "But now I only hear /Its melancholy...", "Into
his mind the turbid ebb and flow /of human misery..." The end of the piece, however, implies that
the alteration of the things around us is something inevitable. The tone changes in the last verse of
the poem in the sense that it now not simply resents mutability, but is also a tone pleading with
the reader to realise nothing is as stable and reliable as one perceives it, not to take the world for
granted, and to stay "true/ to one another".

The fundamental issues of the poem are not only obvious in its conclusion. The theme of Time is
being discussed in the second verse, where Sophocles - an essential historic figure - is referred to.
The mentioning of England and France at the beginning of the first verse can also be considered a
historic reference and therefore - part of the theme of Time as history is a natural subject of it.
Time here is represented by the image of the sea - with its vastness evoking powerful admiration.
The theme of mutability follows closely because of the sea's unreliable nature. It is presented as
something inevitable and insecure and, in its turn, leads onto the theme of humans staying true
and honest to one another - this involving love for each other - as the only way to remain together,
"for the world, which seems/ to lie before us like a land of dreams/ Hath really neither joy, nor
love, nor light."

The structure of the poem gives the immediate impression of being inconsistent and built upon no
particular rules. There are four verses, none of which are alike, with no particular rhythm or
rhyme pattern. Yet its tremendous effect on the reader is wittily based upon the impression of
sharing the author's thoughts as we read - it seems easy to identify with the subject matter just as
the latter synchronise with the sea's waves. The verses lead onto one another by theme although
they appear to be quite unconventionally structured. Thus the end of the first stanza - occupied
with sadness - brings on the "misery" of stanza two; then the image of sea and insecurity of the
end of the second verse invites the beginning of the following and ending verse. The unity of the
poem is in this way complete and its impact on the reader stretches far beyond the lines.

Summary

One night, the speaker of "Dover Beach" sits with a woman inside a house, looking out over the
English Channel near the town of Dover. They see the lights on the coast of France just twenty
miles away, and the sea is quiet and calm.

When the light over in France suddenly extinguishes, the speaker focuses on the English side,
which remains tranquil. He trades visual imagery for aural imagery, describing the "grating roar"
of the pebbles being pulled out by the waves. He finishes the first stanza by calling the music of
the world an "eternal note of sadness."

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The next stanza flashes back to ancient Greece, where Sophocles heard this same sound on the
Aegean Sea, and was inspired by it to write his plays about human misery.

Stanza three introduces the poem's main metaphor, with: "The Sea of Faith/Was once, too, at the
full, and round earth's shore." The phrase suggests that faith is fading from society like the tide is
from the shore. The speaker laments this decline of faith through melancholy diction.

In the final stanza, the speaker directly addresses his beloved who sits next to him, asking that
they always be true to one another and to the world that is laid out before them. He warns,
however, that the world's beauty is only an illusion, since it is in fact a battlefield full of people
fighting in absolute darkness.

Analysis

Arguably Matthew Arnold's most famous poem, "Dover Beach" manages to comment on his most
recurring themes despite its relatively short length. Its message - like that of many of his other
poems - is that the world's mystery has declined in the face of modernity. However, that decline is
here painted as particularly uncertain, dark, and volatile.
What also makes the poem particularly powerful is that his romantic streak has almost no tinge of
the religious. Instead, he speaks of the "Sea of Faith" without linking it to any deity or heaven.
This "faith" has a definite humanist tinge - it seems to have once guided decisions and smoothed
over the world's problems, tying everyone together in a meaningful way. It is no accident that the
sight inspiring such reflection is that of untouched nature, almost entirely absent from any human
involvement. In fact, the speaker's true reflection begins once the only sign of life - the light over
in France - extinguishes. What Arnold is expressing is an innate quality, a natural drive towards
beauty.

Perhaps most interestingly, the first stanza switches from visual to auditory descriptions,
including "the grating roar" and "tremulous cadence slow." The evocation of several senses fills
out the experience more, and creates the sense of an overwhelming and all-encompassing
moment.

The poem also employs a lot of enjambment (the poetic technique of leaving a sentence
unfinished on one line, to continue and finish it on the next). The effect is to give the poem a
faster pace: the information hits us in rapid succession, forming a clear picture in our minds little
by little. It also suggests that Arnold does not wish to create a pretty picture meant for reflection.
Instead, the beautiful sight is significant because of the fear and anxiety it inspires in the speaker.
Because the poem so wonderfully straddles the line between poetic reflection and desperate
uncertainty, it has remained a well-loved piece throughout the centuries.

SOHRAB AND RUSTUM

Sohrab and Rustum: An Episode is a narrative poem with strong tragic themes first
published in 1853 by Matthew Arnold.[1] The poem retells a famous episode
from Ferdowsi's Persian epic Shahnameh relating how the great warrior Rustum unknowingly
slew his long-lost son Sohrab in single combat. Arnold, who was unable to read the original,
relied on summaries of the story in John Malcolm's History of Persia and Sainte-Beuve's
review of a French prose translation of Ferdowsi.[2] In Sohrab and Rustum, Arnold attempted
to imitate the "grandeur and rapidity" of Homer's style which he was to discuss in his
lectures On Translating Homer (1861).[3] The poem consists of 892 lines of blank verse.

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The poem gave the title and place names to a notable work of children's literature, The Far-
Distant Oxus, written by Katharine Hull (1921–1977) and Pamela Whitlock (1920–1982)
while they were still children themselves.

Sohrab and Rustum: Summary & Analysis

The poem begins with the scene where, the two powerful armies of the Tartars and the
Persians are encamped along the banks of the Oxus River. During the night the soldiers are
asleep. The following day, they are about to witness a great battle. Sohrab, the hero of the
Tartar army, fails to sleep. In the grayness of the early dawn, he leaves his bed and makes his
solitary way through the black tents of the great encampment to the quarters of Peran-Wisa,
commander of the Tartar army. Sohrab is the youthful champion of the Tartars. Hardly more
than a boy, he had developed into the mightiest fighter of the Tartar host. Young in years and
famous in arms, he is nevertheless restless and discontented. Above everything else, he wants
to find his father whom he has never seen, the incomparable Rustum, invincible chieftain of
the Persians.

Peran-Wisa awakens when Sohrab enters and asks an unusual favor of him: Sohrab wishes to
challenge a leader of the Persians to single combat. He hopes that his fame as a fighter will
thereby reach the ears of his father. Peran-Wisa urges patience and questions his wisdom in
thus tempting fate. He fears that he would lose. He advises him to uses the mean of non-
violence to find his father. But young as he is, Sohrab is not ready to listen to him. Since he
has heard that he is the son of a famous warrior, he too wants to impress his unknown father
with his strength. Just as a lions club cannot be held back, Peran-Wisa realized that he could
hold back Sohrab and grants him the permission to fight a Duel.

The following morning, both the armies come out form their camp. The hosts were ready to
engage themselves in the war. There is a scene where both the armies await the order of their
respective commander. Just as they were about to engage in the battle, Perena-Wisa appeared
on the battle front. He then announced that instead of war, there would be a duel. This meant
that one champion form the Persian army and the other form the Tartar army would fight with
each other. This was a death match where in the last man standing would gain victory for his
entire army.

Meanwhile in the Persian camp, Gudurz, one of the member of the council goes to call
Rustum to face the champion of the Tartar army. But Rustum says that the king himself
should choose some young men to meet up to the challenge put by Sohrab. He admits that he
is older than his opponent. Therefore he refuses to take part in the battle. Gudurz then taunts
him by asking him a rhetorical question as to what the people would say once Rustum says
no to the challenge. He warns Rustum to take heed lest the people would consider his days
concluded.

These words of Gudurz, triggers the warrior’s spirit within Rustum and he decides to take
part in the duel. Gudurz then returned to the camp while Rustum calls his followers and
commands them to bring his arms and his shield to take down his opponent. He also bid his
horse Ruksh to follow him. The horse follows him like a faithful dog. After this, Rustum
makes his way towards the arena.

Both the heroes make their way into the arena. At this point Rustum tell Sohrab to back out.
Rustum tell this because he feels pity on the youth-hood of Sohrab. Rustum also points out
that Sohrab is like a son to him, without knowing the fact that Sohrab was his actual son.

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Sohrab looks at the mighty figure and as he looks, a strange hope is born in his breast. He
runs forward and kneeling before the mighty warrior says, “Art thou not Rustum? Speak! Art
thou not he?” Sohrab was only told about the name of his father. Therefore hoping to be his
father he falls on his feet catches his legs and asks him if he is Rustum.

Rustum, thinks that it is a trick and rebukes Sohrab’s amazement. He tells him of his fame as
a proof that he himself is Rustum. He narrates to him the story besides wherein he
“challenged once the two armies camped besides the Oxus, all the Persian lord, to cope with
him in single fight: but they shrank”. He taunts him to get up to his feet and challenge him.

Sohrab gets up on his feet answers back saying that he was not scared of him. “I am no girl,
to be made pale by words.” He also warns him saying that thought he was young, yet victory
itself was not sure in whose court it would fall in and “only even will teach us in tour”

With this conversation the two great heroes fight for the honor of their kingdom. They fight
with spear and club and both have gained mastery over their respective weapons. In the fight
Sohrab gains the upper hand. He manages to impress damage on Rustums armor. Rustum in
turn tries to fight back by attacking Sohrab with his club, but Sohrab being young and using
his agility skills, dodges the strikes form of Rustum. The strike hits Rustum in return and
Rustum falls to the ground. Sohrab removes his sword from his sheath and pierce Rustum.

Sohrab then taunts Rustum asking him to prove his might. He reminds him that “Boy as I am.
I have seen battles too- Have waded foremost in their bloody waves and heard their hollow
roar of dying men”. He then invites him to give his best in the fight and not to hold back.

As Sohrab spoke, Rustum get up and gets hold of his spear. He was full of rage and shouts
back “girl, nimble with thy feet, not with thy hands!” He tells him that he will fight him with
all his might and he no longer feels pity for Sohrab because he had shamed him in front of the
entire army with “light skipping tricks and girl’s wiles”.

At this point both the warriors rush towards each other with all their strength ‘as two eagles
on one prey’ and dash each other. Rustum strikes the Shield of Sohrab with his spear and
manages to make a hole through it but is not able to reach Sohrabs skin. Sohrab strikes
Rustums Helm (helmet) with his sword. This way, there is a tough fight between the two
warriors each trying to get the better of each other. Because of the fight, a thick dust emerges
from the ground and covers the battle field and no one could see anything. Rustum finally
manages to pierce his spear through Sohrabs body. Sohrab takes a few steps behind and then
fall to the ground for the last time. Finally when the dust settles, the two armies see Rustum
standing on his feet while Sohrab lying on the ground.

Rustum with a bitter smile begin to sarcastically praise Sohrab. He tells that he was tough. He
tells him that he has made his father and his friends proud for having faced a tough warrior as
himself. But at the end he calls him a fool for having challenged him and getting killed by an
unknown man. He insults him by saying, “dearer to the red jackals shall thou be than to thy
friend, and to thy father old”

Sohrab then replies back to Rustum and tells him that it was not an unknown man but Rustum
who slew him. He also tells him that if there were 10 more people as strong as Rustum
against him he would still defeat them. But it was the name of ‘Rustum’ which troubled him.
Because of the name he held back while fighting. He gives Rustum the shock of his life when

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he ironically tells that his father ‘Rustum’ will avenge his death. Till now both the warriors
have no idea that they are related to each other

Rustum rebukes this statement and tells that, “The mighty Rustum never had a son”. Sohrab
then reveals that Rustum did have a son, it was he himself. He also reveals that Rustum was
never informed that he had a son. He also tells him that he pities his mother “who in ader-
baijan dwells who with her father, who grows grey with age, and rules over the valiant koords
camp”. Rustum finds it difficult to swallow the fact that the same person who is dying in
front of him was his own son. The poet then gives us a glimpse of the past. One day Rustum
was an honored guest at the king’s palace in a faraway city. Here he saw the king’s daughter,
Tamineh, whom he loved for her beauty and wisdom. So they were married, for the king was
glad to make an alliance with Rustum. Time came when Rustum had to go back to his own
city. He was sad and could not take his wife with him. He did not wish that his people should
know about his marriage for they expected him to marry a maiden of his own people. So he
took a tender farewell of Tamineh and gave her an amulet made of onyx stone which he got
from his arm, and said: “If Heaven should grant thee a little daughter in my absence bind this
onyx in her hair; but if a son, place it upon his arm, then shall he be strong of limb as Sahm,
my grandsire, and graceful of speech as Zal, my father.”

After sometime, Tamineh gave birth to a lovely boy who smiled at the world from the
moment he came to it; and so they called him Sohrab, or the child of smiles. He was as
mighty as his father. When he grew to nine years, he could fight and ride better than any
grown man in that land. Tamineh was afraid for Rustum will be proud of such a son and take
him from her. While still a baby she bound the amulet of onyx on his arm and sent message
to Rustum that a daughter had been born instead. Rustum was disappointed for he had hoped
for a brave son; but he sent five jewels for the child bade the mother to take good care of her.
He was busy in the battlefield and could not come to see her.

