Appreciating Poetry

Appreciating Poetry

Edited by

Salil Varma R
Suma M V
Abida Farooqui

Publicaion Division
University of Calicut
Appreciating Poetry
Calicut University Edition
Published in 2019

Cover: Asuthosh. V.
Typesetting : Laly Francis. K

© UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT
Printed at Calicut University Press

Price: Rs. ISBN

Published by Omprakash. V, Publication Officer, University of Calicut.

 Contents
Preface 7
Module 1: Poetry: Some Key Concepts
Basic Elements of Poetry 11
Module 2: Poetic Forms
William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day (Sonnet XVIII) 22
John Milton
When I consider how my light is spent 26
John Keats
La Belle Dame Sans Merci 29
P B Shelley
Ode to a Skylark 34
W H Auden
In Memory of W B Yeats 42
Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night 48
Robert Browning
My Last Duchess 52
John Donne
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 57
Alexander Pope
Essay on Man (Epistle 1, Section II) 62
 Appreciating Poetry

Stanley Kunitz
The Layers 67
Leonard Cohen
I am Your Man 72
Module 3: World Poetry
Rainer Maria Rilke
Childhood 77
Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines 81
Nazim Hikmet
Some Advice to Those
Who Will Serve Time in Prison 86
Langston Hughes
Mother to Son 93
Namdeo Laxman Dhasal
Stonemasons, My Father and Me 95
Diane Glancy
Without Title 100
Yehuda Amichai
Anniversaries of War 103
Charles Baudelaire
Be Drunk 107
Joao Cabral De Melo Neto
Landscape of the Capibaribe River 111
Bassey Ikpi
Homeward 120

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Preface

Appreciating Poetry is an attempt to give some sense of

direction to the undergraduate students of English with regard to the
variety of poetry written not just in English but in literatures originating
in various languages and regions of the world. Needless to say,
beginning with a Shakespearean sonnet as representing one end of
the spectrum, Appreciating Poetry cuts across race, class, gender
and time to the other end of the spectrum with a spoken word poem
by Bassey Ikpi, the forty-three year old Nigerian spoken word artist,
as she calls herself. The lyrical impulse of the British poetry of the
younger romantics and the negation of the lyrical in favour of the
ironic that has become the hallmark of the current century and the
one that preceded it, both are given sufficient space in this volume.
It is a sampling from across the continents and includes Asian,
African, Afro-American, Native American, South American poets
and the poets of the Middle East. The native poetic traditions of
various continents are also incorporated to make the students aware
of the voices that are silenced and excluded by canonical
considerations that often limit the admissibility of many a writer into
the syllabus. The act of compiling Appreciating Poetry is thus
conceived as an act of considering the casualties of an academic
syllabi forming exercise and is meant to initiate a process of inclusion,
however tenuous it may turn out to be. Appreciating Poetry is
intended to create a historical sense of the growth of poetry and
poetic forms, and above all it strives to communicate the dynamic
nature of the conceptual dimensions of what constitutes poetry by a
selection of poems that manifests such dynamism. The general design
of the text caters to the demands of a freshman course in poetry.
Whether there is a form particular to poetry, and if so, to what
extent a change of formal patterns is admissible without losing its
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 Appreciating Poetry

definitional consistency, is an age old question. Perhaps the idea that

rhythm is innate to poetry is ingrained since its very inception. Yet
there have always been systematic and significant attempts to
theorize rhythm and metre. All ages of poetry are marked by a sizeable
body of widely divergent discourses on rhyme and rhythm. There is
indeed a very strong tradition of critical writing about the extent to
which rhyme and stanzaic patterns are vital to poetry, and voices
both laudatory and resisting have gone shrill in every century. The
twentieth century and the current century generally have witnessed
a gradual loosening of form and experimentation with form in all
languages and cultures all over the world. Module One: Poetry
Some Key Concepts, of an introductory nature, is meant to create
in the students of undergraduate courses some acquaintance with
poetic forms originating in diverse periods and languages.
Module Two: Poetic Forms is a sampling of poems designed
to make the students aware of the variety of poetic forms in the
literary representations of the last four centuries. The poems are
selected keeping in view the need to make the students familiarize
themselves with poems that can be conveniently assigned to some
recognizable poetic form. The fact that there is considerable poetry
about poetry could not be ignored in the selection of poems for this
anthology. The resilience of life, poetry and poets against time that
determines the narrative drift of some of the poems selected, notably
that of Shakespeare’s, Auden’s and Baudelaire’s, tones down the
pessimistic forebodings about what language can accomplish, not
just as theoretical positions but as lived experience that increasingly
marks human life. With the exceptions of the American Kunitz and
the Canadian Cohen all the poets in this module are British since
Auden is currently classified as an Anglo-American poet.
The last module World Poetry is based on the conviction that
world poetry is basically and necessarily poetry in translation. With
the exception of Baudelaire, the sole representative of the sometime
British period definition of continental poetry, the poets in this section
are from various continents that would not have figured at all in the
European imagination. The poetry from these “Other Continents”,
as the reader shall realize, is vibrant and receptive to the voices of
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 Appreciating Poetry

dissent and resistance. The perennial questions about love, loss, living,
ageing, facing illness, fighting death and dying, figure here just as
they do in the earlier module. This section is as much about our
future as it is about our past. The future that emerges in these poems,
a dismal one, is not a distant reality but an imminent one and very
often environmentally apocalyptic. The theme of dispossession that
appears in the later poems of this anthology is a complex one and of
urgent concern. The environmental issues, erosion of ethnic identities,
personal and collective struggles to reclaim some degree of lost
autonomy and resistance to imposed marginality that are of a
pandemic nature find voice in these poems. Later poems are selected
on the basis of contemporary themes, mostly of a social nature, as
well as with due consideration of the stylistic peculiarities of
contemporary poetry.
The activity section appended to each poem is only meant as a
rough pointer. The teacher and the students can turn the classroom
into a site of interrogation of the very text’s position in the structure
of the academia by supplementing the poems prescribed for study
by relating it to the current trends in the poetry written in the
vernacular languages or languages that they are familiar with.
Students are expected to write critical appreciation of poems with
the help of teachers in the classroom. Teachers can circulate poems
of their choice, or alternatively, students can suggest their choice
and teachers may assist the students to evaluate the poems addressing
the thematic and stylistic concerns of the poems taken for analysis.
Such an exercise, we hope, will direct the academic fraternity to
continually redraw the terrain of poetry by revisiting the logic of
inclusiveness operational in defining poetry and eventually anthologies.
Choices are always difficult and that reminds us of S Nagesh,
Former Head of the Centre for Research and Postgraduate Studies
in English, St. Joseph’s College, (Autonomous) Devagiri, whose
invaluable advice played a definitive role in the selection of the poems
and eased our worries. Without his excellent library, his solid grasp
of the currents in contemporary world poetry, his support and
encouragement, this anthology would not have materialized. His
guidance in a quiet way made the choice of poems a pleasant and
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 Appreciating Poetry

rewarding experience which we sincerely hope will benefit the

students and teachers of English. Robin Xavier of the Department
of English, St. Joseph’s College, Devagiri, is also remembered with
gratitude for his timely advice in the formulation of this volume. We
also thank Remya K, Assistant Professor of English, St. Joseph’s
College, Devagiri, for her constructive suggestions. Her infinite
patience and meticulous and repeated proofreading, we believe, have
made the text as error free as possible. We appreciate her exemplary
efficiency in meeting our mercilessly demanding and almost
impossible deadlines gracefully. The help extended to us by Shyama
E (Head of the Postgraduate Department of English, Providence
Women’s College, Calicut), Priya Karunakaran and Swapna N R,
(Research Scholar, PTM Government College, Perinthalmanna) in
making Appreciating Poetry possible is also gratefully
acknowledged.

11 October 2019 Salil Varma R

Kozhikode Suma M V
Abida Farooqui

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 Appreciating Poetry

Module 1: Poetry: Some Key Concepts

Basic Elements of Poetry
Prosody is defined as the study or science of all aspects of
versification. Depending upon the country or language of origin they
are classified as English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and
Indian, to name a few. Metre, rhyme, stanzaic forms and rhythm are
some of the important aspects that come within the scope of prosody.

Rhythm
Rhythm is derived from the Greek word Rhythmos. It means
a sense of flowing (Greek verb rheo means flow) caused by the
arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllable. It can occur in
verse and prose. Plato saw rhythm as an order in movement.
Aeschylus uses the term in “the sense of steady limitation of
movement.” Rhythm carries with it connotations of periodicity and
a degree of prediction. It is the experience of movement, which is
the combined result of the occurrence of stressed and unstressed
syllables and the duration of syllables. Duration is explained as the
phonetic time value. Rhythm in verse is determined by the presence
of various kinds of metrical patterns. It is regular in verse but need
not be in prose.

