MEG01: BRITISH POETRY
TEE-JUNE, 2008
Solved Paper

Reference: The above lines have been taken from the ‘The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’ written by Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer modelled this work after Boccaccio’s Decameron but added more insight to the work by his genuine humour and humanism. In ‘General Prologue’ the poet sets the beginning of the Canterbury Tales portraying the individual characters and their class. In these lines narrator is describing the character of The Prioress, ‘Madam Eglentine’.

Context: The General Prologue marks the beginning of the 24 tales from the Canterbury Tales. The General Prologue begins with a memorable description of Spring. The immediate reason for this is that only with the return of mild weather after winter could people go on a pilgrimage. The author who is also the narrator joins other pilgrims who have gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, which is near the Town Bell. It was a place of the departure and arrival for pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Chaucer then describes the total of 30 pilgrims including the poet himself as a narrator.

The General Prologue serves as introduction to the tales, tale-tellers, host and author himself. Pilgrims belonged to the varied backgrounds and classes, and they reflected upon the class they belonged. Thus, The General Prologue acts as the mirror to 14th century English Society as seen by the author. The General Prologue also acts as Satire upon the English Society, corruption in Church, friendship and companionship, and the ecclesiastical class except the highest aristocracy and low rank folks.

Chaucer describes the Prioress as very subtly drawn, with due respect to her social rank. It was more than likely that she came from an upper-class family. Prioress was well-bred but in her eagerness to imitate courtly manners gives to vanities and foibles. He describes her beauty, dress and dainty table manners in the style of the romances. Details of her sensuous mouth, delicate nose and unveiled, broad forehead, her dress and jewels (fluted wimple, ornamental rosary and the brooch) suggest a femininity imperfectly suppressed by her holy vows.

Chaucer satires upon the worldly nature of the Madam Eglentine, the Prioress. Her French betrays her aspiration to the courtliness. Her French was not that how it is spoken in Paris but as of that of spoken in the Nun at Stratford. Chaucer employs irony by stating that Madame Eglentyne wears a brooch whose motto -love conquers all- could mean carnal or divine love. However, Chaucer describes her character in some good light as well. Prioress is described as gentle lady of high order, noble and caring.

Explanation: In the lines given to us Chaucer tells us that the Prioress had some small hounds that she used to fed with roasted meat, milk and white bread. This type of food was not available to most of the people in England. This moral apathy is deepened by the false delicacy of her sentimental charity: she was so tender of conscience that she would weep to see her pets beaten or dead.

Analysis: The General Prologue is written in Middle English, a form of English spoken from around the 12th to 15th century. Chaucer early in his career started writing in French. However, he wrote The Canterbury Tales in English as English had replaced French as the language of instruction in the elementary schools. English was also becoming the language of the government.

The General Prologue is written in narrative verse which was also the common form of writing at the times of Chaucer. The Poem is written in rhyming couplets, with every two lines rhyming with each other. The lines are structured in Iambic Pentameter, with five foots, each foot consisting of an unstressed and a stressed syllable.

Reference: These assertive and memorial lines have been taken from the autobiographical poem, ‘An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ by Alexander Pope. It was first published on 2nd Jan, 1735 just two months before the death of Dr. Arbuthnot, who was a friend to Pope.

Context: Epistle, in its original sense, means simply a letter. Over the ages the term has come to denote only formal letters which though addressed to a particular person are concerned with public rather than personal matters and express a universal feeling on a particular occasion.

Alexander Pope proved to be the most successful practitioner of the Epistle from of literature. Nature of Epistles by Alexander Pope were on moral and philosophical theme much like is idol Horace.

The Poem, An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is addressed to Dr. Arbuthnot who his friend to Pope and also his physician. The poem is composed in 1734 and written in various fragments. It can be said that Pope did not compose the poem but rather compiled it. Arbuthnot who was scientist, antiquary, a physician was also an writer himself. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club and one of the chief contributors to the ‘The Memoirs of Martinus Sriblerus’, first published in 1741. In 1700 he published an ‘Essay on Usefulness of Mathematics Learning’, which won him the reputation of a Man of Science and he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society. The poem was compiled by Pope while learning that his friend Dr. Arbuthnot was on his death bed. Poet described the poem as a memorial of their friendship. Arbuthnot died on 27th February 1735, two months after the Epistle was published.

In the Epistle, Arbuthnot is given the persona of a patient listener and a prudent advisor. He is a temperate, restraining influence on the poet’s angry impetuousity.