When Rustum would still not believe that Sohrab was his son, Sohrab then gives him a proof.
He loosened his belt and then removes the armor and shows him the seal which was given to
him by his mother. Rustum is shattered looking at the proof. He realizes that the Sohrab was
his son and he himself had killed him. In grief he utters out a loud cry, “O boy-thy father!”.
He embraces Sohrab and kisses him. But his grief is too much for him to bear. He picks up
his sword and is in the act of committing suicide. But then Sohrab stops him by giving him
solace. He tells him “come, sit beside me on this sand, and take my cheeks and wash then
with thy tears and say – My Son”.

Ruksh, the same horse given by Tamineh to Rustum comes on the scene. Being an animal, he
is able to comprehend the sad fate befallen on his master and his son. Sohrab ironically
praises Ruksh for having privilege of spending more time with his father than his own son.
Finally Sohrab makes his final wish to be carried to seistan and to be placed on a bed, and
mourned for him. He also requests to put an inscription which read, ‘Sohrab, the mighty
Rustum’s son lies there, whom his great father did in ignorance kill’. Rustum promises him
that he would fulfill his last wish. He also promises that he would let all his men go in peace
without any bloodshed.

Sohrab and Rustum theme

SOHRAB AND RUSTUM, by Matthew Arnold (published 1853), is perhaps the most
important classical English poem since Words worth. Its theme— the combat of a father with

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his son in ignorance of their kinship— involves central human relations in love and in war,
and gives full scope for pathos, tragic irony, and the classical sense of fate. These are
conveyed in 891 blank verse lines of clear and measured narrative, with passages of de
scription and dialogue, full of sonorous names after the manner of Milton, and of elaborate
similes and other reminiscences of Homer and the Greek tragic poets; so that the focal and
universal theme, which even if unembellished would have appealed to all men, is given every
means of evoking in instructed readers the peculiarly classical aesthetic effect of modified
remembrance and recognition. Yet the poem does not in the least suggest a cento; its action,
which, as an or rather epyllion, takes us at once in medias res, carries all off with a masterly
epic stride; while perhaps the most celebrated passage — that in which, at the end of the
poem, the course of the river Oxus is followed to the sea— is modern in its feeling for the
resolution of all human discords in nature's serene disregard of them.

The poem Sohrab and Rustum by Matthew Arnold is taken from Firdausi’s Persian epic. It
recounts, in blank verse adorned by epic similes, the fatal outcome of Sohrab’s search for his
father Rustum, the leader of the Persian forces.

The principal hero of the poem is the mighty Rustum, who, mounted on his famous horse
Ruksh, performed prodigies of valor in defence of the Persian throne. Of all his adventures
his encounter with Sohrab is the most dramatic.

One noon, while he was sleeping his horse, had disappeared. Looking for his horse he came
to Semenjan. There the king of Semenjan had a fair daughter named Tahmineh, who had
become enamoured of Rustum because of his mighty exploits. Fascinated by her beauty,
Rustum married her.

For a time all went happily, then Rustum found it necessary to leave his bride, as he thought,
for only a short time. At parting he gave her an onyx, which he wore on his arm, bidding her,
if a daughter should be born to their union, to twine the gem in her hair under a fortunate star;
but if a son, to bind it on his arm, and he would be insured a glorious career. To the lonely
bride was born a marvellous son, whom, she named Sohrab. Fearing Rustum would send for
the boy when he grew older, Tahmineh sent word to him that the child was a girl–“no son”.

In his youth, Sohrab insisted that his mother, who had concealed the fact, should inform him
of the name of his father. Being told that it was the renowned Rustum, he exclaimed, “Since
he is my father, I shall go to his aid; he shall become king of Persia and together we shall rule
the world.”

Sohrab, with his army and that of Afrasiab, set out, intending to fight his way until Rustum
should be sent against him when he would reveal himself to his father and form an alliance
with him that would place the line of Seistan on the throne. On the way southward, Sohrab
overthrew and captured the Persian champion, Hujir. Disappointed at his failure to find his
father, Sohrab led his army in a fierce onslaught on the Persians, driving them in confusion
before him.

King Kai Kaoos, in great terror, sent for Rustum to hurry to his aid. Rustum accompanied the
Persian army, under the king Kai Kaoos, which at once set forth to encounter Sohrab.

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They fought for three days. On the second day of the fight, Sohrab succeeded in felling
Rustum to the earth. On the third day Rustum, by a supreme effort, seized Sohrab around the
waist and hurled him to the ground. Then, fearing lest the youth prove too strong for him in
the end, he drew his blade and plunged it into Sohrab’s bosom.

Sohrab forgave Rustum but warned him to beware the vengeance of his father, the mighty
Rustum, who must soon learn that he had slain his son Sohrab. These words were as death to
the aged hero, who fell senseless at the side of his wounded son. When he had recovered he
called in despair for proofs of what Sohrab had said. The now dying youth tore open his mail
and showed his father the onyx which his mother had bound on his arm as directed. The sight
of his own signet rendered Rustum quite frantic; he cursed himself, and would have put an
end to his existence but for the efforts of his expiring son.

W.B.YEATS
“A DIALOGUE OF SELF AND
SOUL”
"Trippers and askers surround me," Walt Whitman proclaimed, "People I meet, the effect upon
me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, . . . But they are not the Me
myself. / Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am." In the 150 years since those lines
were penned American poets have variously adopted, modified, wrestled with, and repudiated the
radically autonomous self they bequeath. The problem of how to station and define the self
becomes especially acute for poets laboring to establish their own individuality in an increasingly
crowded marketplace. How many colorless, formless, nebulous Me myselves can we be expected
to meet and remember before all melt into a gooey mass of ectoplasm? Contemporary poets tend
instead to opt for shape and specificity, for historically and socially grounded identities
When he was finished hitting her he went
to work. She woke the boys, sent them to school,
then hung herself with a belt she'd bought him
for his birthday. He would never get it.

Others give out trade secrets: "We heat graves here for winter burials / as a kind of foreplay
before digging in, / to soften the frosthold on the ground." Still others offer bits of mortuarial
philosophy: "A graveyard is an old agreement made / between the living and the living who have
died / that says we keep their names and dates alive." Perhaps only a poet who has known death
with the kind of aloof intimacy Lynch has would think to substitute the phrase "living who have
died" for the usual "dead."
His most moving poems focus on the undertaker's real customers, the living who have not died.
"Maura" recounts a widow's belated desire for a mate who in life had only been "the regular
husband, the hedged bet / against the bag lady and spinsterhood":
Odd, then, to have a grief so passionate
it woke her damp from dreams astraddle him—
the phantom embraced in pillows and blankets,

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or sniffed among old shirts and bureau drawers.
She fairly swooned sometimes remembering
the curl of her name in his dull tenor.

The powerful empathy for the bereaved this and other poems show plays against a strain of grim
realism that dwells on the particulars of death with professional sang-froid. Lynch seems acutely
conscious of the temptation to exploit his special knowledge of death for cheap shock effects. He
resists it most explicitly in a poem called "That Scream if You Ever Hear It":
You know who you are you
itchy trigger-fingered sonovabitch
always at my elbow with your
"Rub their noses in it.
Give it to them raw.
Spare the cutesy metaphor and bullshit.
Say what it was you heard or saw without
one extra syllable."

This is one of the few poems in the book to eschew all metrical form, presumably in deference to
the voice's strident call for a "raw" treatment of death devoid of the aesthetic embellishments that
are the stock in trade of poet and undertaker alike. In response to this demand the speaker tells of
a horrible accident that killed two small children and a motorcyclist. Characteristically, Lynch's
main concern is the survivor, a woman with "a scream stuck in her somewhere." The poem ends
with a contempuous reply to the you:
Here's another thing you will appreciate.
I know you'll like this. Listen up:
That scream, if you ever hear it,
won't rhyme with anything.

This poem offers a powerful case for the value of formalism in both poetry and death. Grief may
rhyme with nothing, but rhymes, rhythms and patterns are all we have to offer in the face of
catastrophe. The bloodthirsty voice demanding facts without form threatens the foundation of
both Lynch's callings.
The poems in Still Life in Milford do not always avoid the opposite danger, a kind of gracefully
iambic aestheticizing of mortality that comports well with the image of the quiet, attentive,
soothing undertaker. But Lynch's strategy is to move between extremes of realism and
consolation, writing in one poem of a cadaver in all its damaged majesty, in another of the rituals
that help us to forget the corpse. No single vision of death emerges, nor should we expect one;
instead we see all its aspects from the brutally empirical to the philosophically remote. Despite his
book's tripartite division, death and its vicissitudes are Lynch's true subject, not his Catholic
boyhood or Irish ancestry. Death is of course intimately tied to the soul, yet its universal character
is oddly qualified by the poet's profession, which makes his special relation to death as much an
attribute of the self as religion or ethnicity. Perhaps Lynch can't escape the label of undertaker-
poet, but at least it's one he doesn't have to share.

The tenderest meat

comes from the houses
where you hear the least

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squealing. The secret
is to give a little
wine before killing.
A bitter parable about silence, secrecy, violence and vulnerability, this poem obliquely evokes the
wounded self that the subsequent poems anatomize in harrowing detail. Tenderness here connotes
not love but drugged surrender. By this definition the book as a whole can be taken as an exercise
in toughening and sobering the self, the better to resist its executioners.
Where Lynch's book contains only three sections, Derricotte's has seven, perhaps reflecting her
more stratified sense of identity. The first consists of a group of poems describing a visit to
Elmina Castle in Ghana, a historical departure point for slave ships. Like Lynch, Derricotte finds
in her ancestral soil a crucial dimension of her present self, yet despite her knowledge of what her
forebears endured here these poems never fully escape their touristic context. The next section
comprises a single prose sketch—more like a fragment of a memoir than a prose poem—entitled
"When My Father Was Beating Me." If slavery is the ancestral ordeal that shapes Derricotte's
identity, her father's violent rages and her mother's denials constitute the personal trauma that still
scars her. It's in the third section that Derricotte turns to the most singular aspect of her identity,
her appearance and its ramifications for her understanding of race. These are the most original
and poignant poems in the book, alternately angry and compassionate, forceful and hesitant.
Oh my people,
sometimes you look at me
with such unwillingness—
as I look at you!
I keep trying to prove
I am not what I think you think.

If Derricotte's "whiteness" causes her to be viewed with distrust by some of her people, it also
affords her special insight into both the artifice and the reality of race. The section closes with a
moving account of a young black child's grief at being labelled "the Black Briana" at school:
"Already at five the children understand, / 'black' is not a color, it is a / blazing skin." That last
enjambment powerfully underscores the disjunction between the mere fact of color and the binary
code of race in America. Whatever pigment one's skin may naturally possess, once it's been
defined as "black" it blazes with meaning and difference. Derricotte knows this perhaps better
than most, living as she does inside a skin that can suddenly turn from white to black in the eyes
of its beholders.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth sections of the book are less clearly differentiated than the first three,
consisting of long, diffuse streams of introspection shot through with self-hatred and bitterness
that make for fairly heavy going. The book's final section turns to the realm of sexuality, finding
in it something like a cure for the various afflictions diagnosed in the preceding sections. In part
these poems record the poet's tentative movement from heterosexual to lesbian desire and contact.
The first poem in the section, "The Body Awakening," charts her autoerotic exploration of her
own body and its hidden spaces. This and other poems in the section redefine the book's title;
"tender" now suggests vulnerability not to pain and death but to pleasure and desire. Locating that
tenderness in the sexual body, Derricotte comes very close to identifying the soul with the clitoris:
I think with great love of that little hidden seat
of power & wisdom, the clitoris, how it can't be seen

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unless (like the face) you look at it with a mirror.
This verges on a strain of feminist mysticism not all readers will accede to (one need only
imagine a male poet writing of his penis in such exalted terms—even Whitman didn't go quite
that far). What's moving in these poems is not so much their mythologizing of the body as their
reconciliation with the poet's complex, fractured history: "To hold all these parts / in
consciousness (as if it were / a small thing!), my life." By the book's end we can appreciate the
pun buried in Derricotte's initial metaphor: if the sections of the volume and the pieces of the self
they articulate form the spokes of a wheel, that wheel can only turn when its spokes are spoken,
lifted into word and thought.
Where Lynch's poems are polished to a marmoreal sheen, Derricotte's are raw, rough-edged,
sometimes downright sloppy, yet convey an urgency that Lynch's mostly lack; we feel they were
written out of need rather than inclination. What the two poets share is a vision of the self as a
compound of discrete elements that don't quite cohere. Just as Lynch has one voice for his Irish
poems and another for his undertaker poems, so Derricotte is one person when writing about race
and another when writing about sex. A clear example of this inconsistency is the poet's shifting
attitude toward her father. In the poems about child abuse he is pathologically vicious and
sadistic; in the poems about racism he is long-suffering and wise. The contradiction is
understandable, but it heightens the impression of internal dissonance left by the book as a whole.
To her credit Derricotte seems more conscious of these divisions in her poetic self than Lynch,
and more intent on bridging them. "Poems do that sometimes," she writes, "take / the craziness
and salvage some / small clear part of the soul." Crazed, splintered self and small clear soul
remain uneasily conjoined inTender, though most of the time the first drowns out the second.