Metre
Metre is derived from a Greek word metron which means
measure. The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse
constitutes meter. Stress of the syllable rather than quantity is the
determining factor of metrical definition. A line can have fixed number
of syllables but varying number of stresses. Some of the common
stress patterns are iambic (unstressed followed by stressed), trochaic
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(stressed followed by unstressed), anapestic, dactylic and spondee.

Depending upon the number of feet we have monometer (one feet),
dimeter, (two) trimeter (three), tetrameter (four), pentameter (five),
hexameter ( six) heptameter (seven) to octameter ( eight). Variations
are possible within the basic metrical pattern. Substitution constitutes
one such variation.

Rhyme
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines
rhyme as the linkage in poetry of two syllables at line end which
have identical medial vowels and final consonants but differ in initial
consonant (s)-syllables which, in short, begin differently and end
alike. It may also be explained as any kind of sound echo between
words (e.g. alliteration, assonance, consonance) Though rhyme often
exerts a metrical function in marking the end of lines it need not be
always so. The structure of a syllable is often represented as CVC
where initial C is the initial consonant or consonant cluster , V is the
vowel or diphthong and final C is the final consonant or consonant
cluster. Based on the point of correspondence of syllable and sound
and the position at which it occurs we can have CVC (alliteration)
CVC (assonance) and CVC (consonance).
Hard rhyme occurs when there is the recurrence of identical
sounds whereas soft rhyme is distinguished by the presence of similar
sounds. Internal rhyme is the occurrence of two or more rhyming
words within a line.

Alliteration
The term is derived from the medieval Latin word alliteratio
which means repeating and playing upon the same letter. Alliteration
is a figure of speech that can be explained as the repetition of an
initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close
enough to each other for the ear to be affected. Sometimes the term
is used for the repetition of an initial consonant in unstressed syllables
of consonants especially at the beginning of words or stressed
syllables. Older than rhyme it was central to Old English verse and
was widely used until the last phase of middle ages and became
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rare in the fifteenth century. Alliteration is widely used in nonsense

verse, tongue twisters and jingles where the intention is to achieve a
special effect.

Assonance
Assonance comes from the Latin word assonare which means
“answering with the same sound.” Princeton Encyclopedia defines
assonance as the repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in
non rhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the
echo to be discernible. Unlike alliteration which is initial and receives
visual support from the reader’s eye, assonance is usually medial
and is a device of aural (pertaining to ear, i.e. auditory) nature. To
understand the assonance quality of a poem one has to know how
the vowels were pronounced by the poet who wrote it. This is due to
the fact that vowels and diphthongs often change places and undergo
changes both spatially and temporally unlike consonants which do
not change much.

Diction
Diction in the broadest sense of the term means the vocabulary
used by a writer. Poetic diction refers to the use of vocabulary and
particular arrangement of vocabulary in poetry with the purpose of
creating a particular effect. Debates about what constitutes poetic
diction can be traced back to the eighteenth century. The Neoclassical
period was particularly concerned with the implications of poetic diction.
Thomas Gray strongly contended that the writer must actively engage
in a process of selection and adaptation of the language to be used in
the work taking into consideration the appropriateness of the language
to the work under composition. Different subgenres demand different
poetic diction. The vocabulary of an Ode may not be suited for
composing a satire. Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical ballads
often considered a manifesto of the British Romantic movement, has
poetic diction as a major preoccupation. Whether there is language
that is particularly suited to poetry still remains a point of contention.

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Figures of Speech
Simile and Metaphor – Both similes and metaphors are
figures of speech used to make comparisons. A simile uses words
like or as to compare things or ideas, while a metaphor makes the
comparison directly.
My Love is like a red, red rose is a simile
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely
players is a metaphor.
Personification is a figure of speech that ascribes human
qualities to that which is non-human.
e.g. Because I could not stop for Death -
He kindly stopped for me
Oxymoron is a figure of speech that brings together opposite
or contradictory terms
e.g. Sweet sorrow
Why, then , O brawling love! O loving hate!
O anything , of nothing first create
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well- seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still -waking sleep that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh? (Romeo and Juliet )
Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is
referred to by the name of something closely associated with that
thing or concept. In metonymy the word employed is linked to the
concept referred, but is not actually a part of it.
e.g. We swear loyalty to the crown – here the crown stands
for the king.
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But now my oat proceeds,

And listens to the Herald of the Sea,
That came in Neptune’s plea.
He ask’d the waves, and ask’d the felon winds,
“What hard mishap hath doom’d this gentle swain?” (“Lycidas”,
John Milton)
Oat is a musical instrument made of an oat stalk. Here oat
refers to the song the poet is composing.
Synecdoche is a type of metonymy. While metonymy
replaces a concept or object entirely with a related
term, synecdoche takes a part of that object and uses it to
refer to the whole.
e.g. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs
to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that
need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m
telling you. Here flesh, feet, backs, shoulders and arms refer
to human beings.
Transferred Epithet is a figure of speech in which a modifier
(usually an adjective) qualifies a noun other than the person or thing
it is actually describing. In other words, the modifier
or epithet is transferred from the noun it is meant to describe to
another noun in the sentence.
e.g. The plowman plods a long and weary way. (Thomas
Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”)
Poetic Forms:

Lyric
The English lyric comes from the Greek work Lyra a musical
instrument. It is also linked to the classical Greek word mele which
means air, melody. It becomes clear from the origin of the word that
music or musical element is central to the concept of lyric. Mele
songs were sung accompanied by a musical instrument whereas the
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iambic and elegiac poems were to be chanted. Lyric is one among

the three types of poetic literature, the other two being the narrative
(epic) and the dramatic. It is during the Alexandrine period that the
term lyric was used in a generic capacity to refer to a selection of
several genres in the sense that it meant any poem that was
composed to be sung , a meaning that it retained till Renaissance. A
lyric poem is noted for the presence of sensuality, passion, relative
brevity, coherence of a metrical nature and subjectivity. In a lyric
poem there is a speaker though he is not necessarily the poet. Lyrics
also means words in a song and it is in this sense that the word is
more popular in common day parlance. In British literature Romantic
period is often considered to be the golden period of lyric poetry
(Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats). Nineteenth
Century also produced poets like Tennyson, Browning and Arnold
who produced some very fine lyrics.
Ode is a subcategory of the lyric poem. It often addresses a
lofty subject or idea. There is a tone of reverence. The stanzaic
structure of the ode is elaborate. There is marked formality. Grandeur
is the impression created by an ode. The sentiments are often of a
lofty nature. The subject, the feeling and style are exalted. The
length of the ode is generally, though not necessarily limited to one
hundred and fifty lines. Odes were introduced to English by Abraham
Cowley who imitated the odes of Pindar, and the tradition continued
till the publication of “Progress of Poesy” ( Thomas Gray). The
personal ode is another category which was used by Horace who
drew heavily on the works of Sappho and Anacreon. This ode has
uniform stanzaic patterns unlike the Pindaric ode form. Examples
are the odes of Shelley and Keats.
Sonnet in Italian means little sound or song. Petrarch, the Italian
poet established sonnet as a major poetic form. The sonnet has
fourteen lines, the exception being the curtal sonnet (G M Hopkins’s
term) which has ten lines. The metre is iambic pentameter. The
rhyme scheme is variable. The sonnets depending upon the stanzaic
patterns can be divided into three. Petrarchan, Spenserian and
Shakespearean. Petrarchan sonnet has an octave and sestet. There
is no rhyming couplet. The Spenserian variety has three quatrains
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and a couplet. The Shakespearean variety is similar to the Spenserian

since it has three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme
of the Spenserian couplet is ee whereas for the Shakespearean it is
gg. It was Sir Thomas Wyatt and Surrey who brought the sonnet to
English. Shakespeare’s sonnets were printed in 1609. Sir Philip
Sydney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella is considered to be
the first significant sonnet sequence in English. Milton did not write
sonnet sequence but he did write sonnets that could be technically
called occasional. During the romantic and Victorian period the sonnet
form returned to vogue. In the twentieth century Geoffrey Hill and
Seamus Heaney wrote fine sonnets. Late twentieth century saw
the emergence of Tony Harrison as a remarkable sonneteer. Vikram
Seth’s The Golden Gate has sonnet patterns.
Haiku is a relatively recent expression. Originally hokku, it
became Haiku only in the nineteenth century. The Japanese verse
form established in sixteenth century has seventeen syllables in lines
of five, seven, five syllables. Being short in length it is ideal for
expressing a single idea or thought, image or feeling. Hokku originally
was part of a longer sequence called Renga. Some of the significant
English poets to have used haiku are Robert Frost and W B Yeats.
The formal peculiarities of Haiku attracted the imagist poets like
Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell and they readily used the form in their
poem. In the country of its origin Haiku found its fullest expression
in Basho and Komayashi.
Ballad in its original form was a song sung accompanied by
dance. Judas a thirteenth century work is considered a ballad
though most of the English ballads date from the fifteenth century.
Ballad evolved from short alliterative lays of the Anglo Saxon period.
A ballad is a story in verse. The story has a single incident and it is
dramatically treated. It is not a continuous narrative. The statements
in the poem do not express the author’s emotions directly. Oral
traditions have contributed to the rise of genuine ballads. It was
earlier believed that ballads were the result of communal authorship.
But this theory is now replaced by the idea that ballad has a single
authorship initially but later collaborative activity must have contributed
to it. Imitation of ballad both in form and style results in literary
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ballads. Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is