Although, the poem is addressed to Dr. Arbuthnot. But, it seems that the immediate provocation for the Epistle was the composition jointly by Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu titled ‘Verses Addressed to the Imitator of Horace’. Hervey’s and Mary’s Epistle described Pope as a dull poet.

Pope wrote many satires in his career and because of that he made many enemies and was ridiculed by them. Arbuthnot's word of caution ultimately establishes Pope's fearlessness and fair-mindedness. He is not bothered by the status and high office of the persons he is exposing. A reconciliation of opposite stances proves Pope's moral integrity. Poet was catholic and was physically deformed. And for the same reason, Alexander suffered his entire life. His foe and rivals would not hesitate to take a jibe at his physical deformity and faith.

The Poem is condensed autobiography on the whole course arid pattern of the Pope’s life and his motives and reasons for being a poet and satirist. Poem is mean to be an attempt of self justification and self examination. He wrote the poem in order to give his readers a new view on his contemporaries and poetasters. The Poem expresses the his dissatisfaction towards the Poetasters who wrote dull poetry and were seeking favours from pope in return of the flattery.

Explanation/Comment: The idiom ‘Damning with faint praise’ expresses the half-hearted or insincere praise acts as criticism or condemn. The concept can be found way back in works of Philospher Favorinus. With these lines poet says that critics should openly write about him, instead of hinting it, they should not be passively aggressive about his writing. He further goes to satirize Addison, who he think is good writer but is surrounded by dull writers. He compared Addison to Atticus. Addison wants to dominate the literary world,he attacks many writers but he fears being attacked by them so he attacks them timidly. The lines “Willing to wound, but afraid to strike” suggest the above.

He then says that Addison would suggest his criticism like veiled attack with faint praise, so that he cannot be blamed for the criticism or commended. He compared Addison to a timid enemy and suspicious friend.

Critical Analysis: An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is an autobiography written in Epistle form to satirize his opponents and the poetasters. It’s an reply to critics who criticised his work and used his faith as a catholic or his physical deformity to do so.

The poem is an example of his Moral essay in Horace’s style. The poem is written in a closed Heroic Couplet, rhyming in pair of AA BB CC DD etc. The lines are formed in an Iambic Pentameter.

Pope’s style is satirical and essentially poetical. It is poetical because of it imaginative quality and vivid imagery. And, also because of his command over the heroic couplet. This poem is an attack on both critics and detractors and a defence of his own character and career.

The Poem Lycidas by John Milton is written in the form of classical pastoral elegy. The Poem Lycidas first appeared in the 1638 collection of elegies entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago, commemorating the death of Edward King. Edward King was a colleague of John Milton at Cambridge who drowned in shipwreck in 1637.

Milton who had not been very close to Edward King used the occasion to reflect upon his own current emotional conflicts, specifically about the poetry. King who like Milton, had apparently devoted his life to the poetry, becomes the bases of Milton’s searching questions on the worth of such life, in the face of unpredictability of the death.

The two poets have been imagined as shepherd or a pastor in the poem, following the conventions of the classical pastoral, tending the arts of poetry, and Milton’s lament is that such a profession is futile if the muses of poetry cannot guard their shepherds.

What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,
And strictly mediate the thankles Muse,
Were it not better don as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?

He continues his lament when Phoebus (Greek God Appolo) interrupts the lament to console the poet, that fame achieved through poetry lingers beyond the mortal life. This becomes the basis for consolation, which ends with the poet’s celebration of Lycidas’ life and fame. What is significant about the consolation is that is shifts registers, from the classical allusions to Christian muthology- as if Milton deliberately used the former in the preceding part of the poem to discuss the death and sorrow that it brings, but finds life only in the later.

The Poem goes on to describe the heavenly bliss that is Lysidas’ fortune after death. Again here we see how Milton is clearly turning to Christianity as the superior form of belief, for the rewards of the afterlife. However, the moment of the true consolation comes only when St. Peter speaks in wrath at the indulgent ways of those who live life without either religion or poetry. Milton is drawing on two traditions of allegorisation of the shepherd:

1. The classical, where shepherds are poets.
2. The Christian, in which shepherds are spiritual and religious leaders.

Thus, in the poem, the shepherd represent both poets and religious guides, and is envisioning the poet with combination of these both roles that Milton is most comfortable with.