The very title of Mark Halliday's book defines the self as a bizarre compound. With its horror
movie overtones and comically congested sound, Selfwolf establishes the book's prevailing
moods of distrust, ridicule, and fear in the face of the self's insatiable demands
Halliday's strongest poems may be those that exert some formal pressure on his relaxed,
discursive style. None of the poems inSelfwolf are written in strict forms, but several flirt with
traditional patterns and devices. The book's first poem, The Miles ofNight, consists of six-line
stanzas that evoke the sestina, an association strengthened by the repetition of several key words
at the ends of lines, though not in any strict pattern. Those words include "art,""den,""up" and
"down," providing the basic coordinates for the poem's bleak narrative of a family watching
"Long Day's Journey Into Night" on TV while the mother is dying of cancer. Just as the ritualized
consumption of what the poem repeatedly calls "serious art" serves to bring a temporary stability
and wholeness to the already grieving family, so the stanzas and repetitions bring a fragile order
to the poem, albeit one that falls far short of a true sestina's intricate control. A poem called
"Narragansett Boulevard" makes similarly oblique gestures toward the villanelle. An elliptical
meditation on the nature of choice, possibility, and necessity, the poem is cast in three-line
strophes that obsessively repeat certain words and phrases: "On Narragansett Boulevard,""one
could,""as an option,""development." The poem's power comes from the stark contrast between
its sharply realized urban scene, with its "black gas tank" and "chain-link black wet lots," and its
vague, unsettled questioning of place and action. With their heightened sense of form, these
poems rein in Halliday's natural volubility and establish a more careful and precise relation to
language.
Though his title emphasizes the self and its hungers, Halliday does not neglect the claims of the
soul entirely. In another poem that plays with formal conventions, "Soul on Bench," he applies
Keats's famous definition of the world to his own quotidian frustration: "If it is a vale of soul-
making / then the fact that I just missed my train / is incidental." As he struggles to achieve
philosophical serenity, his words start to fall into familiar patterns:
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There is a rhyming of pain
with rain and train and in my soul
these words fall into place
in a comforting iambic way, rhyming also with plane
because having missed the god-damned train
I will probably also miss my plane
and my entire weekend might be screwed—
but it's a kind of food
in the long slow stomach of my soul.

Rhyme and meter associate themselves here with a soothing Romantic faith in spiritual
nourishment that clashes comically with the speaker's more practical concerns and irritations:
"That suitcase should have been on wheels." The poem's title encapsulates this irony, locating the
soul not in some ethereal vale but on a hard, cold bench waiting for another train (perhaps with a
nod to Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice). Whether in fact this poem gives any real credence to
Keats's trope of soul-making is open to question; certainly its gist is to show how thoroughly
compromised the soul is by circumstance and contingency. The translation of Keats's original
metaphors into alimentary ones—"the long slow stomach of my soul"—only reinforces this
hopeless gap between spirit and flesh, soul and bench.
Characteristically, Halliday sets his picture of the bungling, vexed self against a more idealizing
vision, in this case Keats's. Just as he employs Stevens and Grossman as foils for his critical
views, so in Selfwolf Halliday introduces a series of antagonists to inspire the slightly belligerent
tone he relishes. The implied opponent in "The Case Against Mist" seems to be a Buddhist
arguing for the unreality of the self, a view the poem itself tries to refute: "He could not be just
particles of mist / dispersing into the sky, he could not be only that / and there are many reasons."
The poem proceeds to give a series of instances of experiential solidity and engagement with
others that counter the vision of a ghostly self drifting and dispersing like mist, ending on a prosy
note of mock-summation: "We see thus that the proofs are many." Another poem, "Credentials,"
assumes the voice of a familiar kind of moralizing critic: "He has never lost a child. He has never
even / almost lost a child. How can he talk about loss?" This time we don't hear the poet's reply to
these charges, perhaps because they're so palpably unfair that no reply seems necessary. The most
aggressive poem in this vein is "Timberwolf," in which the poet goes mano a mano with his
imaginary opponent:
So, you are feeling ironical about my sentimentality?
Well I feel ironical about that. This kid may be small
but he sure isn't fat. You start using the word "romantic"
as a blowtorch I can leave the building. You won't miss me?
Fine. I can go to San Francisco, or maybe baby go
to some nonvicious milieu in the Midwest. Pluralism
cuts both ways, what? Goodbye, thanks for the chat.

The swagger in these lines feels forced and self-indulgent; the poem is the literary equivalent of
trash-talking, as its many sports references suggest. In all these poems we're made aware of
Halliday's slightly paranoid sense that he's surrounded by enemies, which repeatedly drives him to
justify and defend his own beliefs. The problem is that no clear picture of those beliefs emerges
from the poems. Depending on who he imagines his adversary to be at any given moment, he
presents himself as a Romantic or a skeptic, a cynic or a sentimentalist. Indeed Halliday seems
more invested in the drama of contestation than in the actual substance of debate. This

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predilection for battle may be another aspect of the "selfwolf" the book portrays, but if so it
quickly gets tedious.
Kathleen Peirce's The Oval Hour concerns itself not with the ravenous self but with the
contemplative soul. That soul is by no means immune to the power of desire, especially erotic
desire, but keeps a quizzical distance from its own longings. Like the collections by Lynch and
Derricotte, Peirce's book explicitly associates itself with a work of autobiographical prose; in this
case, however, the prose is by Saint Augustine. Roughly a third of the poems in the book form a
series of "Confessions," each keyed to a specific passage in Augustine's great work of that name.
Peirce doesn't simply rewrite or paraphrase Augustine, but uses his language to authorize her
own, quite distinct spiritual explorations. The fact that she chooses to scatter these poems
throughout her book rather than assigning them to a section of their own suggests that her vision
of the self is less compartmentalized than those of Lynch, Derricotte, and Halliday. Intensely
introspective, at times philosophically abstract, the "Confessions" intermingle with more
concretely sensuous poems, as if to show that these contrasting strains of thought and feeling can't
be forcibly separated.
The poems in the "Confessions" series vary widely in the degree to which they echo Augustine, or
more accurately the nineteenth century translation of him by E. B. Pusey. Some follow their
source passages virtually sentence by sentence while radically transforming their substance. Here,
for example, is part of Peirce's "Confession 1.18.13" (the numbers refer to books, chapters, and
paragraphs in Pusey), along with its Augustinian source:
Passing through innocence, I came either to experience
or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence,
which didn't leave (where would it have gone),
and yet it was no more. I was no longer
an unmarked girl but a woman gesturing.
It was not that the world showed itself to me
in a set method. Longing in stillnesses
and various tendencies of thought, I thought to be touched
by the world as it willed, or by whoever knew me.
I did myself, by the understandings objects gave me,
practice this touching, this being touched.
Passing hence from infancy, I came to boyhood, or rather it came to me, displacing infancy. Nor
did that depart,—(for whither went it?)—and yet it was no more. For I was no longer a speechless
infant, but a speaking boy. [. . .] It was not that my elders taught me words (as, soon after, other
learning) in any set method; but I, longing by cries and broken accents and various motions of my
limbs to express my thoughts, and yet unable to express all I willed, or to whom I willed, did
myself, by the understanding which Thou, my God, gavest me, practise the sounds in my
memory.

Peirce takes the famous passage about language acquisition (which furnished Wittgenstein with
the starting point for hisPhilosophical Investigations) and rewrites it as a meditation on the birth
of sexuality in the longing for touch. Throughout the series Peirce translates Augustine's devout
asceticism into erotic and sensuous terms, though not always so directly. "Confession 2.6.12"
takes a more oblique approach to its source, a passage in which Augustine examines his own
motives for a youthful act of theft. Peirce freely interprets "theft" as seduction, and traces the
strange course of desire in the face of abandonment:

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In the extreme of soul's creation,
what desire is absurd? If I am required
to continue speaking to your back,
I will speak to your back, for this also
gives me shape, as it gives my thinking shape. . . .

There are no direct echoes of Augustine here, only a subtle inversion of his original logic. Where
he retrospectively finds his hunger both for the pears he stole and for the thrill of stealing them to
be hollow and pointless, Peirce ascribes a shaping power to desire even in the face of erotic
rejection. If desire is Augustine's worst enemy it is Peirce's closest friend, the one force in the soul
that can never be absurd.
One of her persistent themes is the way thought, feeling, and perception blur together to produce
visible fluctuations in the world. The book's opening poem, "Ovidian," traces metamorphosis to
its point of origin in desire: "Who stares into a wood and sees a dress fastened to a tree / recalls
the torso of a man with arms held up among the wrens / and desires the man." Another haunting
poem with a classical source, "Pygmalion in March," rewrites the Greek myth as a metaphysical
fable in which the sculptor creates his beloved "against his disappearing," to anchor himself in the
world of form. Many of Peirce's poems are ekphrastic ruminations on paintings and other
artifacts—canvases by Picasso and Bonnard, constructions by Joseph Cornell—but they lack the
descriptive preciosity such poems often have, instead emphasizing the sheer mysteries of looking.
Here for instance is "Thimble Forest," on one of Cornell's inscrutable boxes:
Possibility and skepticism, beauty and consciousness are held in delicate balance here, as they are
throughout The Oval Hour. These are among the most intelligent, philosophically profound
poems of the past ten years; they are also among the most gorgeous. In Peirce's poetry the voice
of the soul finally rises above the babble of the self, and it sings.
Yeats – A Dialogue of Self and Soul (1933)
Thus the poem is about the two most profound instinctive reactions which a ‘dying animal’
experiences in face of death. ‘For these rites of self-mourning to move us, we must possess at
least an unconscious awareness that death as death - not rebirth into life - is the fundamental
occasion of the stanzas, though they triumphantly suppress it’ (Ramazani 179). Self’s embrace of
the fecund ditch (in place of the grave), of the blindness of the living man (in place of the
‘occluded dead man’), is a refusal of death masked as acceptance. Self glories in earthly
permanence (the sword) and in earthly ecstasy (‘such sweetness’) in answer to Soul’s stress on
these values. Soul’s nostalgia and Self’s are in deep collusion: both are strategies for denying
death. The poem, then, is an enactment of denial - denial of guilt and denial of death - and as a
result it is one of the most divided and uneasy performances of the Yeatsian persona. Its manic
close is a narcissistic ecstasy sparked off by a wilful dissolution of painful realities, and one may
guess that this mood is unstable, prone to tumble over into melancholia. Far from being a
magisterial conclusion, it is so exposed and vulnerable as to invite the attentions of the
psychoanalyst, who would see this denial of death as a piece of bravado unconsciously aware of
its own impossibility.
The vein of troubled reflection engages us, while we are repelled by the forced declarations of
esoteric faith in the later poem. In the closing vision - ‘I see Phantoms of Hatred and of the
Heart’s Fulness and of the Coming Emptiness’ -, there is no sense that the three emblematic
scenes are artificially constructed. They are more credible than the apocalypticism of ‘The Second
Coming’ or the allusions to cyclic history in ‘Leda and the Swan’, because they emerge out of the
preceding meditations and are not tied to a philosophy of history. Thus the Yeatsian persona

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displays both its humane richness and its oracular power to best effect when it hews close to the
tensions and contradictions of lived time and refrains from imposing an abstract pattern on them.

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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
STANZA I SUMMARY

Line 1

That is no country for old men.

 We’re off to a strange start here. Besides the fact that the first line of this poem reminds us of a
rather gory movie that’s recently come out (see "Why Should I Care?" for more on this), it’s a bit
confusing.
 We’re told that "that" country isn’t so great for the old folks. But which country is "that" country?
England? The United States? Ireland? Uzbekistan? Well, we’re not going to get any help on that
one from the poem itself.
 All we can say for sure is that it’s not "this" country: that is, it can’t be the place where the
speaker is now.
 Huh? All these pronouns are getting confusing! Where the heck arewe? Well, think about it this
way: if you’re talking about the crummy fast food restaurant you’re eating in right now, you
might say something like, "This place is a dump." If you’re cracking jokes about the restaurant
across the way, you’d say that "that place" is even worse.
 Here’s the problem, though: if all we know so far concerns that country over there, then
we’re…nowhere. Like we said, this is getting confusing.
 So, let’s focus on what we do know. "That" country sucks for old people. As far as we can tell,
then, our speaker must be an old person. After all, if it’s so good over there for the young ‘uns,
then why would our speaker leave?
 More importantly, the first line of the poem lets us know that our speaker seems to be a pretty
opinionated sort of guy. He seems perfectly happy to let us travel down the road of his
thoughts…just don’t expect too many signposts along the way!