an example. The younger romantic poet John Keats’ “La Belle Dame
San Mercy” is yet another case in point.
Couplet means a rhyming pair of successive lines in English
verse. It is widely used in satires, epigrams, verse essays and
narrative verse. Heroic couplet is rhyming iambic pentameter verse.
Chaucer is one of the first poets to use it extensively. Shakespeare
and Marlowe used it with great success. The invention of the heroic
couplet dates back to the sixteenth century and is the result of imposing
a stress pattern of iambic nature and a regular caesura (pause) on
the decasyllabic line of Chaucer and by imposing a pause in the
first line and at the end of the couplet. In such a couplet the end of
the couplet coincides with the end of a sentence and hence came to
be called closed couplet. Open couplet is distinguished by the absence
of any such coincidence between line and syntax.
Villanelle, etymologically, is derived from the Italian word
‘Vilano’ which means rural, rustic and peasant. The term was
originally used as a general term to refer to pastoral poetry in its
various forms. Jean Passerat a sixteenth century French poet is
generally credited with defining the specific characteristics of
villanelle. A villanelle is made up of five three line stanzas called
tercets and a quatrain which consists of four lines. One distinguishing
quality of villanelle is the presence of a refrain. The first and third
lines of the first tercet recur alternatively in the following stanzas
and form a final couplet. Though villanelle is of French origin English
poets like Wilde and Auden have used it.
Dramatic Monologue is a type of poem in which a single
speaker speaks to an imagined listener at a critical moment in his
life, revealing to the readers his character, temperament and
intentions. A poetic form, common in folk ballads, it was perfected
by Robert Browning by bringing in subtlety of characterization and
complexity of situation. The Wanderer and The Seafarer are dramatic
monologues written in the Old English period.
Elegy is a poem that laments the death of a person with an
intense reflection on the broader theme of human mortality. It is
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derived from the Greek word elegus, a song of bereavement, sung

with a flute. A traditional elegy is written in elegiac metre - alternating
lies of dactylic hexameter and pentameter. A pastoral elegy is a
distinct kind of elegy in a pastoral setting with characters who are
shepherds. It begins with an invocation to the Muse, contains
elaborate descriptions of nature and ends with the acceptance of
the inevitability of death. In English literature since the 16th century,
an elegy meant any poem of lamentation written in any metre. e.g.
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray.
Satire is a type of literature that censures human follies,
weaknesses and vices. Irony and sarcasm are the hallmarks of satire.
Any satire is subversive in nature. It also has a corrective function
leading to social reform. There are mainly two kinds of satire:
Horatian and Juvenalian. Named after the Roman satirist Horace,
Horatian satire is gentle, humorous and light hearted, while Juvenalian
satire, named after the Roman satirist Juvenal is abrasive, scornful
and sharp.
Mock epic or mock heroic is a type of satire that parodies
classical heroic literature. It adapts the conventions of epics and
their elevated style to talk about trivial subjects. The mock heroic
was popular during 17th century Italy and the Neoclassical England.
A classic example of mock epic is Alexander Pope’s Rape of the
Lock.
Free Verse is poetry that is free of regular metre, rhyme or
rhythm. Free verse is the literal translation of the French vers libre,
a poetic form of the late 19th century France. It is based on natural
rhythm and normal pauses. Free verse is a feature of contemporary
poetry which gives greater freedom to the poet.
Tanka is a Japanese poetic form supposed to have originated
in the seventh century. One couplet added to Haiku makes it a Tanka.
Tanka means a ‘short song’. It has 31 syllables and is written in a
continuous line. Some of the famous Tanka poets are Takuboku
Ishikawa and Machi Tawara.
Jintishi is a very popular Classical Chinese poetic form which

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evolved in the fifth century. The term refers to a modern form of

poetry, distinguishing it from the ancient one. It is a regulated verse
form which follows a set of tonal variations and rigid structural
features. Jintishi discusses common themes like history and politics.
A typical Jintishi has eight lines in four couplets, with the even lines
rhyming with each other.
Ghazal is a seventh century Persian poetic form which has its
origin in Arabic poetry. It is a collection of couplets called Sher. A
Ghazal may consist of six to seven Shers. Each Sher is a complete
statement in itself and contains an independent idea. These Shers
have tremendous quotability and are highly philosophical, exploring
themes of love and suffering. All the Shers in a Ghazal follow a
meter called Beher. The rhyming pattern of Ghazal is called Kaafiya
and the refrain is called Radif. Ghazals are very popular in India and
Pakistan. Popular Ghazal singers are Jagjit Singh, Mirza Ghalib,
Ghulam Ali and Farida Khan.
Rubai is a Persian verse form in the stanzaic structure of a
quatrain. Rubai is the Arabic term for quatrain. Rubaiyat (plural of
rubai) is a collection of quatrains. All the lines except the third in a
rubai rhyme with each other. Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is one of
the most popular illustrations of this verse form.
Prose Poetry claims to be a poem but appears like a prose
piece written in paragraphs. The line breaks, typical of poetry, are
absent. It is a hybrid genre written not in verse form and contains
features such as rhythm, meter, images, figures of speech and other
poetic techniques. Writers of Prose poetry include Amy Lowell,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Clarice
Lispector.
Narrative Poetry is a genre of poetry that tells a story or
narrates an event. Written in the poetic form, it has characters, plot,
setting and dialogue. Some of the popular narrative poems are ‘’Out
Out’’ by Robert Frost,” The Owl and the Pussy Cat’’ by Edward
Lear, “The Fish’’ by Elizabeth Bishop.
Performance Poetry is a genre regarded as invented by

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Hedwig Gorski in the 1970s. It is the art of the spoken word, a

revival of the oral tradition. Poetry gets enacted before the audience
accompanied by music, movements, gestures and intonation. In
Performance poetry, the page transforms into a stage and the reading
becomes a theatrical performance. Quite often experimental rhythms
are used to engage the attention of the audience. Two significant
contributions to this genre are Patricia Smith’s performance of
‘’Medusa’’, a feminist poem and Sarah Kay’s performance of
‘’Hiroshima.’’

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Module 2: Poetic Forms

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day
(Sonnet XVIII)
William Shakespeare
Introduction