The Poem weaves several themes together: mortality as inevitable, the futility of the poetic ambitions and the transience of the worldly pleasures in the face of mortality, the guarantee of the spiritual immortality within Christianity, and the need to promote this as superior form of immortality to that offered by classical thought and literature. There is persistent impulse in the poem to find a perfect mix of the two traditions.

It is very evident from the lines in poem that Milton used this Elegy as an occasion to reflect upon his struggle between classical and biblical thoughts. The various movements in poem explores with classical pastoral beliefs, and end with a more or less comprehensively Christian conclusion to the emotional problem that Milton negotiates in the poem.

Thomas Shadwell, the target of the satire in Mac Flecknoe, was born in 1642, and thus younger more than 24 years to John Dryden. He was a dramatist and professed imitator of Ben Jonson. His witty talk and amusing writing made him popular.

Professional rivalry between Dryden and the younger Shadwell is easy to imagine. Dryden's appointment as Poet Laureate in 1668 may have made Shadwell envious. Ironically, Shadwell succeeded Dryden as the Poet Laureate in 1685.

Shadwell had often sneered at Dryden, a senior and superior poet. But the Shadwell of Mac Fleclcnoe is fictional or mythical. Its derivation from real experience is only like all other derivations of fiction from fact.

The comic imagination of Dryden created, in Mac Flecknoe, a mock-heroic fantasy. Shadwell is almost an excuse for the poem.

'Mac Flecknoe' means 'Son of Flecknoe'. Flecknoe is the historical Richard Flecknoe believed to have died in the same year (1678) as Mac Flecknoe was composed. Dryden found the connection between a bad poet and Flecknoe natural. The name had become a literary or fictional synonym for a poetaster and dullard.

A mock-heroic epic framework of the poem means that it is a satire with narrative form. Mac Flecknoe presents the imaginary coronation in the pseudo-literary sphere. In the Poem Flecknoe is the poet-ruler of the kingdom of Nonsense. Once, Flecknoe decided to find a worthy successor to his throne. And, of eveyone he chooses Shadwell.

Shadwell is found the fittest of the sons 'to reign, and wage immortal war with wit'. Notice how 'reign' and 'wage immortal war' are playfully misapplied to create mock-heroic effect. A hero reigns, wages and wins immortal wars. A mock-hero wages 'war with wit', and the poem of his creator makes him 'immortal' as really a villain.

Flecknoe finds Shadwell’s merits, which are actually faults, include his use of repetition. He realises that his inheritor is even more duller than him. Flecknoe chooses that Shadwell coronation will done at the ‘Nursery’ which is the London Theatre to help students of drama. This is very opposite of Ben Jonson whom the Shadwell used to advocate much about, for Jonson would never study and teach at the London theatre.

With the news of Shadwell’s Coronation the dullest of poets come out for proclaiming the Shadwell as successor. Shadwell arrives at the Augustun City (London) with Flecknoe for his coronation. Flecknoe tell his son that he is good at at encouraging dullness and ignorance and that he should continue do it. Flecknoe also tells his son that he would have not work much hard to do because he is very natural at it. This implies that Shadwell will become a bad poet like Ogleby, and not like Jonson. Before Flecknoe could finish his prophecy, he falls down through a trap-door and the his crown falls upn his son, that is Shadwell, the new King of Nonsense.

William Blake was a man of vision who saw ultimate truth at the moments of great illumination. Vision is for him the great secret of life. His entire work – poetry or painting – is an attempt to develop this faculty of vision so that man may see to understand and thereby forgive and act rightly.

Blake’s poetry and paintings are didactic. He wanted people to free themselves from conventions and tradition and depend on their own intuitions to realize their potential. The mystical tone, the symbol, the revolutionary ideas, the newness of his art made people think that he was lunatic. He was more revolutionary in the themes, diction and the techniques than Burns or Wordsworth. But, his genius was not recognised in his lifetime.

Blake’s view on politics, religion, literature and science were revolutionary. He could not accept the prevailing culture of the eighteenth century. Blake was attracted by revolutions. He was eighteen when the Declaration of Independence by American Colonies inspired the idealist all over the europe. He despised tyranny of every sort. Although, did not develop a coherent political theory, he wanted freedom and love for all. Blake hated the traditional Christianity. The Romantics attempted a re-evaluation of the Christian values after the French revolution. Some Romantics sad that godless philosophers fomented the Revolution. But, Blake believed that all the churches are kind of prison.

One could find four levels of meaning in his poetry. Literal, Moral, Allegorical and Analogical.