Lines 1-3

The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,

 Aww. We’re talking about "that" country again. It actually seems pretty nice, right? It’s full of
lovers "in one another’s arms" and birds in the trees. In other words, it’s got all the makings of a
delightful romance.
 Frankly, our speaker seems a little bit bitter right now, doesn’t he? After all, who starts hating on
lovers? Seriously.
 Line three takes a bit of a sharp detour, though.
 First we’re reading about young things and pretty birdies. Suddenly, however, our speaker tosses
in a casual reference to death.
 Not just one death: lots of death. Whole flocks of birds and generations of young lovers.
 Sure, birds may be singing right now…but that’s just because they don’t know how crumby the
winter’s going to be. Anything natural must also be mortal: you may be young now, but one day
you’ll wake up with grey hairs and wrinkles.
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 It’s not all fun and games in this life, folks. At least, that’s what our speaker seems to be
suggesting.
 We want to take a quick break to insert a minor Shmoop historical analysis: Yeats’s use of the
word "generations" in line three is particularly provocative.
 Want to know why? Well, the poem was published in 1928. It’s smack in the center of a literary
movement called "modernism." Here’s why that’s important to us, though: modernism was
partially born out of the devastating losses and tragedy of WWI. After 1918, the world changed.
Disillusioned by the senseless violence and seeming futility of war, the generation of young men
and women who came back from the battlefields became pretty cynical about the whole state of
their society. After all, pretty much everyone living in Britain lost somebody they knew in the
war.
 A certain group of early twentieth-century thinkers and modernist writers was even known as
"The Lost Generation." The group usually included only American writers, but the term was a
popular one.
 Back to our poem, then: line 3 seems to be deliberately invoking the language of wartime losses.
After all, it’s not just a couple of folks who are dying. Generations are dying.

Lines 4-6

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

 Hmm. We’re back in nature again. Lots of fish…and then some more fish.
 Before you start thinking about supper, though, we should point out that the same pattern that
occurred in lines 1-3 repeats itself here. Things live and then they die. Got it?
 Our speaker insists upon the natural world in this stanza. Humankind (that would be "flesh" here)
is sandwiched between "fish" and "fowl." We’re just like the birds and the fishies. We live, and
then we die.
 What distinguishes people from animals? Well, in "that country," at least, not much.

Lines 7-8

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 Here’s the zinger of this first stanza. Want to know why our speaker is so down on "that
country"? Well, here we have it. Folks there live in the moment.
 That’s a good thing, right?
 Well, sort of. Unfortunately, they’re so caught up in all that "begetting" and living and dying that
they completely forget to think about things that might outlast their own brief lives.
 Yeats weaves a deliberate set of artistic references into this line.
 He wants to compare living in the moment to thinking about something long-lasting (and even
immortal). To do so, he compares music to sculpture. (He actually compares music to
"monuments." But aren’t most monuments sculpture of some kind?) Music sounds really
great…for about three minutes. Maybe even five. Sculptures, however, are around for a looooong
time.
 (Remember, Yeats lived a long time before iPods. There wasn’t any "repeat" button for him to
press. If he wanted to listen to a certain song, he had to wait until his local D.J. got around to
playing it on the radio. Music, in other words, wasn’t nearly as permanent as other art forms.)

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 Comparing life to "music" may sound sweet, but it’s actually a pretty damning critique. If you’re
too absorbed in the here and now, you’ll never be able to think about things that might matter
more than your petty little problems. How can you fight for world peace if you’re obsessed about
that date you’re going on this weekend?
 At least, that’s what our speaker thinks.

STANZA II SUMMARY

Lines 9-11

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing,

 Remember the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz? That’s the image that our speaker seems to be
going for here.
 In fact, the Scarecrow’s problem reminds us a lot of what our speaker is trying to say. In The
Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow spends a whole bunch of time wandering around and muttering, "If I
only had a brain…"
 Notice the similarities? Our speaker couldn’t agree more. Once you get done with all that lovin’
and livin’ that young people do, you’re nothing more than a bunch of clothes on an old, wrecked
frame. It’s not a pretty picture – unless, of course, you have a brain (or, in this case, a soul).
 Using personification to allow the soul itself to "clap its hands and sing," Yeats introduces a teeny
tiny bit of distinction between the soul and the body.
 The body, remember, is just a stick with some clothes on it. The soul, however, seems
to almost have a body of its own. It’s just a figurative body at this point, of course. The soul
doesn’t actually have hands to clap. That would be awkward.
 Keep this soul-body in mind, though, as we move though the poem. It’ll come up later. We
promise.

Lines 11-12

and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

 What do people usually sing about?

 Well, love probably tops the list. Lost love, love gone wrong, love that hasn’t happened yet,
loving somebody so much that your heart’s going to break…we’re guessing that you can continue
this list on your own. Check out the top forty pop songs for some hints.
 Our speaker, however, doesn’t seem to be interested in songs that celebrate love.
 When he (or she) thinks about the soul and its singing, he’s focused on the way that songs come
out of aging and suffering. In other words, the older you get, the louder you should sing.
 We’re guessing that this is metaphorical singing here. After all, it’d be a bit weird if everyone
walked around humming all the time. Our speaker’s talking about living out loud – letting your
soul stay alive and kicking, even if your body’s a "tatter," or disintegrating.

Lines 13-14

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

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 Hmm. We’ve got to admit, these lines are confusing.
 Where exactly is there no singing school? Based on our speaker’s previous thoughts, we’re
guessing that he’s still talking about "that country."
 The overall geographical vagueness of the first lines seems to be repeating itself here.
 Perhaps the speaker means that in his old country nobody really valued the life of the mind or the
soul. Perhaps he’s trying to make a broader claim about people in general, the world over.
 What we do know, however, is that the speaker seems pretty upset about the fact that folks spend
most of their time talking and thinking about how great they are. Sculptures and monuments =
good. Sculptures of yourself = bad.
 Self-indulgence in general isn’t something that our speaker’s too keen about.

Lines 15-16

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 Now we’re getting somewhere. We’re getting to Byzantium, as a matter of fact.

 Notice how line seven starts with, "and therefore." The entire poem up until this point has been a
preface to the actual heart of the action.
 If you’re in student government (or you just happen to read congressional resolutions for fun),
you know that bills tend to have lots and lots and lots of prefatory information before they
actually get around to stating what the bill is actually about.
 Here’s an example: "I think you smell nice and I like that you've helped me with my homework
all year and I really like that shirt you’re wearing, and therefore I’m going to ask you out on a
date."
 Similarly, our speaker’s offered a whole lot of reasons for why he’s sailing before he even
mentions the fact that he’s hopped onto a boat. Luckily, the poem’s title clues us in…otherwise,
we’d be very, very confused by now.
 Now the speaker has actually arrived at Byzantium. It’s a holy city. Today we’d call it Istanbul In
1928, Yeats would have called it Constantinople. Confused yet?
 Byzantium was once the center of Greek art and culture.
 Interestingly, Yeats chose to use the ancient name of the city, Byzantium, instead of its Roman
name, Constantinople.
 What’s the big deal? A name’s a name, right? Well, using the Greek name for the city allows
Yeats to affiliate his speaker with Greek arts and values.
 The quick and dirty distinction between Greek and Roman cultures goes something like this: both
Greeks and Romans liked bloody battles. They were both actually pretty good at fighting. The
Romans, however, didn’t really have a culture of their own. They went around picking up bits and
pieces of culture from all the folks that they conquered. The Greeks, on the other hand, were
highbrow culture. They valued "arête," or excellence.
 Let’s put it this way: the Romans had about as much culture as your local strip mall. The Greeks
had some serious game. It’s no wonder that Yeats decided to hang his hat with the Greeks!

STANZA III SUMMARY

Lines 17-18

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

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 Now that we’ve gotten to Byzantium, things are looking up.
 For one thing, there are actually beings that our speaker wants to address. They happen to be
sages, wise and holy folk. They also happen to be standing in a fire. That doesn’t seem so wise,
but hey, what do we know?
 The whole poem seems to have shifted from nature and the body (that cycle of living and dying
that we saw in stanza one) to something more mystical. The art has changed, as well.
 If "that country" has music that only lasts for a few minutes, Byzantium has sages that appear like
the "gold mosaic" of a wall.
 Let’s pause on that for a second: gold is generally a good thing. It’s shiny and pretty and usually
quite expensive. That’s because it’s a precious metal.
 Using gold to metaphorically describe the sages allows our speaker to allude to the precious
nature of the sages, as well. When we say that the sages are "precious," we don’t mean that
they’re cute little five-year-olds. We mean that they’re valuable. Like gold.
 Moreover, a mosaic is a piece of art (notice how much we’re talking about art now?). You
probably made lots of them out of macaroni when you were in grade school.
 By combining small pieces of precious metal, gemstones, and even colored stones into intricate
designs, artists create complex pictures.
 For an example of a Greek mosaic, check out our "Images" page. We’ve got to admit, the images
we’ve added for you to check out are actually from a later period in Byzantine history…mostly
because few Greek mosaics from the time Yeats is referencing still exist.
 Not to worry, though: Byzantine craftsmen continued to make some pretty awesome mosaics,
especially during the early periods of Christianity. It’s hard to see in these images, but if you look
closely, you can see that certain sections of the mosaics are actually inlaid with gold. Sort of like
in our poem.
 So why allude to mosaics in this particular phrase? Why not painting or sculpture or macaroni
art?
 Well, the nifty thing about mosaics is that they create a beautiful picture out of lots of small parts
– sort of like the way that a good society is created by the collaboration of lots of individual
people. The sages aren’t the end-all and be-all of Byzantium. They’re just a small (and
beautiful) part of a pretty awesome whole.

Lines 19-20

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

 Ack. What in on earth is he talking about? Is "perne" even a word?

 Well, yes. Yes it is. Check out our "Literary Devices" section for an analysis of circles and
spirals.
 Here’s the quick and dirty version: to "perne" is to turn in circles, like a bobbin in a sewing
machine or a top. A "gyre" is a sort of swirling vortex that creates spiraling motion. Lots of
circles. Lots of spiraling. It’s one of Yeats’s key moves.
 So our speaker asks the sages to swirl around him and become the "singing masters" that he
couldn’t find back in his old country.
 In other words, he’s looking for a spiritual rebirth. It may sound a bit New Age-y, but that’s
because it is a bit New Age-y. Yeats was a huge fan of mysticism. He even played a major role in
an esoteric group (a.k.a. cult) called The Golden Dawn.
 Even without the esoteric overtones, however, the concept of spiritual rebirth is a pretty popular
one. Think about movies like The Freedom Writers or even Batman (and, of course The Dark

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Knight). Everybody’s excited about becoming new and better person these days…and most folks
need a mentor in order to do it. Our speaker, for example, has the sages.
 Let’s get technical for a second (don’t worry, we won’t bore you for too long):
 Note the long "i" sounds in the words "fire" and "gyre." There’s a super-spiffy technical term for
repeating vowel sounds in a segment of poetry. It’s called "assonance." Assonant words tend to
blur together in our ears, almost as if the vowels are echoing each other.
 Go ahead: read line three aloud. Notice how the "i" seems to carry over?
 That’s intentional – it allows the word "fire" to extend its reach over the entire line (almost as if
it’s taking the line over). It’s consuming. Just like an actual fire. Pretty cool, huh?

Lines 21-23

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is;

 So the speaker’s still having a conversation with the sages.

 If the sages come out of fire, maybe they can work like fire, consuming the speaker’s heart.
That’s what he’s hoping for, at least. Total destruction (and a total make-over). In terms of total
transformations, this guy would put "What Not to Wear" to shame.
 Remember how we told you to keep in mind the splitting of body and soul, which starts to happen
in Stanza I? Here’s where that hint starts to pay off.
 The problem, it seems, is that our speaker’s heart is just too attached to his body. It’s a natural
reaction. We’re all pretty attached to our bodies. After all, they’re the only way that we know the
world.
 The bad part, of course, is that bodies die. If you’re trying figure out a way to stay immortal (as
our friend here is), then sticking with a decaying body can be…problematic. No one likes talking
corpses. Even zombies don’t tend to be so popular.
 Attached to a body, our speaker’s heart can’t break free and exist on its own. That, my friends, is
a problem.

Lines 23-24

and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

 Why is eternity an "artifice?" And why does our speaker want to be a part of it?
 Those are good questions. After all, "artifice" tends to sound like something that’s contrived or
made-up (or, well, artificial). That’s bad, right?
 Well, not necessarily. See, art is also a form of artifice. It’s not part of the natural world. It’s made
up – and that means that it doesn’t have to participate in all those endless cycles of birth and death
that our speaker hated so much, earlier in the poem.
 A mosaic or another piece of artwork can outlast the artist who created it. What’s eternal and long
lasting about the artist, then, isn’t her body. It’s her art. The art, or "artifice," becomes the way
that an artist can enter the history books.
 How would we remember Shakespeare if it weren’t for his plays? Or Picasso without his
paintings?
 Having your soul gathered up into your art might not sound like a pleasant experience, but it may
just be the only way that our speaker can transcend his own body and become part of a larger
whole.

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STANZA IV SUMMARY

Lines 25-26

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

 Like we were saying just a few lines ago, nature fades. Seasons change. People die.
 Art, however, lasts a long, long time.
 As our speaker decides, the best way to preserve part of yourself is to lodge that part in
"unnatural" things like art.
 Once our speaker moves into a sort of speculative mood, his options seem a lot better than they
were in his present. It’s almost like he’s daydreaming about his next life. ("Do I want to be a
cricket? Nope. Maybe a Swiss army knife? Hmm…")
 Right now nature’s got him locked in her claws; after death, however, he’ll be free to return as
something else.