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote 154 sonnets and it is

generally believed that the sonnets were written during the period
the theatres were shut down due to plague and were published
between 1608 and 1609. The sonnets of Shakespeare have a
standalone quality from plays and are considered complete in
themselves. Much critical energy continues to be expended on
pinning down a rival poet, the Dark Lady and the handsome boy
who figure in the sonnets. The problems are compounded by the
lack of conclusive evidence to identify the speaker of the sonnets
with Shakespeare. Shakespeare scholars are of the opinion that the
sonnet sequence can be divided into two subsequences. Sonnets
from 1 to 126 talk about a young man. The second sequence begins
from 127 and ends with sonnet 154. This sequence has for its theme
the narrator’s love for a Dark Lady. There is also a poem of greater
length, titled A Lover’s Complaint which continues with the themes
of the earlier sonnets. The sonnets sank into obscurity soon after its
publication in 1609 but a revival of interest took place with the
reprinting of the 1609 Quarto edition by Edmund Malone.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” belongs to what
critics call a mini sequence within the first larger sequence (1-127.)
This mini sequence is also termed procreation sonnets by Shakespeare
scholars due to the insistent presence of the narrator persuading the
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listener to marry and perpetuate his line through the next generation.
This sonnet is an inversion of the Petrarchan sonnet variety since it
is addressed to a man and not to a woman, and also for the fact that
the identity of the person addressed to in the poem is also never
given. The poem is addressed to a young man and this itself was
found to be problematic by Shakespeare’s contemporaries like Ben
Jonson. The homoerotic reading of the sonnet received better
attention due to the efforts of writers like Oscar Wilde and W H
Auden who themselves were homoerotically inclined. Whether it is
affection for a younger man or homoerotic attachment continues to
be a point of debate though the current critical readings mostly favour
a reading that sees the relationship as something that cannot be seen
as mere friendship.
The sonnet belongs to the English sonnet category and is the
eighteenth sonnet of Shakespeare. The poem is in the form of an
argument that has three parts. Structurally it is made of three quatrains
and one concluding couplet. In the first quatrain there is an attempt
to compare the listener to whom the poem is addressed to nature.
He toys with the idea of comparing his beloved to summer’s day but
decides against it since he feels that his beloved is lovelier. After
making more comparisons the poet is compelled to think about how
time ravages everything. All that is beautiful will fade one day. The
thought of transient beauty is communicated powerfully in the image
of summer as having short life. The poem elaborates the experience
of summer as too hot sometimes and too dim and cloudy at other
times. This leads the poet to the realization that whatever is fair will
soon lose its beauty either by chance or by the course of nature.
The course of nature inevitably leads to the loss of beauty. Inevitable
decline awaits every living thing. In the third quatrain there is a return
to the beloved, but comparison with nature continues. The poet sees
the beloved as superior to nature because of the eternal summer
that he enjoys. The quality of fairness will not fade, the poet says.
The beloved will live in the lines of the poet. The poem uses the
image of grafting ie. grafting a branch to another stronger one so
that the grafted branch will live longer. The poet ends the poem on
a confident note – he is confident that his poetry will live longer than
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the beloved and by being part of the poem the beloved will also live
longer than his usual life. So long as people are alive, the poem will
be read and remembered, and the poet and his beloved will live
forever. Stephen Booth indicates, lines can also refer to the cords
used to fix the scion to the stock or to the threads of one’s life, spun,
measured, and cut by the Fates. In this way Time is cheated, since
the stronger stock allows the weaker rose to live much longer than it
would “naturally.” TA Jankowski comments: “ The speaker is
indicating here that he has grafted the weaker scion of the beloved
onto the stronger stock of the poet’s verse, which will allow the
beloved to cheat time and be beautiful—and alive—long past the
beloved’s natural death.”
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. Why does the poet say that his beloved is superior to nature?
2. Explain the metaphor of the ship in the poem.
3. Explain the meaning of the closing lines of the poem.

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4. How is time described in the poem?

II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Explain the three arguments in the poem.
2. Comment on the imagery in the poem.
Activity
Compare “ Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day with “Devouring
Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws” (Sonnet number 19 )

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 Appreciating Poetry

When I consider how my light is spent

John Milton

Introduction
John Milton, the seventeenth century (1608-1674) Puritan poet
is often considered on par with Shakespeare by many. Born into an
English Puritan family, his reputation chiefly rests on Paradise Lost
(1667) an epic in verse, in which the poet undertakes to justify the
ways of God to men. His important works are “Lycidas”, a pastoral
elegy about the death of his friend Edward King, A Masque
presented at Ludlow Castle (Now generally known as Comus) ,
“LAllegro”, ( “The Happy Man”) and “Il Penseroso” ( “The Pensive
Man”). He also wrote a number of pamphlets including the “Reason
of Church Government”, “Animadversions” and “Of Reformation”.
Milton’s thinking was much ahead of his times as evidenced in his
writings supporting divorce, “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce”
(1643) and the plea for the freedom of press ( Aeropagitica 1644).
Milton’s sonnets cover a wide variety of themes including the
political issues of the times. Some of the examples are “On The
Lord General Cromwell, May 1652”, “On The Late Massacre in
Piedmont” and “On The New Forcers of Conscience Under The
Long Parliament” (1646?). Being a strong antiroyalist, Milton
supported the execution of Charles the First in The Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates. He suffered failing vision from 1651 onwards
and Andrew Marvell served as an assistant and aided him in his
writings. The later years of his life saw a profuse output (Paradise
Regained and Samson Agonistes, both published in 1671). Milton
also wrote fiercely against the Restoration in his “The Ready and
Easy way to Establish a Common wealth”. His antiroyalist sympathies
led to his imprisonment but he managed to free himself with the help
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of his friends. “How Soon Hath Time , The Psalm Poems, “Me
Thought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” and “On the Morning of
Christ’s Nativity” are some of his frequently anthologized poems.
He also served as secretary to Oliver Cromwell.
Considered to be written in 1652, the year in which Milton
became completely blind, “When I consider how my light is spent”
is justifiably the most popular sonnet of Milton. The sonnet follows
the Elizabethan pattern and the first line of the poem is taken as the
title. The poem is structured around the metaphor of light and the
poet elaborates it to an extended metaphor by using it along with
sight. The poem turns on a contrast between the two conditions of
the poet, one in the past and the other in the present. In the past he
could see and now he is blind. He thinks about the service that he
has to do for God but is worried because he can no longer see.
Milton asks himself whether God can demand work even while God
denies him sight. But this mood passes soon and he realizes the need
for accepting what fate has kept in store for him and finds consolation
in the thought that God does not need his service. It would be
egotistical on his part to conclude that God needs his service. The
poem ends on a note of relief when Milton convinces himself that
there are various ways of service. They also serve who stand and
wait.
Milton uses biblical allusion to explain his situation in this poem.
The reference is to Matthew verses 13-30 and the use of Talent.
The story is of a master who gives a certain number of Talents to his
servants and leaves. On his return the master finds that two of the
servants have invested their money properly and have doubled it.
But one servant has buried the money in the ground. The master is
pleased with the way the two servants used the money that he gave
to multiply and is angry about the way the third servant dealt with
the money and he casts him out of his house. Milton thinks of himself
as the third servant because he cannot use the one talent that he is
given to him by God. His only talent is the skill to write and he
feels he cannot use it as he is blind. The poet uses the two possible
meanings of Talent- Talent as a certain amount of money and talent

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as some ability or quality that one has. For the blind poet his only
talent is his capacity to write, but he says he is unable to use it due to
his blindness.
When I consider how my light is spent
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
I. Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. What is the reply given by Patience to the poet?
2. Mention one example of personification in the poem.
3. What are the meanings of the word Talent?
4. Explain the last line of the poem.
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Consider Milton’s sonnet as a crisis poem.
2. Comment on the imagery of the poem.
Activity
Compare Andrew Marvell’s “On Paradise Lost” and Colly Cibber’s
“The Blind Boy” with Milton’s “When I consider how my light is
spent.”
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 Appreciating Poetry

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

John Keats
Introduction
John Keats (1795-1821) was the last and the youngest of the
great Romantic poets. He belonged to the second generation
Romantic poets along with Byron and Shelley. His poetic career
was a short one that spanned only five years. It is remarkable that in
such a short period he produced some of the finest poems in English
literature. Apprenticed to a surgeon, he practised surgery for a short
while, gave up the profession in 1817 and then turned to poetry.
His first poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,”
published while he was twenty two, was inspired by his reading of
Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He published
fifty four poems in three volumes. His first volume published in 1817
has two remarkable poems Chapman’s Homer and Sleep and
Poetry. His second volume Endymion was published in 1818 and
the third in 1820. His early poetry was influenced by Leigh Hunt, the
editor of The Examiner, whose poetic circle was mockingly called
the Cockney school of poetry. Through Leigh Hunt he was introduced
to the poets of his time.
Keats is admired as a sensuous poet. M H Abrams describes
his poetry as “a slow paced, gracious movement; a concreteness of
description in which all the senses – tactile, gustatory, kinetic, visceral
as well as visual and auditory” are affected. His line ‘O for a life of
sensation rather than of thoughts’ shows his pure, unalloyed love of
sensuous beauty of nature. Wilson Knight remarked on the quality
of his poetry: “o touch, to smell, to taste, to feel the living warmth of
one object after another.”
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 Appreciating Poetry

He hailed beauty as the ultimate truth. In Endymion he says

“a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” In “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, he
repeats “beauty is truth and truth beauty.” He was enamoured of
the beauty captured by imagination, the beauty that appealed to all
senses, as the only instrument of truth. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey
he reiterates the idea: “what the imagination seizes as beauty must
be truth- whether it existed before or not.”
His poetry was marked by sensuousness, medievalism and
Hellenism. His tendency to Hellenism was inspired by his reading of
the classics. His Endymion, based on Greek mythology, runs into
four thousand lines. It is based on the story of a shepherd loved by
Artemis, the moon goddess and it talks about how love makes man
immortal.
His odes are the highest expression of his creative genius. “To
a Nightingale” was inspired by the sight of a nightingale that built
her nest close to his house. “On a Grecian Urn,” “On Melancholy,”
“To Autumn” and “To Psyche” are his other famous odes. Keats
has been admired for his felicity of expression and the richness of
his imagery. He is also well known for the letters he had written,
mostly to his brother George in America. His idea of Negative
Capability has been expressed in one of his letters.
Keats spoke of the enchanting effect of poetry and contrasted
it with the dullness of philosophy.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
Fine sounds are floating wild
About the earth: happy are ye and glad
He died at the age of twenty-six of consumption. His epitaph
reads thus “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Shelley
calls Keats one of the inheritors of unfulfilled renown.
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” an atypical poem of Keats, is
one of the most perfect of English ballads. A ballad is a poem or a
song of unknown authorship telling a story. This ballad tells the story