Although, Blake had lived in the neo-classical age of the poetry, he was out of sympathy with its poetic themes, forms and techniques. He sought new verse forms and new techniques. He went to the Elizabethan and early seventeenth century poets, and the other eighteenth century writers outside the main stream poetic tradition of Alexander Pope and Dr. Samuel Johnson for his lyric models.

‘Songs of Innocence’ and ‘Songs of Experience’ are some of Blake’s major works. We have seen Blake’s use of symbols in ‘The Lamb’ , ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Tyger’ and other poems. We have also seen the examples of the compressed or consise statemnets in his poems. He developed these and integrated them into elaborate system of his own.

Blake provide with a good example of the romantic revolt against the traditional ideas. We hace seen that he is opposed to the mechanic view of the universe, and to the tyranny of political systems. He has created a strange, even a private, mythology and re-interpreted Christianity to suit his opinions. There was a tendency amongst the romantics to pursue the truth in new way. In their quest for ultimate meanings, the romantic emphasised the work of art. Blake was an outstanding example of this new approach to find out the ultimate truth.

However, Blake was almost unknown as a poet in his lifetime. Three decades after his death, the Pre-Raphaelites regarded him as precursor to the Romantic poetry.

Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-53) was born on 27th October, 1914 at Swasnea, Wales. Fern Hill and Poem in October two of his famous poems, suggest that his childhood was happy.

He was most conscious craftsmen after Eliot, he allowed a dream-like association of images, many of them taken from childhood memories, to form the connecting thread on which a poem was to be hung. His innovations like Hopkins are verbal and textural more than structural. Thomas’ physicality, his musical sounds and visual imagery and his contempt for respectabilty magnetised American poetry leading to legendary success of Ginsberg’s reading of Howl in San Fransico in 1955.

Let us discuss the use of imagery in few of his Poems below:

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Dylan Thomas has used the imagery of Sea, crying gulls, breaking waves,rise of the dead, biblical ideas in the poem. Sea imagery in the first stanza depicts the death and biblical idea that the dead will be created again after sinking in the sea of death and they will be recreated on the Judgment day. Crying gulls and breaking waves are example of sound imagery in the poem. The major imagery which is in the title of the poem ‘And death shall have no dominion’ is that death being powerful is not that powerful to control everything is also reference to the biblical notion that is adapted from St. Paul’s epistle to Romans, chapter 6 and verse 9.

Poem In October

The poem celebrates the poet’s own birthday. Birth, life and death are simultaneously present in his imagination and the urge to transcend time and defeat death in art or poetry in intense and paramount in the poem.

The Poem presents a ritual, sacramental picture of the nature by using phrases “the heron priested shore” and “water praying”. The scene in made vivid and concrete with use of phrase “harbour and neighbour wood” in recalling Laugharne. The “water-bird, and the bird of the winged trees flying my name” is sort of self-protection or the identification with the nature. The phrase “a shower of all my days” is mixing the past and the present memory with perception. “Gates closing as the town awakes” imply rebirth on his birthday. In the second stanza “the bird of the winged trees flying my name” may simply mean birds flying above the waves. “Dylan” in English means “High Tide”.

Sunshine and rain symbolise childhood and youth, past and present. The phrase “ The tall tales beyond the border” means childhood days of Swasnea and Fern-hill.

Fern Hill

Fern Hill, the poem, derives its title from the name of a farm which was home of the poet’s aunt, Anne Jones, whose death he mourned in an another poem.

In the Poem phrases like “all the sun long, “all the moon long” show how a child measures time. “Time let me hail and climb...” is to mean, play like child.

In striking phrases like “once below time, the rivers of the windfall light” “once upon a time” is adapted. This is not merely unconventional. It emphasizes that man is subject to time. The phrase “river of light” is metaphorical. The light flowing as in river. The word “windfall” suggests that the splendour of these rivers of light is windfall, an unexpected prize.

The second stanza uses words, like Sabbath and holy to give a religious dimension to the boyhood experience of vacation on the farm. In the third stanza, “fire green as grass” is queer expression, green suggesting intensity and vitality. “Adam and maiden” suggests that the boy thinks of Eve as a maiden. His world was like the garden of Eden before the original sin was committed, or the forbidden fruit tasted.

“I sang in my chains like sea”, is implying the simile of the sea. The sea is chained to the moon and the sun, and sings in its waves and tides. The poet is like the sea, the sea is eternal and so is the art of poetry.