Lines 27-29

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

 Once he’s imagined himself as an artwork, our speaker spends these lines clarifying exactly
what sort of art he’d like to be. Like the sages, he’s thinking that he’s solid "hammered" gold.
 In case you’ve missed it, he emphasizes the gold part once more for good measure. He won’t just
be hammered gold. Nope. He’ll be hammered gold and "gold enamelling." That’s some serious
bling.
 Notice at this point that he’s alluding to the gold that went into the sages’ mosaic in stanza three.
Now, however, our speaker seems to be imagining himself as a sculpture of some sort.
 Hammering gold was a technique frequently used in crafting Byzantine jewelry and sculptures.
 Then again, maybe our guy’s imagining himself in his own mosaic, instead. We’ll leave that
particular choice up to you.
 And here’s where his imagination takes over. Because art sticks around for such a long time, it
can have many audiences. Think about the last museum you went to. How many people passed by
one picture in the time you were there?
 It’s a weird sort of popularity, but our speaker seems to want it. He imagines his audience as a
"drowsy Emperor." Hey, if you’re daydreaming, you might as well reach for the stars.

Lines 30-32

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 Moving deeper into a reverie about his future form, our speaker loops back to the first stanza of
the poem.
 Envisioning himself "set upon a golden bough," our speaker seems to suggest that he’d like to be
a bird. Unlike the birds of nature, however, which fall in "dying generations," he’ll be a golden
bird. Nature transforms into art over the course of the poem.

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 This time, though, the birds actually have someone to listen to their song. The "lords and ladies of
Byzantium" will turn to the golden bird as a touchstone, something that allows them to connect
the past, present, and future.
 Because art lasts for all time, it can be relevant to all ages. That, friends, is immortality. It’s not a
bad gig if you can get it.

In 1922 Yeats was appointed to the Senate of the newly formed Irish Free State, where he served
until 1928. He was awarded the Novel Prize in Literature in 1923, mostly on the merit of his
plays. However, it is Yeats's later poetry, especially The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael
Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928) (in which “Sailing to Byzantium” appears),
and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), that made him one of the most influential and
important twentieth-century poets writing in English. He died in France in 1939.

Plot and Main Characters

“Sailing to Byzantium,” a lyric poem, has neither conventional characters nor plot. The poem
consists of four open-form stanzas and features a speaker who may be thought of, as Richard
Ellmann suggests, as “a symbol of Yeats and of the artist and of man.” The action of the poem
concerns the problem of immersing oneself in life and at the same time striving for permanence.
The opening stanza describes a state of youth, a sensuous, sometimes violent, life with emphasis
on productivity and regeneration (“That is no country for old men”), and then contrasts this
sensuality with the intellectual and the transitory with the permanent: “Caught in that sensual
music all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect.”

Acknowledging both his mortality and desire for transcendence, the speaker prepares his soul for
the body's death by “studying / Monuments of its own magnificence” and “sail[s] the seas and
come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” In Byzantium, the speaker hopes to fuse the “sensual
music” with the “monuments,” that is, the passing pleasures with transcendent art. In 1931, Yeats
wrote that he chose to “symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city”
because “Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual
philosophy.” In Byzantium, the speaker encounters a world of timeless art and spirituality,
represented by sages and “God's holy fire” with flames and smoke twisting like a “perne in a
gyre,” an allusion to Yeats's cyclical theory of history and transcendence. The speaker wishes to
lose his heart, “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and have his soul gathered
“into the artifice of eternity” so that “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from
any natural thing.” In the last stanza, the speaker imagines himself transformed into a work of art
that transcends the passing of time, a Byzantine work of art, a golden bird that is animate in that it
sings to the Emperor, but inanimate as a work of art that will survive generations.

Major Themes

The source of several major themes in “Sailing to Byzantium” can be found in Yeats's 1925
work, A Vision (1925), in which he develops his cyclical theory of life, based in part on Yeats's
understanding of the Hegelian dialectic and his reading of Blake's prophetic poetry. In “Sailing to
Byzantium,” Yeats used the concept of the spiraling gyre to suggest that opposite concepts—such
as youth and age, body and soul, nature and art, transient and eternal—are in fact mutually
dependent upon each other. Yoked together by the gyre and the poem itself, the mutually
interpenetrating opposites—thesis and antithesis—resolve in such a way as to produce a synthesis

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that contains a larger truth. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” the golden bird contains elements of
transitory nature—namely, its music—with the transcendent qualities of timeless art.

The tension between art and life is an essential dichotomy in Yeats's poetry. Yeats envisioned the
artist as a kind of alchemist, whose transformative art obscures the distinction between “the
dancer and the dance,” as he wrote in the poem, “Among School Children.” For Yeats, only
through imagination could the raw materials of life be transformed into something enduring. Thus
“Sailing to Byzantium” has at least two symbolic readings, both mutually interdependent upon the
other. The poem is both about the journey taken by the speaker's soul around the time of death
and the process by which, through his art, the artist transcends his own mortality.

An important symbol in “Sailing to Byzantium” is the ancient city of Byzantium, which in the
fifth and sixth centuries was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the center of art and
architecture. Byzantine art did not attempt to represent human forms, and so, for Yeats,
Byzantium symbolized a way of life in which art is celebrated as artifice. Furthermore,
Byzantium represents what Yeats, in A Vision, calls “Unity of Being,” in which “religious,
aesthetic and practical life were one” and art represented “the vision of a whole people.”

Critical Reception

By 1928, the year he published “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats was, in his own words, “a smiling
sixty-year-old public man” with a senate career and the Nobel Prize behind him. With the
publication of that poem in the volume The Tower, Yeats's contemporaries noticed a change of
style and maturity, as the poems in that volume not only reflected Yeats's satisfaction with a long,
fulfilling life but also, according to A. Norman Jeffares, a “sharpened apprehension, brought by
Ireland's civil war, of approaching conflagration in the world, and, by approaching age, of ruin
and decay.”

Yeats's contemporaries generally agreed that his technique was stunning, but viewed his ideas on
poetry and history to be eccentric. An early critic, T. Sturge Moore, told Yeats in 1930 that he
found the first three stanzas “magnificent” but believed the fourth to “weaken to an ineffective
and unnecessary repetition of ‘gold’ four times in as many lines, … implying that the contrast
between artificial and natural forms is fundamental, which is obviously not the case.” In 1931,
Harriet Monroe, the publisher of the influential Poetry magazine, likened the emotional quality of
the poem's language and imagery to that of Shakespeare's drama, especially the monologues of
Lear.

Since its publication, critics have agreed that “Sailing to Byzantium” masterfully marries structure
and content. For Yeats's biographer, Richard Ellmann, “Sailing to Byzantium” represents a poetic
“climax” for Yeats, “creating richer and more multitudinous overtones than before.” He writes
that Yeats attempted “to evoke a symbol—in the poem as a whole and also in the symbolic bird
spoken of in the poem—which would have a life of its own into which he could put himself.” Not
only does “Sailing to Byzantium” have “as many levels as the Empire State Building,” writes
Donald A. Stauffer, but its “lyrics are inexhaustible […] Every new reading adds a new pleasure
or a new thought.” James Lovic Allen likewise applauds the “consummate mastery of multiple-
leveled symbolic structures” that demand reading “on both the spiritual level and the aesthetic
level simultaneously.” Since its publication, critics have recognized “Sailing to Byzantium” to be
an important poem by a leading modernist poet.

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SAILING TO BYZANTIUM ANALYSIS

“Sailing to Byzantium” is an endlessly interpretable poem, and suggests endlessly fascinating

comparisons with other important poems—poems of travel, poems of age, poems of nature,
poems featuring birds as symbols. (One of the most interesting is surely Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale,” to which this poem is in many ways a rebuttal: Keats writes of his nightingale,
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down”; Yeats,
in the first stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium,” refers to “birds in the trees” as “those dying
generations.”) It is important to note that the poem is not autobiographical; Yeats did not travel to
Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople in the fourth century A.D., and later renamed
Istanbul), but he did argue that, in the sixth century, it offered the ideal environment for the artist.
The poem is about an imaginative journey, not an actual one.

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats - 1865-1939
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Summary
“The Second Coming”
Summary of The Second Coming

 Popularity: “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, a legendary Irish poet,
is the most robbed piece of literature due to its heavily used or borrowed title, lines or
phrases. It was first published in The Dial in 1920. The poem deals with the subjects
of political, spiritual and cultural decay and regeneration. The poet prophesizes that
some sort of “the Second Coming is arriving”, and the anarchy in the world

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foreshadows it is not very far. The popularity of the poem rests on the fact that it has
resonated through all the cultural decays across the globe since its publication.
 “The Second Coming” as Commentary on the Changing World: As this poem is
about the changing nature of the world, the poet says that the world is constantly
altered through violence and chaos. Comparing the world with the widening gyre, he
says that this changing world is made up of interlocking circles constantly spinning
and expanding to catalyze their existence. He argues that, due to this change,
humanity has become disillusioned, and has loosened away from its center. This
distance, in turn, liberates the people from their ancient traditions and conventions.
Also, it pushes them into a new era of freedom and new opportunities. That is why the
center of the world is falling apart, which will eventually lead humanity to more
destructive situations. Hence, the poet also prophesizes that there’s a monster looming
in the future, which is constantly paving its way to reach this dismantled world.
 Major Themes of “The Second Coming”: Violence, prophecy, and meaninglessness
are the major themes foregrounded in this poem. Yeats emphasizes that the present
world is falling apart, and a new ominous reality is going to emerge. The idea of “the
Second Coming” is not Biblical. To him, the Second Coming is not a savior that is
going to restore the business of humanity, but a sphinx that will add more to the
agony and destruction of the world. He argues that people are moving away from the
center and there is no hope in the future due to the chaos. And those, who wish for
any spiritual guidance, are living in fool’s paradise.

Analysis of Literary Devices in “The Second Coming”

Literary devices are tools the writers use to convey emotions, ideas, and beliefs. With the
help of these devices, they make their texts appealing to the reader. Yeats has also employed
some literary devices in this poem to prophesize the future of the world. The analysis of some
of the literary devices used in this poem has been stated below.

1. Metaphor: There are several metaphors used in this poem such as, “the Falcon” and
“the falconer,” which stands for the world and the controlling force that directs
humanity. Similarly, “the blood-dimmed tide” stands for waves of violence, while
“the rough beast” stands for “the Second Coming.”
2. Hyperbole: Hyperbole is a device used to exaggerate a statement for the sake of
emphasis. The poet has used hyperbole in the tenth line where it is stated as, “Surely
the Second Coming is at hand,” as if the beast is about to enter the world in just a few
hours or days.
3. Consonance: Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such
as the sound of /r/ in “Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”
4. Allusion: Allusion is an indirect reference to a person, place, thing or idea of a
historical, cultural political or literary significance in a literary piece. The use
of illusion in the fourth line of the second stanza is “the spiritus” It is an illusion to the
Latin phrase meaning the world’s soul. “The Second Coming” is also a
biblical allusion to the return of Christ.
5. Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such
as the sound of /s/ in “Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the” and /n/ sound in
“The darkness drops again; but now I know.”
6. Symbolism: Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them
symbolic meanings that are different from the literal meanings. Yeats has used

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multiple symbols such as, “falcon” as the symbol of the world, “desert birds” are the
symbols of approaching death and “the Second Coming” symbolizes the indifference.
7. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of same vowel sounds in the same line such
as the sound of /i/ in “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” and /e/ sound in
“The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
8. Imagery: Imagery means the use of images of the five senses intended to make the
readers understand the writer’s feelings and emotions. Yeats has used imagery to
present the vivid and clear picture of the ominous beast such as, “A shape with lion
body and the head of a man”, “somewhere in sands of the desert” and “Is moving its
slow thighs.”

The literary analysis shows that Yeats has skillfully used some literary devices to discuss the
reason why the world is going astray. The effective use of these devices and clarity
of subject matter have made the poem thoughtful for the readers.

Analysis of Poetic Devices in “The Second Coming”

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the
analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

1. Stanza: A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There are only two stanzas in this
poem.
2. Rhyme Scheme: The poem follows ABBA CDDC throughout the poem with
iambic pentameter.
3. Iambic Pentameter: It is a type of meter consisting of five iambs. This poem
comprises iambic pentameter For Example, “Turning
and turning in the widening gyre.”