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of a knight who is seduced by a fairy, a typical femme fatale. Femme

fatale, a common figure in the European Middle Ages, is an epitome
of unbridled female sexuality, who used her charms and beauty to
ensnare men. Two of Keats’ poems “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
and “Lamia” contain the image of femme fatale. There are two
versions of the poem – the manuscript version of April 21st of 1819
and the published version of May 20, 1819 with amendments
suggested by Leigh Hunt. The poem, in the form of a dialogue, is
written in twelve stanzas with the rhyme scheme abab.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

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I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’

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I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
I. Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. Identify the speaker of the poem.
2. Who are the men who have been seduced by the fairy? What
adjectives are used to describe them?
3. Why do you think the poet has chosen a French title for the
poem?
4. What happens to the knight at the end of the poem?
II. Answer the following questions in a paragraph
1. Bring out the images of decay and desolation in the poem.
2. Discuss the significance of the repetition of the words ‘pale’ and
‘wild’ in the poem.
3. How does the woman lure the knight into a relationship?
4. Supernatural elements in the poem.
III Write an essay on the following
1. Discuss the poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” as a ballad.
2. Discuss the significance of the imagery in the poem.
3. Justify the title of the poem.

Activity
Compare “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” with “Lamia.”

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 Appreciating Poetry

Ode to a Skylark
P B Shelley

Introduction
P B Shelley (1792 – 1822) was a second generation Romantic
poet like Lord Byron and John Keats. Romanticism was a
philosophical and literary movement that emerged as a reaction
against the rationalism of the eighteenth century. While the previous
century had exalted reason as the highest faculty of man, the
Romantics heralded a revolution in hailing imagination as the most
important human faculty. It was the publication of Lyrical Ballads
in 1798 jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge that ushered in
Romanticism as a literary movement. It drew immensely from the
ideas propagated by the French Revolution - ideas that questioned
blind acceptance of authority and ideas that upheld individuality. The
writers sought freedom from, and rebelled against classical
conventions. One of the important slogans of Romanticism was back
to nature. The Romantic age was fecund for poetic imagination.
Poetry flourished in an unprecedented manner during this period
when compared to other literary forms.
Shelley was the most radical of the Romantic poets. As a child
he was fascinated by Gothic romances. He grew up to be a rebel
who questioned all forms of authority, be it the King or the Church.
While he was an undergraduate student at University College, Oxford,
he published a provocative pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism
(1811) wherein he proclaimed that “the mind cannot believe in the
existence of God” for which he was expelled from college. He was
influenced by the political radicalism of William Godwin, the author
of Political Justice, whose daughter Mary Shelley he later married.

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A Defense of Poetry (1840) is an important critical work of

Shelley wherein he proclaims that poets are “the unacknowledged
legislators of mankind.’ In keeping with the Romantic strain, he hailed
the poet as a missionary, a prophet and a leader. Making a sharp
distinction between reason and imagination, he considered imagination
as the synthesizer and the unifier which finds highest expression in
poetry. He found it hard to separate poetry from politics. “To Liberty”
and “To Naples” are his political odes.
His major poems like “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,”
“To a Skylark” and “The Spirit of Delight” are rich in imagery.
Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Hellas (1822) are lyrical dramas
that show his revolutionary spirit. Prometheus becomes a true hero
when he refuses to budge before the threats of Jupiter. His play
Cenci (1819) is infused with Gothic elements. Adonais is his elegy
on the death of John Keats. He spent the last years of his life at
Pisa, Italy. After his death in a boat capsize, Mary Shelley returned
to England and published his poems in Posthumous Poems and the
four volume edition of The Poetical Works.
Alexander Mackie observed that the “Ode to a Skylark” and
“Ode to Nightingale” by Keats are “two of the glories of English
literature.” “Ode to a Skylark” is one of the best odes of Shelley. He
wrote the poem on being inspired by the song of a skylark that he
heard in Italy in 1820. Endowing the bird with an ethereal quality, the
skylark, for Shelley, becomes a vehicle to convey profound thoughts
on humanity. The bird becomes a metaphor for the poet himself. In
a similar vein, he proclaims in A Defense of Poetry that ‘a poet is a
nightingale who sits in darkness and seeks to cheer his own
solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced
by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel they are moved
and softened yet know not whence or why...’poetry redeems from
decay the visitations of divinity on man.’ The ‘harmonious
madness’ that flows from the poet is an allusion to Plato’s Phaedrus
which Shelley read in May 1819 ”If anyone comes to the gates of
poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert
knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness”, says
Socrates, “he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed
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by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds”
Mary Shelley recalls “It was on a beautiful summer evening,
while wandering in the lanes near Leghorn whose myrtle hedges
were the bowers of the fireflies, that we heard the caroling of the
skylark which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.” The
stanzaic structure of the poem is well suited to its theme. The first
four brief lines verbalize the rapid upward flight of the bird while the
long fifth line, written in iambic hexameter, is an alexandrine, which
expresses the lark’s poise in the sky.
Ode to a Skylark
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are bright’ning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
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 Appreciating Poetry

In the broad day-light

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow’d.

What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a Poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden

In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden

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Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its a{:e}real hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embower’d

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflower’d,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awaken’d flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match’d with thine would be all

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But an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,

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I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.
I. Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. Explain the phrase Chorus Hymeneal.
2. Quote any line from the poem that expresses the poet’s wonder
at the skylark.
3. Cite two similes from the poem.
4. How does the poet account for the ecstasy of the skylark?
5. What plea does the poet make to the skylark?
6. “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of the saddest thought.”
Explain.
7. Explain the allusion in ‘harmonious madness.’
8. Give two examples of caesura from the poem.
9. What is the rhyme scheme of the poem?
10.Identify the words in the poem that describe the movement of
the bird.
II. Answer the following questions in a paragraph
1. Illustrate the analogies that Shelley brings in to describe the skylark.
How do they add to the meaning of the poem?

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2. Transcendental elements in “Ode to a Skylark.”

3. How does the poet contrast the blissful existence of the skylark
with the painful human condition?
III. Write an essay on the following
1. Discuss “Ode to a Skylark” as a Romantic poem.
2. How does the skylark become a metaphor for poetic inspiration?
3. The poem is a search for the ideal, the elusive and the transcendent.
Elucidate.
Activity
1. Compare Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” with Wordsworth’s “To
the Skylark”
2. Read Thomas Hardy’s “Shelley’s Skylark” and discuss.

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 Appreciating Poetry

In Memory of W B Yeats
W H Auden

Introduction
W H Auden (1907-1973) who belongs to the post romantic
phase of English Literature, was influenced by the theories of Sigmund
Freud on whom he wrote an elegy, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”.
According to Richard Davenport “Auden is the first poet to
incorporate, deliberately and formally, the ideas of twentieth –century
psychology in his work. Auden who held the Oxford Chair of Poetry
(1956-1961) was powerfully influenced by the poetry of T S Eliot
and the modernist movement. Auden who in his early poetry criticized
the horrors of war, was also influenced by Wilfred Owen, who died
in action one week before the armistice, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert
Graves. Owen, Sassoon and Graves exposed the horrors of war in
their writings. Auden is also a poet of long poems like The New Year
Letter, The Sea and the Mirror, For the Time being and The Age
of Anxiety. 1930 witnessed the publication of Poems and the
generation came to be known by his name as the Auden generation
(christened thus by Samuel Hynes). Also called the Oxford Group, it
included poets like C Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen
Spender. Auden belongs to that category of poets called the Thirties’
poets. His single book length critical work is The Enchanted Flood
and his autobiographical work is A Certain World. His major works
include City without Walls and Many Other Poems (1969), and
Epistle to a Godson and Other Poems (1972). His literary output
was not limited to poetry alone. His essays and reviews (Forewords
and Afterwords 1973) exhibit great insight. Some of his most famous
poems are “Night Mail”, “A Shilling Life”, Musee de Beaux Arts,
“The Unknown Citizen” “Shield of Achilles” and “Sir, No Man’s