The term Movement Poetry, generally refer to this group of loosely linked poets such as Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Thomas Gunn, Philip Larkin, etc. It was a reactionary movement in the sense that these poets share a mutual dislike for their immediate predecessors such as T.S. Eliot,Ezra Pound,Auden and Dylan Thomas in poetry.

The Movement poets were antagonistic towards Eliot because much of his work is too clever and too allusive to be understood by the common man. And,so was Auden, and for almost the same reasons. Auden's work again is intellectually demanding although in a manner different from Eliot's. It was too political. Dylan Thomas, too, went out of favour with the Movement, but for entirely different reasons. There was too much of excess in Thomas’s work. His poems were too Spontaneous, too full of emotion to be considered mature.

In particular, the new generation of poets was averse to the romantic concept of the poet being a special person in any way.

With Philip Larkin and Movement poets, the identity of the poet is stripped of the glamour and the poet becomes an ordinary man talking about ordinary things in language that – though versified –sound quite prosaic. As a human being, the poet is no way special, nor is there any reason to glorify his life. This is Philip Larkin’s attitude in poem after poem. Even Childhood, which is traditionally depicted as ideal, golden period, is portrayed as dull and uninteresting. Larkin is not like the romantic poets who celebrate the inncocence of the child and intimations of immortality during childhood.

Let’s see this in few of his Poems below:

I Remember, I Remember

In the poem, Childhood is remembered as one bleak period when nothing, seems to have happened. The focus in Larkin’s poem remain ordinary, without any surprises. There is no epiphanic moments, the graph of life follows a straight line, never rising to crest or falling into a trough.

Toads

The common man according to Philip Larkin, does not go about killing dragons, he leads a quiet, uneventful life. Time and again he presents himself as a workday, middle-class man who has few interesting experiences to either recall or anticipate. Real life comprises not dreams and fancies but hard work which brings in the money and comfort of life. So in poem, Larkin says that one has to work for a living and there is no escape from Toad Work.

Toads Revisited

This poem reiterates the theme of hard work and labour. Even if the work is tedious, it is essential as it makes life bearable and helps one pass time which otherwise would hang heavy. The idea that Larkin tries to present is that life can be meaningful even if it is not spectacular. Besides, there is an internal wealth that is more than adequate compensation for the hard work.

Metaphysical poetry is a term associated to the 17th century poets whose works are marked by the use of colloquial diction, conceits (extended metaphors), irony,logical approach, the flexible use of metre. Conceit is an extended metaphor where two very unlike things are compared. Things are so unlike that reader doesn’t want to compare them, but the poets makes the comparison acceptable through his skills. John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan are few of the well know metaphysical poets.

The literal meaning of metaphysical means beyond the earthy/concrete. The Metaphysical poets moved concrete symbols beyond their meanings into physical symbols.

To His Coy Mistress is poem written by poet Andrew Marvell. The main subject of the poem is ‘Coyness’ of his mistress/lover and how to deal with coyness. It is a reaction to the virtuous coyness as seen as an ideal in females earlier (in times of Andrew Marvell) and even still in conservative societies. The poem defies the idea of such platonic love.

The use of syllogism in poem shows the logical approach taken by poet which is different from his predecessors. He puts his Syllogism in three part structure. The first part tells that if he had all the time and space, he would happily engage in platonic timeless love. In the second part he starts with a “But” and gives a reality that life is short, time will run out, youth will be lost and they will eventually die. In the third and the conclusive part he tells his lover that they should utilize the time and energy they have to make love.

Consider the lines below:

“Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain.”

The linking of two rivers implies the long-distance relationship, the distance between the two rivers. The difference in the manner of flows of two rivers implies the differences between two lovers, the travelled lady (to exotic place like India) and provincial lover. This is example of the conceit or extended metaphor used in the poem, comparing rivers with lovers.

In the last stanza of the poem, the poet compares himself and the coy mistress to “amorous birds of prey”. Which is an unlikely comparison and thus a conceit as well.

The lines below are example of imagery:

“My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;”

Above lines are attack on the romantic love which grows slowly, and thus requires endless time.

The final couplet:

“Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

This is an allusion to the biblical hero Joshua who made the sun stand still while he took revenge on Israel’s enemy. These lines also present the paradox used by the poet. If he gains his end and wins the lady, he will only increase time’s speed, the faster you run away from the time the faster you use up time.

As we have seen the poem uses the logical approach, conceit, imagery, allusion and paradox, we can say that the poem is a metaphysical poem.