Theme of the poem

The Relationship Between Art and Politics
Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically linked and used his writing to express
his attitudes toward Irish politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural history.
From an early age, Yeats felt a deep connection to Ireland and his national identity, and he
thought that British rule negatively impacted Irish politics and social life. His early
compilation of folklore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed by British
rule, and his early poems were Odes to the beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. This
work frequently integrated references to myths and mythic figures, including Oisin and
Cuchulain. As Yeats became more involved in Irish politics—through his relationships with
the Irish National Theatre, the Irish Literary Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and
Maud Gonne—his poems increasingly resembled political manifestos. Yeats wrote numerous
poems about Ireland’s involvement in World War I (“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”
[1919], “A Meditation in Time of War” [1921]), Irish nationalists and political activists (“On
a Political Prisoner” [1921], “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” [1933]),
and the Easter Rebellion (“Easter 1916” [1916]). Yeats believed that art could serve a
political function: poems could both critique and comment on political events, as well as
educate and inform a population.
The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History
Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical
system that emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events
have been preordained. Yeats had rejected Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong study

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of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism, philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound
interest in the divine and how it interacts with humanity. Over the course of his life, he
created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to
spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that
history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the human
and divine interact. A Tone of historically determined inevitability permeates his poems,
particularly in descriptions of situations of human and divine interaction. The divine takes on
many forms in Yeats’s poetry, sometimes literally (“Leda and the Swan” [1923]), sometimes
abstractly (“The Second Coming” [1919]). In other poems, the divine is only gestured to (as
in the sense of the divine in the Byzantine mosaics in “Sailing to Byzantium” [1926]). No
matter what shape it takes, the divine signals the role of fate in determining the course of
history.

The Transition from Romanticism to Modernism

Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a
modernist poet. When he began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical,
romantic style, and they focused on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing
follows the conventions of romantic verse, utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metric patterns,
and poetic structures. Although it is lighter than his later writings, his early poetry is still
sophisticated and accomplished. Several factors contributed to his poetic evolution: his
interest in mysticism and the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically
complex subjects. Yeats’s frustrated romantic relationship with Maud Gonne caused the
starry-eyed romantic idealism of his early work to become more knowing and cynical.
Additionally, his concern with Irish subjects evolved as he became more closely connected to
nationalist political causes. As a result, Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore to
contemporary politics, often linking the two to make potent statements that reflected political
agitation and turbulence in Ireland and abroad. Finally, and most significantly, Yeats’s
connection with the changing face of literary culture in the early twentieth century led him to
pick up some of the styles and conventions of the modernist poets. The modernists
experimented with verse forms, aggressively engaged with contemporary politics, challenged
poetic conventions and the literary tradition at large, and rejected the notion that poetry
should simply be lyrical and beautiful. These influences caused his poetry to become darker,
edgier, and more concise. Although he never abandoned the verse forms that provided the
sounds and rhythms of his earlier poetry, there is still a noticeable shift in style and tone over
the course of his career.
Motifs
Irish Nationalism and Politics
Throughout his literary career, Yeats incorporated distinctly Irish themes and issues into his
work. He used his writing as a tool to comment on Irish politics and the home rule movement
and to educate and inform people about Irish history and culture. Yeats also used the
backdrop of the Irish countryside to retell stories and legends from Irish folklore. As he
became increasingly involved in nationalist politics, his poems took on a patriotic tone. Yeats
addressed Irish politics in a variety of ways: sometimes his statements are explicit political
commentary, as in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in which he addresses the
hypocrisy of the British use of Irish soldiers in World War I. Such poems as “Easter 1916”
and “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” address individuals and events
connected to Irish nationalist politics, while “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan”
subtly include the idea of Irish nationalism. In these poems, a sense of cultural crisis and
conflict seeps through, even though the poems are not explicitly about Ireland. By using
images of chaos, disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an understated commentary on the

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political situations in Ireland and abroad. Yeats’s active participation in Irish politics
informed his poetry, and he used his work to further comment on the nationalist issues of his
day.
Mysticism and the Occult
Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult, and his poetry is infused with a
sense of the otherworldly, the spiritual, and the unknown. His interest in the occult began
with his study of Theosophy as a young man and expanded and developed through his
participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a mystical secret society. Mysticism
figures prominently in Yeats’s discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his
philosophical model of the conical gyres used to explain the journey of the soul, the passage
of time, and the guiding hand of fate. Mysticism and the occult occur again and again in
Yeats’s poetry, most explicitly in “The Second Coming” but also in poems such as “Sailing
to Byzantium” and “The Magi” (1916). The rejection of Christian principles in favor of a
more supernatural approach to spirituality creates a unique flavor in Yeats’s poetry that
impacts his discussion of history, politics, and love.
Irish Myth and Folklore
Yeats’s participation in the Irish political system had origins in his interest in Irish myth and
folklore. Irish myth and folklore had been suppressed by church doctrine and British control
of the school system. Yeats used his poetry as a tool for re-educating the Irish population
about their heritage and as a strategy for developing Irish nationalism. He retold entire
folktales in Epic poems and plays, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Death of
Cuchulain (1939), and used fragments of stories in shorter poems, such as “The Stolen Child”
(1886), which retells a parable of fairies luring a child away from his home, and “Cuchulain’s
Fight with the Sea” (1925), which recounts part of an epic where the Irish folk hero
Cuchulain battles his long-lost son by at the edge of the sea. Other poems deal with subjects,
images, and themes culled from folklore. In “Who Goes with Fergus?” (1893) Yeats
imagines a meeting with the exiled wandering king of Irish legend, while “The Song of
Wandering Aengus” (1899) captures the experiences of the lovelorn god Aengus as he
searches for the beautiful maiden seen in his dreams. Most important, Yeats infused his
poetry with a rich sense of Irish culture. Even poems that do not deal explicitly with subjects
from myth retain powerful tinges of indigenous Irish culture. Yeats often borrowed word
selection, verse form, and patterns of Imagery directly from traditional Irish myth and
folklore.

When You Are Old

by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

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And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Summary of When You Are Old

 Popularity of “When You Are Old”: William Butler Yeats, a famous Irish poet
wrote, “When You Are Old”. It was first published in 1893 and is one of the famous
love poems. It comprises the poet’s eternal love for his beloved. However, its
popularity lies in the description of the poet’s meditation on catastrophic onslaught of
time.
 “When You Are Old” As a Representative of Love: As this poem is about love,
the speaker directly addresses his beloved and invites her to throw her mind forward
to the future when she will not be attractive, beautiful or glamorous, but a fair old lady
poking by the fire. He asks her to recall her past youth, how many people would have
loved and admired her for her startling looks and eye-catching features. However, he
mentions that there was only one person who loved her sincerely despite knowing the
transient qualities of her beauty. He adds that he could have been the right choice for
her, but she rejected him. As their love would not last, and she would surely regret her
decision for the rest of her life. What enchants the reader is the way he has drawn a
metaphorical comparison to show his genuine love for his mistress.
 Major Themes in “When You Are Old”: Love, rejection and time are the major
themes of this poem. To express pure love, the poet invites her to have a glance at the
time when she will be old and will not be surrounded by fake lovers. Therefore, she
should understand his feelings toward her. Throughout the poem, he tries to make her
realize that her existing company loves her for her beauty, but one day she would
grow old and regret lost opportunities.

Analysis of Literary Devices in “When You Are Old”

Literary devices are tools the writers use to create meanings in their texts to enhance the
poems or stories and connect the readers with the real message of the text. Yeats has also
used some literary devices in this poem to illustrate the meanings of love. The analysis of
some of the literary devices used in this poem has been given below.

 Imagery: Imagery is used to make readers perceive things with their five senses. He
has used imagery in the poem such as, “And nodding by the fire, take down this
book”, “And bending down beside the glowing bars” and “And paced upon the
mountains overhead”.
 Symbolism: Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them
symbolic meanings different from literal meanings. Here, “grey and weak and full of
sleep” symbolizes an elderly woman. “Fire” is the symbol of fiery love she once
rejected and “mountain overhead” and “crowd of stars” stand for things she knows
exists but she can’t reach them.
 Consonance: Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such
as the sound of /n/ in “And bending down beside the glowing bars” and “And paced
upon the mountains overhead”.

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 Alliteration: Alliteration is a repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of the
letters in the same line. For example, the sound of /h/ in “And hid his face amid a
crowd of stars”.
 Personification: Personification is to give human characteristics to inanimate objects.
For example, “Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled”, as if the love is human and it
can move.
 Enjambment: It is defined as a thought in a verse that does not come to an end at
a line break; instead, it rolls over to the next line. Such as,

“And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

Analysis of Poetic Devices in “When You Are Old”

Poetic and literary devices are the same, but a few are used only in poetry. Here is the
analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem.

 Stanza: A stanza is a poetic form of some lines. There are three stanzas in this poem
with each comprising of four lines.
 Quatrain: A quatrain is a four-lined stanza borrowed from Persian poetry. Here, each
stanza is quatrain as the first one and the second one.
 Rhyme Scheme: The poem follows the ABBA rhyme scheme in all the stanzas.
 End Rhyme: End Rhyme is used to make the poem melodious. The poet has used end
rhyme in this poem such as in the first stanza the rhyming words are, “sleep”, “deep”,
“book”, “look.”
 Iambic Pentameter: It is a type of meter consisting of five iambs. This poem
comprises iambic For Example, “When you are old and grey and full of sleep.”

When You Are Old Summary

"When You Are Old" is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In the poem, which is
published in Yeats's second collection, The Rose (1893), the speaker asks someone to think
ahead to old age, strongly suggesting that the addressee will eventually regret being unwilling
to return the speaker's love. Most critics agree that the poem is about Yeats's relationship with
Maud Gonne, an Irish actress and nationalist. Though the poem is one of the best-loved of
Yeats's works, many people don't realize that it is based on a much earlier sonnet by Pierre de
Ronsard, a 16th century French Renaissance poet.
The speaker directly addresses someone else and asks this person to imagine old age, a time
of grey hair and general tiredness. The speaker tells the addressee to pick up this book when
they're falling asleep by the fire, and to read from it, while dreaming of the soft and shadowed
look the addressee's own eyes used to have.
The addressee should also think of how many people loved the addressee's gracefulness and
beauty, whether or not these people were sincere in their love. But there was one man who
genuinely loved the addressee's emotional and spiritual restlessness. This man also loved the
sadness that showed on the addressee's face as it changed over the years.
The speaker imagines the addressee bending down to tend to a fire and muttering sadly about
how love ran away to walk restlessly in the mountains and hide among the stars of the night.
“When You Are Old” Themes

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Love and Beauty
“When You Are Old” is a bittersweet poem that reveals the complexities of love. The poem
is generally taken to be addressed to Maud Gonne, an Irish actress with whom Yeats was
infatuated throughout his life (which is why we're using male and female pronouns in this
guide). That said, the poem can also be interpreted more broadly, without specifying the
names or genders of either the speaker or the addressee. In any case, the poem argues in favor
of a kind of love based not on physical appearances—which fade over time—but on the
deeper beauty of the soul.
In the first stanza, the speaker asks the addressee to think ahead to a time when she will be
old, tired, and grey. Then, says the speaker, the addressee will look back nostalgically on her
life to date, thinking of her youthful looks and vigor as though they were a dream.
Aging
The poem has a fairly bleak outlook on aging, with the speaker suggesting to the addressee
that life will grow sadder and lonelier as youthful beauty fades away. The speaker links the
enjoyment of life to the addressee's youth, as the poem argues that the addressee should make
the most of the younger years she has still has left. Through the speaker's words to the
addressee, the poem argues that time passes by quicker than people realize—and that once
youth is gone, it is truly irretrievable.
The poem takes an imagined look into the future day-to-day existence of the addressee. It
shows a picture that contrasts sharply with the vibrant and vivacious life that this woman
seems to have been living at the time of the poem’s writing. Old age is depicted in the first
stanza as a time of passivity. The addressee is falling asleep by the fire, grey-haired and
lacking energy. The speaker here implores her to “take down this book”—likely the
collection of poems that holds this poem—and read, in order to be reminded of her former
glories.
In the second stanza, the speaker characterizes the addressee's youth in terms of how loved
she is, suggesting that youth is a kind of attractive force that brings other people into its orbit.
According to the speaker, people love the addressee's “glad grace” and “beauty.” But the
poem then links aging to sorrow, suggesting that the addressee's “changing face” over the
years will reflect an internal sadness that comes with the loss of youth. In the third stanza, the
loss of youth also seems to cut short any possibility of love. Love, in this future scenario, has
“fled” from the addressee; like youthful looks, love is a kind of present absence in the
addressee's old age—that is, it's felt deeply because of the fact that it’s no longer there.
Of course, this is all viewed through the perspective of the speaker. It’s not necessarily true
that the addressee will have to spend old age looking back nostalgically on her youth. But the
poem seems to imply that this is likely, given how—in the speaker’s opinion—the
addressee's current life is governed by things that will vanish over time (beauty and youthful
energy). All in all, “When You Are Old” paints a pessimistic picture of old age, suggesting
that it’s a time of melancholic reflection and regret, particularly for those who focused on
shallow forms of love in their youth. It’s up to the reader, of course, to decide whether this
argument rings true—especially as the poem was written by a young man.
Literary and Historical Context of “When You Are Old”
Literary Context
Along with Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats is one of the foremost poets ever to come
out of Ireland. He was born in 1865 and began writing around the age of seventeen, and this
poem appears in his second collection, The Rose (1893). Yeats's influences were wide and
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diverse, including the English Romantics—figures such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats—
and the French Symbolists, such as Stephen Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. Irish mythology
and folklore were also especially formative to his work, particularly given his desire for
Ireland's political independence from England. Yeats was also interested in mysticism and the
occult.
With these influences still in mind, however, this particular poem also has one very specific
literary influence : a poem by the 16th century French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard.
Ronsard's poem, "Quand vous serez bien vielle" (which translates as "when you are very
old") is the literary prototype from which Yeats created his own poem. Both comment on
unrequited love, and in particular try to point to future literary fame and worth as impending
proof that the poems' addressees are making fundamental errors in not reciprocating the
speakers' feelings. Ronsard's poem is a sonnet, and Yeats's retains an echo of that form in the
way that the poem turns on line 7, revealing its intention to contrast the speaker's love with
the allegedly more superficial love of others. And no mention of love when it comes to Yeats
would be complete without also mentioning Maud Gonne, an Irish actress and nationalist
with whom Yeats was infatuated throughout his life. It's generally agreed by most critics that
this poem, as well as many others, is written form Yeats's perspective with Gonne as the
intended addressee.