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Enemy”. Auden is also often classified as an Anglo-American poet

since he moved to the United States in 1939, the year which also
incidentally witnessed the death of Yeats. He was granted US
citizenship in 1946. Auden died in Vienna on September 29, 1973.
His last work Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974), was published
posthumously.
The year 1939 is a point of mobility, both ideological and
geographical, in his career. Auden’s departure for America was partly
due to his growing discontent with being associated with the Oxford
group. Two days after Auden reached America, Yeats died and Auden
wrote a prose piece “The Public vs the Late W B Yeats” and the
poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”. The poem first appeared in March
8, 1939 issue of Republic and it was included in Another Time, the
first of the volumes of Auden to appear in the United States. The
second section of the poem as it appears now was completely
excluded in the earlier versions. The existence of various versions
and revisions is clear evidence of Auden’s interest in the poem. The
death of Yeats offers Auden a context to discuss the role of art,
artist, the relation to the society and the significance of time. Writing
about the influences on Auden, Richard Davenport observes: “He
was stupendously responsive to the influence of other poets. In
Memory of W. B. Yeats” is his eloquent tribute to a master whose
influence he came to repudiate with vigor.”
The first part of the poem is conspicuous in its use of pathetic
fallacy, which is an elegiac convention. The death of Yeats makes
the day cold. The extended metaphor of a nation’s unrest and its
dissolution merges with the dissolution of Yeats’ body. The different
parts of the body mutinying are compared to the territories that are
revolting. Once the poet is dead he becomes part of the poems and
when he is read by his admirers, he becomes them and lives on.
Another equally important thought running through the first part of
the poem is the theme of insignificance i.e. the world continues
without being affected by the death of the poet. The conflicting
thoughts of a national crisis and inconsequential event add to a
balanced view of the assessment of the death of Yeats and by
extension the death of all poets. The work of the poet is relatively
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more important than the poet, and Auden concludes the first stanza
with a return to the refrain, restoring the elegiac tone.
In the second section of the poem Auden catalogues all those
things that the poetry of Yeats will survive. This section also contains
some of Auden’s famous statements on poetry that are often taken
out of context and quoted as examples of Auden’s expose of the
weakness of poetry. The idea that poetry exists in a world of its
own, independent of the world around it informs this section. Critics
have seen the line “Poetry makes nothing happen” as a reflection of
Auden’s distaste for Yeats’ politically inspired poetry. Simultaneously,
it has also been read as the poet’s later awareness of the need to
resist didactic considerations in the making of any work of art. Auden
ends the second section saying that poetry is a way of happening. It
may not precipitate any action or event. In other words, it may be a
manner of action but may not provoke any action in itself.
The final section begins with the image of Yeats being laid to
rest. Yeats who died in France was buried there. Later his body was
brought back to his native village Sligo and interred there. Beginning
with a final farewell Auden calls Yeats an Irish Vessel. In the first
section Auden had used the image of mutiny and national unrest.
Here the reader is presented with an image of contention that cuts
across national borders and assumes international dimensions. Critics
have found prophetic tones in many lines of this section of the poem
since the poem was published less than a week before the onset of
the Second World War. Auden, physically distanced from Europe
facing imminent war, revisits the themes of the role of poets and
poetry. In one sense the poem and the poet move away from the
attitude that poetry makes nothing happen. Poetry, as Auden stresses
in the last lines of the poem, can have an emotional and intellectual
objective. It can persuade one to rejoice and teach the free man
how to praise. The rejection of the didactic role of poetry in the
second section is cancelled in this final section where Auden is
convinced enough of what poetry can do.

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In Memory of W B Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
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As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice

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Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
I. Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. Why does Auden say “ He disappeared in the dead of winter”?
2. Explain the lines “the words of a dead a man/ are modified in the
guts of the living”?
3. Explain the last two lines of the poem.
4. Comment on the prophetic aspect of the poem.
II. Answer the following in a paragraph
1. What is Auden’s attitude towards poetry?
2. Comment on the imagery in the poem.
3. Attempt a comparison between the second and third parts of the
poem.
4. How does Auden describe the day on which Yeats died?
III. Write an essay on the following
1 “In Memory of W B Yeats” is not just about Yeats. It is about
poetry and poets.” Discuss.
2 Discuss the elegiac elements in “In Memory of W B Yeats.”
Activity
Discuss the different types of elegies e.g. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy
Written in a Country Churchyard” and Milton’s “Lycidas.”

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Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas

Introduction
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), born in Swansea, Wales, is
perhaps, the most famous of the Welsh poets. Thomas who was a
phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic, lived only for thirty nine
years and died on one of his legendary poetry reading tours in
America. After a short stint with a South Wales Daily Post as a
reporter, Thomas began his career as a poet with the publication of
an early version of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” in the
New English Weekly ( 18 May 1934). For sometime Thomas worked
as a scriptwriter and broadcaster for the BBC and the Strand Films.
Often considered the most mythologized poet of English Literature,
Thomas’ first book Eighteen Poems (1934) ushered in a new
sensibility which has come to be identified as Neo-apocalyptic. His
poetry by and large is less autobiographical with a few exceptions
like “Poem in October” and “Fern Hill”. His major poetical works
are Twenty Five Poems (1936), The Map of Love (1939) and
Deaths and Entrances (1946). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Dog (1940) is a collection of stories with surrealist tendencies. A
Child’s Christmas in Wales (a prose piece, 1952) is a powerful
nostalgic rendering of the experiences of Christmas from a child’s
perspective. It is now generally believed that Thomas died of the
complications of a drink habit. Leslie Norris writes: “As his fame
spread, Thomas was regarded as the very type of the romantic poet,
wild, dissolute, inspired. This was not the complete truth, but when
he died in 1953, tragically and sensationally after a bout of drinking,
it was as if Dionysus had died again.” Thomas’ untimely death left
Adventures in Skin Trade and a poem titled “Elegy” unfinished.
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His last completed work is Under Milk Wood (a radio drama, 1954)
though it was conceived as early as 1945.
Seamus Heaney’s astute observations throw light on the status
of Thomas in English Literature. “In the end, Thomas’ achievement
rests upon a number of strong, uniquely estranging, technically original
and resonant poems, including one of the best villanelles in the
language. . . . The poems are his definitive achievement. . . . No
history of English poetry can afford to pass them over. Others may
have written like Thomas, but it was never vice versa.”
“Do not go gentle into that good night” is a response to a crisis
that Thomas experienced in his life. Deeply shaken by the news
that his father has cancer, Thomas wrote this poem and had hoped
that he would be able to read his poem out to his father though the
poem was published only after his father’s death. Originally published
in Bottel Oscure in 1951 it found a place in Country Sleep and
Other Poems (1952). The poem is a good example of an abiding
preoccupation in Thomas’ poetry - how to tackle life in extremis. It
is about how to bear the duress that life, and consequently death
bring to man. The poem concerns itself with the loss that death entails,
but it also offers a way of facing it amassing all the strength that is
possible when one is forced to face it. The poem stands out in its
directness of the treatment of mortality and its powerful balance of
thought and emotion which prevents the poem from being sentimental
even when it is about imminent death. “Do not go gentle” is a good
example of how in the world of Thomas’ poetry life and death are
seen as present simultaneously in every moment of one’s life.
Night has always been associated with death since ancient
days. In that sense there is nothing unusual about the poem. But
Thomas’ poem becomes unique in the way it is informed by a voice
that does not advocate an easy submission to it. The poem implicitly
celebrates life by suggesting a possible attitude that thoughts of
mortality evoke in oneself. Seamus Heaney, the most significant poet
to come out of Ireland after Yeats, comments on the uniqueness of
“Do not go gentle into that good night” in his essay “Dylan the
Durable? On Dylan Thomas”: “One of the poem’s strengths is its

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outwardly directed address, its escape from emotional claustrophobia

through an engagement with the specifically technical challenges of
the villanelle. Yet that form is so much a matter of crossing and
substitutions, of back-tracks and double-takes, turns and returns, that
it is a vivid figure for the union of opposites, for the father in the son,
the son in the father, for life in death and death in life. . . . It is a living
cross section, a simultaneously open and closed form, one in which
the cycles of youth and age, of rise and fall, growth and decay find
their analogues in the fixed cycle of rhymes and repetitions.”

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I Answer the following in two or three or sentences
1. What is a villanelle?
2. What prompted the poet to write the poem?
3. What is the prayer that the poet makes at the end of the poem?
4. What does night stand for in the poem?
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Describe the attitude of the poet towards life and death.
2. Explain the significance of the title of the poem.
III Write an essay on the following
1 “Do not go gentle into that good night” is one of the finest villanelles
in English literature. Comment.
2. Discuss the critical observation that “Dylan Thomas has great
mastery in handling varying moods.”
Activity
Discuss the theme of death in some important poems of twentieth
century e.g. Dylan Thomas’ “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by
Fire, of a Child in London” Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”, John Donne’s
“Death, be not proud.”