Historical Context
Yeats was a prominent public figure, the first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was integral to the Irish Literary revival, which in turn was a key part of the Irish push for
self-autonomy and the move toward a sense of distinctly Irish culture. Indeed, Yeats's Irish
patriotism was in part the reason why so much of his early poetry is filled with references to
Irish mythology (though this poem does not contain such references). Many of his poems
were overtly political. "Easter, 1916," for example, was written in response to an Irish
uprising against British rule that was ultimately unsuccessful. Though Yeats generally
eschewed violence as a means of resistance, he had conflicting feelings about those involved
in the armed insurrection. Later in life, Yeats tried to distance himself from politics but was
frequently brought back into its orbit. In 1922, Ireland descended into civil war.
Notably, however, this poem contains no mention of any of these developing political and
historical complexities; it could almost be set in any time or place. It's perhaps a testament to
the depth of the love behind this poem that it completely ignores the historical context that
was so meaningful to Yeats in real life, focusing instead of the speaker's ideas about love and
its importance.

T. S. Eliot Biography
T. S. Eliot, American-English author, was one of the most significant poets writing in English
in the twentieth century, as well as one of the most influential critics, an interesting
playwright, editor, and publisher.

Eliot's youth
On September 26, 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, a member of
the third generation of a New England family that had come to St. Louis in 1834. Eliot's
grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, Unitarian minister and founder of schools, a university,
and charities, was the family patriarch, or leader. While carrying on a tradition of public
service, the Eliots never forgot their New England ties. T. S. Eliot claimed that he was a child

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of both the Southwest and New England. In Massachusetts he missed Missouri's dark river,
cardinal birds, and lush vegetation. In Missouri he missed the fir trees, song sparrows, red
granite shores, and blue sea of Massachusetts.

Eliot family
Henry Ware Eliot, the father of T. S. Eliot, became chairman of the board of a brick company
and served the schools and charities his father had helped found, as well as others. He
married a New Englander, Charlotte Champ. After having six children, she focused her
energy on education and legal protection for the young. She also wrote a biography, some
religious poems, and a dramatic poem (1926).
Eliot grew up within the family's tradition of service to religion, community, and education.
Years later he declared, "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me
than any part of the world." The Eliots spent summers on Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

Education of a poet
In St. Louis young Eliot received a classical education privately and at Smith Academy,
originally named Eliot Academy. He composed and read the valedictory (something that
involves a farewell) poem for his graduation in 1905. After a year at Milton Academy in
Massachusetts, he went to Harvard University in 1906. Eliot was shy and independent and he
made a good impression as a contributor and editor of the Harvard Advocate. He completed
his bachelor of arts degree in three years.
Eliot's stay at Harvard to earn a master of arts in philosophy (the study of knowledge) was
interrupted by a year at the Sorbonne (The University of Paris) in Paris, France. He returned
to Harvard in 1911 but in 1914 he went overseas again on a Harvard scholarship to study in
Germany. When World War I (1914–18; a war fought between the German-led Central
powers and the Allies: England, the United States, and France, among other nations) broke
out, he transferred to Merton College, Oxford. Ezra Pound (1885–1972), the young American
poet, discovered Eliot at Oxford. They shared a commitment to learning and poetry. After
Oxford, Eliot decided to stay in England and in 1915 married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. He
taught at Highgate Junior School for boys near London (1915–1916) and then worked for
Lloyd's Bank. While teaching, he completed his dissertation (a writing on a subject that is
required for a doctorate degree), Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H.
Bradley. The dissertation was accepted, but Eliot did not return to the United States to defend
it and therefore did not receive his doctorate.

Early poetry
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eliot tried to join the U.S. Navy but
was rejected for physical reasons. That year his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other
Observations, appeared and almost immediately became the focus for discussion and debate.
Eliot's writing style spoke to the confusion and bad feelings that World War I had created in
European and American societies. This was most effective in the poem "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock."

Critic and editor

Eliot served as literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist (in support of equality for women)
magazine, from 1917 to 1919. The back pages of the Egoist were written by a series of young

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poet-editors, and here, with the aid of Ezra Pound, the new poetry and commentary was
written. Eliot was also writing anonymous (a work where no name is given to the creator)
reviews for the London Times and publishing essays. In 1919 two of his most influential
pieces appeared. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems." Some
of his early critical essays were The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John
Dryden (1924), Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (1932), and The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (1933).

The Waste Land

While recovering from exhaustion in 1921, Eliot wrote The Waste Land, one of the most
influential and debated poems of the century. In The Waste Land, the weakening of society is
compared with a shattered wasteland. The poem proposes solutions for recreating personal
and caring communities through a variety of methods and with the joining of different
religious beliefs.
Also in 1922 Eliot founded the Criterion, a small magazine that appeared until 1939. As
author of The Waste Land and editor of the Criterion, Eliot assumed an important role in
literature in America and in Great Britain. He left Lloyd's Bank in 1925 and joined Faber and
Faber, Ltd., a publisher, eventually rising to a position of leadership there.

Religious and cultural views

In 1927 Eliot became an Anglo-Catholic and a British citizen. In After Strange Gods (1934)
Eliot took the literary ideas of his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and demonstrated
how they could apply to society. He also declared that too many freethinking Jews would
damage the kind of Christian culture he proposed. This work, along with The Idea of a
Christian Society (1939) and Notes toward a Definition of Culture (1948), indicated Eliot's
stand against the pluralistic society (a society that allows freedom of religion) of most
Western democracies.
Ash Wednesday (1930) is the title of this six-part poem that refers to the beginning of Lent.
The poem focuses on a person who is isolated from God and who sets out to find Him. The
poem shows the prayer and progress of this person. The tone of sincerity and passionate
yearning, of anxiety and some joy, was new for Eliot.

Four Quartets
In 1936 Eliot concluded his Poems 1909–1935 with "Burnt Norton," the first of what became
the Four Quartets. "Burnt Norton," in which Eliot makes use of his repeated rose-garden
symbolism, grew out of a visit to a deserted Gloucestershire mansion. This poem brought
about three others, each associated with a place. "East Coker" (1940) is set in the village of
Eliot's Massachusetts ancestors. The last two quartets appeared with the publication of Four
Quartets (1943). The third, "The Dry Salvages," named for three small islands off the
Massachusetts coast where Eliot vacationed in his youth; and the fourth, "Little Gidding,"
derives from a visit to the site of a religious community, where the British King Charles I
(1600–1649) paused before he surrendered and went to his death. Each of the quartets is a
separate whole that also is related to the others. The theme, developed differently, is the same
in each: One may seek or wait in any place at any time, for God is in all places at all times.
Eliot, midway through his composition of Four Quartets, published Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats (1939). Here Eliot the fabulist (a writer of fables) appeared, and his humor and
wit are demonstrated in this piece of work.
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Honor and old age
In 1947 Eliot's first wife died. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize and the British Order of
Merit, and the list of his honors continued to grow. After the Four Quartets, he committed
himself to the poetic drama with On Poetry and Poets (1957), and the editing of collections of
his poetry and plays. In 1957 Eliot married his private secretary, Valerie Fischer, and
remained married until his death on January 4, 1965, in London. His ashes were placed in St.
Michael's Church, East Coker, his ancestral village, on April 17, 1965.
Many poets and artists paid final tribute to T. S. Eliot, including Ezra Pound: "A grand poet
and brotherly friend." A committed Christian in an important age, Eliot tried to restore the
religious roots of European and American culture. His career recalls the flexible writer of the
eighteenth century.

THE LOVE SONG OF

J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
Style

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a modernistic poem that expresses the thoughts of the
title character via the following:
Conversational Language Combined With the Stylized Language of Poetry. For example, the
poem opens straightforwardly with "Let us go then, you and I." It then presents a bizarre
personification/simile with end rhyme (lines 2 and 3), comparing the evening to an anesthetized
hospital patient. End rhyme continues throughout most of the poem, as does the use of striking
figures of speech. The figures of speech generally refer in some way to Prufrock. The
anesthetized hospital patient, for example, represents the indecisiveness of Prufrock. The yellow
fog and yellow smoke of lines 15 and 16 are compared in succeeding lines to a timid cat, which
represents the timidity of Prufrock.
Variations in Line Length and Meter. Some lines contain only three words. Others contain as
many as fourteen. The meter also varies.
Shifts in the Train of Thought: The train of thought sometimes shifts abruptly, without transition,
apparently in imitation of the way the human mind works when it dreams or daydreams or reacts
to an external stimulus.
Shifts in Topics Under Discussion: The subject under discussion sometimes shifts abruptly, from
trifling matters one moment—Prufrock's bald spot, for example, or the length of his trousers—to
time and the universe the next.
Shifts From Abstract to Concrete (and Universal to Particular): The poem frequently toggles
between (1) the abstract or universal and (2) the concrete or specific. Examples of abstract
language are muttering retreats (line 5) and tedious argument of insidious intent (lines 8-9).
Examples of phrases or clauses with universal nouns arethe
muttering retreats and the women come and go. Examples of concrete language are oyster-
shells (line 7) and soot (line 19). Examples of particular (specific) language
are Michelangelo (line 14) and October (line 21).
Shifts From Obvious Allusions or References to Oblique Allusions or References: Prufrock
quotes, paraphrases, or cites historical or fictional persons, places, things, or ideas. Some of his
references are easy to fathom. For example, everyone with a modicum of education knows who
Michelangelo was (line 14). Other references are difficult to fathom. For example, few readers
realize that To Have Squeezed the Universe into a Ball (line 92) is a variation of a line written by

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poet Andrew Marvell (1621-1678). In his use of allusions, Eliot apparently wanted to show that
Prufrock was well read and retained bits and pieces of what he read in his memory, like all of
us. ..
Use of Repetition

.......Eliot repeats certain words and phrases several or many times, apparently to suggest the
repetition and monotony in Prufrock's life. Notice, for example, how often he begins a line
with And—20 times. He also repeats other words as well as phrases and clauses, including the
following:

Let us go
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo
There will be time
Do I dare
Should I presume
I have known
Would it have been worth it
Title & Meaning
The title of T.S. Eliot’s poem is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It is not literally a
song, but a modernist dramatic internal monologue. However, the poem does share the
characteristic of repeating certain lines, such as in a love song. The speaker of the poem, known
as Prufrock, is reflecting on his inability to make decisions and his trouble with women. The title
helps to communicate the central theme of Prufrock’s inadequacy socially and physically. The
epigraph of the poem, taken from Dante’s Inferno, describes a man who lives in Hell. Prufrock is
living in a kind of tortured Hell on Earth, one where he cannot confess his feelings to the one he
loves in fear of rejection. He is also painfully aware of his inadequacies, deepening his fears.
Form
The poem has a total of 131 lines. Several different words and lines are repeated
throughout the poem, which ties the poem together and creates a pattern. “Prufrock” does have a
rhyme scheme, both in line by line and within a line itself. Some examples of this include, “In the
room the women come and go/Talking ofMichelangelo”, “And time yet for a
hundred indecisions/And for a hundredvisions and revisions”, and “Have known the evenings,
mornings, afternoons/I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”. Although there is a
rhyme scheme, it is irregular but not random. The rhyme scheme gives the poem a flow and
makes it easier to read. Because the poem is a monologue, the breaks between stanzas
acknowledge the formation of different thoughts. This also contributes to the flow of the poem,
allowing the reader to follow Prufrock’s train of thought.

The Speaker
The speaker is a middle aged man by the name of J. Alfred Prufrock. He does not address
his speech to anyone because the poem is an internal monologue. Throughout the poem, Prufrock
reflects on his myriad insufficiencies and his social inadequacy which contributes to his fear of
being rejected by women. The poem begins with a description of a setting, which could indicate
that Prufrock is outside, walking to meet someone who is most likely female. He often talks about
“daring” and how there is time for “indecisions and revisions”, which indicates that there is time
to change his mind in asking this woman a particular question (perhaps if she will marry him).

Diction

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Malingers: Exaggerating or feigning illness in order to escape duty or work (line 77)

Deferential: Many different words are repeated throughout the poem. Some examples include
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes/The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle
on the window-panes” and “That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all”. This repetition
provides the poem with more flow and creates a rhythm. Repeated words and phrases makes the
poem more familiar to the reader and ties the poem together. The words are used in abstract ways
and require the reader to look deeper into the poem for its real meaning. For example, the lines
“Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening/Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains”
pushes the reader to picture the fog as a living creature; a form of personification. This makes the
poem more interesting and imaginative to read.