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My Last Duchess
Robert Browning

Introduction
Robert Browning (1812-89) was a prolific poet of the Victorian
age. He made a conscious decision to be a poet at the age of eighteen.
Initially Shelley was his literary hero. His wife Elizabeth Barrett
Browning was also an eminent poet of the time. She was elder to
him by six years and began writing poetry before him. Though both
of them were great poets in their own unique ways, Elizabeth Barrett
acknowledged Browning’s superior poetic art when she claimed that
her ‘cricket’ merely chirps at his ‘mandolin.’ Their love story is a
classic of real life romance. “By the Fireside”, “One Word More”
and “O Lyric Love” are his love poems where he expresses his
intense feelings for his wife. They are considered among the greatest
love poems in English language.
His first major work “Paracelsus” (1835) dealt with a Swiss
physician’s failure in his quest for perfect knowledge. He also tried
his hand at drama with little success. In his later works he discovered
the dramatic monologue, a poetic form best suited to his genius
Dramatic monologue is a self revelatory soliloquy which enabled
him to explore the human psyche in all its complexity. Here a single
character speaks to an imaginary listener (as in “My Last Duchess”)
or to himself or herself (as in “Porphyria’s Lover”). The speaker is
caught at a critical moment of his/ her life and as he/she speaks, the
reader is taken into his/her innermost thoughts, feelings and intentions.
Bells and Pomegranates (1846) is his first anthology of plays,
dramatic monologues and lyrics, which contains his masterpieces
like “Pippa Passes,” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and “My Last

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Duchess.” “Pippa Passes” tells the story of Pippa a poor girl who
goes out singing through the Italian town of Osolo. Her songs affect
four different people at the most critical moments of their life in very
positive ways and cause them to give up their sinister designs. The
oft quoted lines ‘God’s in his heaven/ All’s right with the world’
appear in this poem. “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is based on an old
legend of the piper who drives away the rats from a rat infested
town and then the children of the town. Men and Women (1855) is
an anthology of fifty poems in which occurs the famous poems “A
Grammarian’s Funeral”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, “Andrea del Sarto” and
“Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” “Fra Lippo Lippi” tells the story of a
fifteenth century Italian painter-bishop who exposes his irreverence
to religion. “Andrea del Sarto” describes the blind love and admiration
of a Florentine painter for his wife Lucrezia. The poem brings in the
Victorian concerns of the limits of human knowledge and ambition,
fate and destiny.
Dramatis Personae (1864), another anthology which contains
poems like “Abt Vogler” and “Rabbi Ben Ezra”, expresses his insights
on the contemporary scientific theories and perspectives on
knowledge, truth and faith characteristic of the Victorian age. The
Ring and the Book (1868), widely regarded as his magnum opus,
marks the culmination of his experiment with the dramatic monologue.
His last collection is Asolando. Renaissance Italy was his favourite
setting. He had a fascination for Italian painting, music, history and
landscape. The establishment of Browning Society in 1969 is indicative
of his cult status as a poet. In the words of Harold Bloom ”Browning
is the most considerable poet in English since the major Romantics,
surpassing his great contemporary rival Tennyson and the principal
twentieth-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy, and Wallace
Stevens.”
“My Last Duchess”, set in the Italian town of Ferrara, is one
of the best poems of Browning. The poem was written at a time
when women were considered mere property. Written in rhyming
couplets in a single long stanza , it appropriately conveys the
uninterrupted thought processes of the egoistic Duke, who considers
his wife’s happy disposition a crime. The monologue is the duke’s
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justification for the murder of his sweet wife, his mercenary interest
in negotiating the new marriage and his diabolical warning to the
emissary regarding the fate of his fiancé, if she fails to live by his
dictates. The character of the Duke is loosely modeled on Alfonso I
d’Este, Duke of Ferrara who lived in Italy in the 15th century , who
belonged to a very ancient illustrious family and who married three
times. Like his poetic counterpart, he was a connoisseur of art. Most
of the lines are written in iambic pentameter, with some lines in
spondaic, pyrrhic and trochaic feet.
My Last Duchess
FERRARA
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

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Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—which I have not—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—
E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
Bottom of Form
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. “I gave commands, then all smiles stopped together.” Explain.
2. What is the significance of the allusion to Neptune taming a sea horse?
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3. “The Count your master’s known munificence/ Is ample warrant

that no just pretence/ Of mine for dowry will be disallowed.”
What does this tell you about the duke?
4. Comment on the stanzaic structure of the poem.
5. Who is the listener of the poem and what is the context which
occasions the monologue?
6. Do you think the speaker is a connoisseur of art? Why?
7. What is the significance of the Duke mentioning the name Fra
Pandolf?
8. “Sir, ‘t was all one!” – What was “all one”?
II Answer the following questions in a paragraph
1. Discuss the significance of the title “My Last Duchess.”
2. Do you think the duke is proud, egoistic and arrogant? Substantiate
with examples.
3. How does the duke establish that the duchess can be pleased
very easily?
4. “Who’d stoop to blame this sort of trifling?” – What does this tell
you about the duke?
5. What idea does the poem give you about the position of women in
Victorian England?
III Write an essay on the following
1. Discuss the poem as a dramatic monologue.
2. Attempt a character sketch of the duke and the duchess.
3. Discuss the element of irony in the poem.
Activity
Compare “My Last Duchess” with “Porphyria’s Lover”

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 Appreciating Poetry

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

John Donne

Introduction
John Donne (1572-1631), the renowned metaphysical poet was
born in London. He came into the world during a tumultuous period
of religious and political unrest. Living in protestant England, Donne
found that his Catholic lineage was always a major hurdle to both his
career and personal life. He studied in both Cambridge and Oxford
Universities but did not succeed in attaining a degree since he did
not subscribe to Anglican values. Later, Donne took up law at Lincoln’s
Inn. Two years later he joined the Anglican Church after the death
of his younger brother who was being persecuted for his catholic
beliefs in person. The 1590s saw most of Donne’s creative spurts
when he penned major collections of his love lyrics, religious poems,
satirical and erotic verses in two volumes, Satires and Songs and
Sonnets.
In 1598, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas
Egerton. He fell in love with Sir Egerton’s sixteen year old niece,
Anne More and secretly married her. This incident ruined Donne’s
career and even led to his imprisonment. The Divine Poems (1607)
and Pseudo Martyr (1610) were works of this period. His wife
died in 1617 at the age of thirty three after giving birth to their twelfth
child who was still born. The Holy Sonnets was written during this
phase of his life. In the later years of his life he became the Dean of
St. Paul’s Cathedral. His writings in those years reflected his fear of
the unknown or even death. This was perhaps as a result of his
severe illness. John Donne died in London on 31 March 1631.
Donne’s style was criticized by one of his early contemporaries,

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John Dryden, as “affecting the metaphysics and for perplexing the

minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he
should engage their hearts with the softness of love”. He was
recognized as the founder of the school of metaphysical poetry, the
association of which includes George Herbert, Richard Crashaw,
Andrew Marvel and John Cleveland. They are known for their skill
to shock the reader through the use of paradoxical images, strange
imageries and extended metaphors known as conceits. As Samuel
Johnson has rightly observed, in such poems “the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together”. Metaphysical poetry has been
defined as “highly intellectualized poetry marked by bold and ingenious
conceits, incongruous imagery ,complexity and subtlety of thought,
frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity
of expression”. The greatest tribute to metaphysical poetry has been
from the side of TS Eliot. According to Eliot, the metaphysical poets
embody a fusion of thought and feeling that other poets were unable
to achieve because of a “dissociation of sensibility.”
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’’ was written when Donne
was leaving his wife Anne More to visit France. He seems to literally
forbid his wife from shedding tears on his departure. Donne suggests
that their love is beyond such trivialities like separation or attachment.
Their relationship is not carnal but spiritual and would withstand the
test of time. Donne attempts to convince his love that their parting is
something temporary and is not one to be mourned. He stresses the
importance of spiritual love in the poem. He compares worldly love
to spiritual love and proves his point by giving various examples as
arguments. A good example of metaphysical conceit comes up in
lines 25-32 where the two lovers are compared to the two legs of a
compass. The stationary leg of the compass is likened to his lady
love, who is steadfast and strong and has the ability to support him
even if he circles around at a distance. The startling use of
comparisons and images like the death of a virtuous man, the earth
quake and the trepidation of the spheres and the expansion of gold
to airy thinness gives the poem an argumentative and cerebral quality.
The poet wants the reader to think through the lines and expressions
with utmost involvement. The poem is structured in nine four line
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stanzas (quatrains) following iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme

for each stanza is an alternating abab.
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,

Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet
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A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. How does the lover praise his beloved ?
2. What is the metaphysical conceit employed in the poem?
3. Why does the lover forbid the mourning?
4. What is the context of the poem?
5. Why should the parting couple “melt “ and “ make no noise”?
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1.Explain the conceit employed by Donne in the poem.
2.What are the arguments used by the lover to console his beloved?
III Write an essay on the following
1. Discuss the features of metaphysical poetry as evident in Donne’s
poem.