Tone
The tone of the poem comes across as very pessimistic and melancholy. This is supported
by lines such as, “To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’”, “With a bald spot in the middle of
my hair— [They will say: ‘How is hair is growing thin!’”]” However, as the poem continues
Prufrock becomes very resigned and defeatist. This is exemplified in lines such as “No! I am not
Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;/Am an attendant lord, one that will do/To swell a progress,
start a scene or two/Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,/Deferential, glad to be of
use,/Politic, cautious, and meticulous”.

Imagery & Symbolism

The poem is written in a way that the reader must use their sense of imagery and
symbolism to understand the real meaning behind it. For example, the lines, “Let us go, through
certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap
hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” and “For the yellow smoke that slides along
the street/Rubbing its back upon the window-panes” allow the reader to realize that the speaker of
the poem must be walking outside, as he is describing his surroundings. However, the words used
in the poem create a more intricate setting than a simple description. The connotation that these
words have also add to the themes of melancholy and pessimism within the poem and intensify
them. There are also many literary references in the poem, as found in the lines, “To say: ‘I am
Lazarus, come from the dead’”. Lazarus was the name of the man who Jesus was said to have
brought back from the dead. In addition, the line “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to
be/Am an attendant lord, one that will do” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with “attendant
lord” referring to Polonius. This communicates the idea that Prufrock comes second best and does
not see himself as someone important. He sees himself as a supporting character rather than a
main character in his own life. This continues to advance the theme of pessimism within the
poem.

Modernism

I mentioned earlier in the overview of Modernism, that Modernism is concerned with voices and
consciousness as well as placing speakers or multiple speakers. This poem really begins in a way
that might make you uncomfortable as a reader, since you're not really sure where you stand in
relation to this voice that is speaking to you. And the poem begins like this:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

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Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells
First off, who is you and I? Is it you as the reader or someone else off-stage who he's addressing?
We don't know, so we're already uncomfortable. We're not sure where we stand. And this
transition that he puts - when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized
upon a table - that's not something you'd expect right after against the sky. It sets the tone, and it's
really jarring transition, a jarring simile (that's when you compare something using the word
'like'). This opening tells us that, while we may think we're comfortable touring the city with this
guy, there is a characterization with the cheap one-night hotels and half-deserted streets - that's all
fine, but that opening tells us that we're not in Kansas anymore. We're going to have a contrast
between what we expect and what we're getting throughout the poem - the romanticized sky and
then the patient etherized upon the table. There's that basic discomfort along with the 'you and I'
and not knowing who the 'you and I' is.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Themes

Prufrockian paralysis

Paralysis, the incapacity to act, has been the Achilles heel of many famous, mostly male, literary
characters. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the paragon of paralysis; unable to sort through his waffling,
anxious mind, Hamlet makes a decisive action only at the end of "Hamlet." Eliot parodically
updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Parodically, because Prufrock's paralysis is not over murder and the state of a corrupt kingdom,
but whether he should "dare to eat a peach" (122) in front of high-society women.
Indeed, Prufrock's paralysis revolves around his social and sexual anxieties, the two usually tied
together. Eliot intended Prufrock's name to resound of a "prude" in a "frock," and the hero's
emasculation shows up in a number of physical areas: "his arms and legs are thin" (44) and,
notably, "his hair is growing thin" (41). The rest of the poem is a catalogue of Prufrock's inability
to act; he does not, "after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its
crisis" (79-80).

Temporal repetition and anxiety

Prufrock's paralysis (see Prufrockian paralysis, above) roots itself in the poem's structure. Eliot
deploys several refrains, such as "In the room the women come and go / Talking of
Michelangelo" (13-14, 35-36) and "And would it have been worth it, after all" (87, 99), to
underscore Prufrock's tendency to get stuck on a problem. Just when we believe Prufrock has
waded through the "hundred visions and revisions" (33) and come to a conclusion, he echoes a
line from the beginning of the stanza. For instance, the double "'at all'" from the woman's "'That is
not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all'" (109-110) provides the answer for Prufrock's
original question of "And would it have been worth it, after all" (no, evidently).

The two allusions to Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress" ironically comment on
Prufrock's attitude toward life. In the poem, the speaker urges his lady to have sex with him while

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they are still young and alive. Prufrock's allusions, however - "And indeed there will be time"
(23) and "Would it have been worth while, / Š To have squeezed the universe into a ball" (90, 92)
- reinforce his fixation on paralysis rather than sex. He deludes himself into thinking he has plenty
of time left, and thus does not need to act; death looms, though, however much he wants to deny
it. Sex, of course, reproduces new life while death ends it; Prufrock is somewhere in the middle,
gradually advancing on the latter.

Fragmentation

One of the key terms in Modernist literature, fragmentation is the accumulation of numerous and
varied - often to chaotic effect - signs (words, images, sounds). James Joyce's Ulysses, with
fragments as obscure as specific letters that course meaningfully throughout the novel, is possibly
the defining fragmented Modernist work. But it is so successful because the Modernists also
believed that meaning could be made out of these fragments. To quote from Eliot's "The
Wasteland," possibly the defining Modernist poem: "These fragments I have shored against my
ruins" (431). From the ruins of fragments, some coherence can be established; only this gives the
chaos of modern life hope.

Augmenting our appreciation of the fragmented Prufrock is insight into his mind and voice. His
mind is perhaps more easily represented; all over the place, interrupted by self-interrogation and
self-consciousness, looping back on itself, Prufrock's train of thought is deeply fragmented. But
his voice is Eliot's greater achievement, one that sows the seeds for "The Wasteland." What is
Prufrock's voice, poetically speaking? It is difficult to answer because it is a combination of so
many historic poetic voices. The poem comes in the form of a dramatic monologue, a form that is
usually fit for a resonant speaking voice (and one that extinguishes the personality of the poet,
too). But "Prufrock" has a chorus of fragmented voices - the epigraph to Dante, the frequent
allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and many poetic predecessors - which deny the existence of a
solo voice. This, then, is Prufrock's voice: a fragmentation of voices past and present that
somehow harmonize. In "The Wasteland," Eliot would go on to write a poem whose vocal origins
are hugely varied and hidden, much like Joyce's Ulysses.
The Waste Land
The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot,[A] widely regarded as one of the most important
poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.[2][3] Published in 1922, the
434-line[B] poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The
Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in
book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month",
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih
shantih shantih".[C]
Eliot's poem combines the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King with vignettes of
contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from
the Western canon, Buddhism, and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of
satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and
time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.
The poem is divided into five sections. The first, "The Burial of the Dead", introduces the
diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, "A Game of Chess", employs
alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes
experientially. "The Fire Sermon", the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in
relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced
by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After a fourth section, "Death by Water", which

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includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, "What the Thunder Said",
concludes with an image of judgment.
Summary of The Waste Land

1. Popularity of “The Waste Land”: The poem was written by a modern and popular
poet of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot, and was first published in 1922 in the
magazine, The Criterion. It was originally written with a blend of traditional and
cultural texts to show the post-war effects and the prevalent materialistic culture of
that time. Since then, it has become immensely popular across the globe for its
universal appeal and true representation of materialism.
2. “The Waste Land” as a Cultural and Social Critique: As it is a modern poem, it
has been written to capture the mundane approach of the modern world and the loss of
cultural norms and values. The poem reflects Eliot’s grief over the loss of cultural
legacy and the adoption of the greedy and artificial outlook toward life. The
contemporary world, according to Eliot, has lost the true spirit of traditions or culture.
The poem expresses solutions through following the blend of religious and spiritual
values of the East and the West. What stays in the minds of the readers of this poem is
the transformation of humanity toward materialistic culture and salvation through
religious values.
3. Major Themes in “The Waste Land”: The poem comprises the thoughts of the poet
and his resentment at the loss of morality, humanity, and spirituality in the modern
world. It demonstrates that the people of the contemporary world are like a body
without a soul. They are greedy to the extent that they do not have time to think about
what they have lost. The poet is sad by the after-effects of wars and events happening
in the twentieth century. Therefore, he divides his poem into sections to draw
a contrast between the modern people and humanity before them. He also explains
that the final salvation can be achieved by being more spiritual.

Analysis of the Literary Devices in “The Waste Land”

Literary devices, a significant part of any literary piece, are used to highlight hidden
meanings. Through “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot brings clarity and richness to this poem
using appropriate devices. The analysis of some of the literary devices is given below.

 Metaphor: There are three major metaphors in the poem. The first one is used in the
first stanza where it is stated, “April is the cruelest month.” April represents cruelty
and brings change which is a source of pain for the people. The second metaphor is
used in the third section of the poem, “a rat crept softly through the vegetation /
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank.” Here rat represents the war and its
aftermaths. The third extended metaphor is used in section five “Cracks and reforms
and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna
London / Unreal.” These cities show the destruction of cultural and traditional values.
 Personification: Personification is used to show human-like quality for inanimate
objects. The first is used in the third section where the poet has compared the musical
sound made by a mandolin to a whining sound of a human being. The second example
is in also in the third section where he personifies the sound of utensils coming from
the restaurant with human conversation. The third example of personification is in the
last part where he personifies river by giving it a human attribute “of sweaty oil and
tor.”

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 Irony: Irony is a figure of speech that states the opposite meanings of the situation
being discussed. Similarly, the poet presents irony in the very first line where he says
that “April is the cruelest month”. April is a pleasant spring month but has become
cruel as it brings the war memory back.
 Simile: A simile is a device used to compare two different objects. There are two
similes in the poem such as, “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne” / “Turn
upward from the desk, when the human engine waits, Like a taxi throbbing waiting.”
 Onomatopoeia: It is defined as a word which mimics the natural sounds of a thing
which makes the description interesting and appealing. Eliot has used this device in
the section of the poem called “The Fire Sermon “twit, twit, twit” / “jug, jug, jug.”
 Consonance: Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds such as the sound of
/y/ in “year to year” and /t/ sound in “twit, twit, and twit” and “time to time.”
 Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line such as the
sound of /i/ in “little life with dried “and sound of /a/ in “a wicked pack of cards” and
/o/ sound in “a crowed flowed over London Bridge.”
 Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sounds in the same
lines of the poetry such as the use of /t/ sound in “Twit, twit, twit” and /g/ in “jug, jug,
jug.

text. The analysis of some of the poetic devices used in this poem is given below.

1. Stanza: A stanza is a poetic device comprising a different number of verses. There is

no fixed stanza type in this poem. Each section has various stanzas with a varying
number of lines. The first section has four, second has three stanzas, while three have
eight and so on. However, what is interesting is that there is no proper rhyme scheme
or a set number of verses in each stanza.
2. Blank Verse: “The Waste Land” does not contain any specific rhyme scheme; it is
rather written in blank verse. Eliot has also used chunks from different songs in
a different section with specific meters to make his poem melodious at some points
and rugged at other points.
3. Enjambment: Enjambment refers to a phrase that is carried over a line-break without
a major pause. Similarly, “The Waste Land” comes up with many examples where
Eliot has continued the verses without any appropriate pause such as;

“April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

4. Scansion: It refers to a poem that does not follow a traditional or patterned meter.
Eliot has not used any set meter pattern in this poem, making it a good scansion.
5. Repetition: There is a repetition of the verses, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”
and “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” Eliot enhances the musical quality of his poem
with the help of repetition.

The analysis shows that “The Waste Land” though, seems a simple depiction of confused
modern culture, points out the miserable condition of humanity reeling under materialism.

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Quotes for Usage from “The Waste Land”

 These lines can be quoted when teaching the children about deserts and sandy areas.
There is no water in the deserts and only sand rocks. For example, “no water” would
shed light on no possibility of life and “sandy rocks” deceive weary travelers and
doesn’t offer help.

“Here is no water but only rock

Rock, and no water and the sandy rock.”

 The same lines could also be used to teach about global warming by directly referring
to the poem and its title of “The Waste Land.”

Daud Kamal Biography | Poet

Daud Kamal (4 January 1935 - 5 December 1987) (Urdu: ‫ ))داؤد کمال‬was a Pakistani poet
who wrote most of his work in the English language.[1]
His poetry was influenced by modernist English-language poets like Ezra Pound, W.B.
Yeats and T.S. Eliot.

Education and career

Born in Abbottabad in 1935, the son of Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, who served as the vice-
chancellor of the University of Peshawar,[3] and was the founder of the Jinnah College for
Women in 1964,[4] he received his early education from the Burn Hall Abbottabad there
followed by Burn Hall Srinagar, before going to the Islamia College Peshawar.[5] Then, he
completed his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Peshawar and the Tripos from
the University of Cambridge in England.[6]
For 29 years, he also had served as a teacher and chairman of University of Peshawar's
Department of English.

Death
Professor Daud Kamal died in the United States on 5 December 1987. Later he was buried in
the cemetery of the same university where he taught for 29 years, University of Peshawar's
graveyard in front of the Pashto Academy.

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