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Activity
1. Read Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and identify the
metaphysical elements.
2. Attempt a comparison of “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”
with “The Flea.”

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Essay on Man (Epistle 1, Section II)

Alexander Pope

Introduction
Alexander Pope (1688-1744), a satirist par excellence is
regarded as a representative poet of the Neoclassical age. He was
a precocious child with a strong penchant for learning. Being a
Catholic in Protestant England placed restrictions on his formal
education. Hence he took lessons informally from his aunt and a
family priest, read the classics thoroughly and gained mastery in
Latin, Greek, French and Italian. A hunchback, only four feet six
inches tall, he had proved his genius at a very early age and today he
is the most quoted writer after Shakespeare. His sharp, violent satire
earned him the epithet the ‘wasp of Twickenham.’
The beginning of the18th century is marked by a spirit of
rationalism and scientific temper that gained sway as a result of the
Enlightenment. There was an educated, genteel, urban population to
whom poets began to cater and poetry became a refined activity
that appealed to the intellect rather than to emotion. The age has
been variously called the Augustan age and the Neoclassical age.
The term Augustan was derived from the Roman emperor Augustus
Caesar during whose reign literature was in its heyday. It was called
Neoclassical because of the reverence for the classical writers that
led to the revival of the classical forms in art and literature.
Isaac Newton was the most influential scientist of the day.
Though he dismissed poetry as irrelevant, his scientific theories and
his religious beliefs had profound influence on eighteenth century
poets. Pope’s epitaph for Newton reads thus- “Nature and Nature’s
laws lay hid in night: God said, let Newton be! And all was Light.”
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Pope’s first important work “The Pastorals” (1709) came out

when he was sixteen years old. “Essay on Criticism” (1711), written
in the vein of Horace’s Ars Poetica is noted for its pithy maxims like
‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’, ‘For fools rush in where
angels fear to tread’ and ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ “The
Rape of the Lock”, written initially in two cantos in 1712 and later in
five cantos in 1714, is a mock heroic epic that satirized the fashionable
society of 18th century. The theme revolves on the cutting of a lock
of hair of Arabella Fermor by Lord Peter which snowballs into a
family feud. Windsor Forest, a pastoral work, was published in
1713. In 1717, he published his collection of poems which included
his romantic poem “Eloisa to Abelard.”
He completed the translation of The Iliad (1720) in six volumes
in ten years, followed by the six volumes of The Odyssey (1726).
His translation of Homer made him financially sound. His next major
work “The Dunciad” (1728), a mock epic, is a violent satire through
which he tried to settle scores with the major as well as the minor
writers of the day. He vehemently attacks Lewis Theobald, a
Shakespearean scholar of the time who pointed out the inaccuracies
of Pope’s work on Shakespeare, Colley Cibber, a mediocre actor-
dramatist who was appointed Poet Laureate, and Horace Walpole,
the Whig politician.
His last important works were The Satires and The Epistles
written in imitation of Horace. Pope was at his best as a satirist in
“An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot” (1735) addressed to his physician-
friend Dr John Arbuthnot. It is a blistering attack on his personal and
public adversaries and an indictment of cowardly critics, pedants,
sycophants and bogus aspirants of art.
He perfected the use of heroic couplet, a form that he used in
all his poetry except “Universal Prayer.” The heroic couplet was
the most preferred poetic form as it was closest to the verse of
Virgil and Homer and helped to impose order as well as to control
emotion. Pope’s epigrammatic terseness brought it to perfection.
The critic Joseph Warton rightly observed – “in that species of poetry
wherein Pope excelled, he is superior to all mankind.”

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“Essay on Man” (1733-34), a philosophical poem where Pope

tries to “vindicate the ways of God to Man”, contains four epistles –
the first epistle exploring man in relation to the universe, the second,
man in relation to himself, the third, man in relation to society and the
fourth, man in relation to happiness. Essay on Man was an attempt
to explain the premises of contemporary moral philosophy based on
the Newtonian universe of order and regularity. What appears in the
natural world as chaotic and ‘mighty maze’ is the product of a divine
plan which man can fathom through his marvelous mental faculty
called reason. That we can judge only with regard to our own system
and that we are ignorant of the larger scheme of things is a serious
limitation to be reckoned with. “Essay on Man” is an attack on men
who fail to follow Nature’s path and to understand his place in the
Great Chain of Being. The poem asserts the commonly held belief
in traditional cosmologies that a ‘Divine Intelligence’ exists that is
capable of creating only the best of all possible worlds and that the
hierarchy of all beings is created in gradation, so that each being has
its due degree.
Essay on Man (Epistle 1, Section II)
Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou find,
Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?
First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,
Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less!
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade?
Or ask of yonder argent fields above,
Why Jove’s satellites are less than Jove?

Of systems possible, if ’tis confest

That Wisdom infinite must form the best,
Where all must full or not coherent be,
And all that rises, rise in due degree;
Then, in the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain
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There must be somewhere, such a rank as man:

And all the question (wrangle e’er so long)
Is only this, if God has plac’d him wrong?

Respecting man, whatever wrong we call,

May, must be right, as relative to all.
In human works, though labour’d on with pain,
A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;
In God’s, one single can its end produce;
Yet serves to second too some other use.
So man, who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal;
’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

When the proud steed shall know why man restrains

His fiery course, or drives him o’er the plains:
When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod,
Is now a victim, and now Egypt’s God:
Then shall man’s pride and dulness comprehend
His actions’, passions’, being’s, use and end;
Why doing, suff ’ring, check’d, impell’d; and why
This hour a slave, the next a deity.

Then say not man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault;

Say rather, man’s as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur’d to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space.
If to be perfect in a certain sphere,
What matter, soon or late, or here or there?

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The blest today is as completely so,

As who began a thousand years ago.
I. Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. ‘Man is as perfect as he ought’ – Explain.
2. What does the poet mean by the expression ‘Wisdom infinite?’
3. Comment on Pope’s use of the heroic couplet.
4. Why does Pope address man as ‘presumptuous?’
5. Explain the expression ‘scale of reas’ning life.’
II. Answer the following questions in a paragraph
1. What does the contrast between the ‘steed’ and the ‘ox’ signify?
2. How does Pope establish that perfection is ‘relative?’
3. Neoclassicism as a literary movement.
III Write an essay on the following
1. How does the poem ‘vindicate the ways of God to man?’
2. The poem is a reflection on the reigning scientific thought of the
day. Discuss.
3. Discuss Alexander Pope as a Neoclassical poet.

Activity
Read “Essay on Man” (Epistle I Section I and III) and discuss how
Pope develops his argument on man and God.

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The Layers
Stanley Kunitz

Introduction
Stanley Kunitz ( 1905-2006), one of the distinctive voices of
American poetry, described by David Barber as “ the venerable
doyen of American Poetry” was born in America to Yetta Helen
and Solomon Z Kunitz , of Jewish Russian Lithuanian descent. His
childhood was traumatic with his father’s death, penury, his mother’s
marriage, their conviction in a case and his stepfather’s death. His
father had committed suicide on being bankrupt six weeks prior to
his birth. Despite his mother’s efforts to erase all memories of his
father from home, his father’s death had affected him deeply, haunting
him and his poetry. Critics have observed that, “his primordial curse
is the suicide of his father before his birth.” His poetry collection
The Testing Tree takes the readers into his past bringing alive “the
images that have haunted him.”
He worked as a butcher’s assistant and a cub reporter, before
he turned to poetry. He won the American Pulitzer Prize in 1959.
He became the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library
of Congress first in 1974 and then in 2000, and became the tenth
Poet Laureate of the United States in 2000. He was designated the
Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. During
the course of his career, he made an enduring friendship with the
poet Theodore Roethke and they continued to influence each other.
Kunitz declares that he writes poetry “for the ear.” He testifies
to the difference in writing poetry in youth and old age. In youth,
poems are spontaneous. “They’re delivered at your doorstep like
the morning news.” While at old age, it requires effort - “one has to
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dig.” He celebrates the “life-sustaining, life-enhancing” quality of

poetry and affirms that “poetry is for the sake of the life.” He stressed
on how a poem develops naturally and assumes an organic whole.
Says Kunitz “a poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of. It
takes on a life and a will of its own.”
His first poetry collection Intellectual Things was published
in 1930. During the Second World War, he had served in the army
which led him to write his next work Passport to the War (1944).
Both these collections earned him the reputation of being an
intellectual poet. His next major work Selected Poems 1928-1958
(1958), that included poems from his earlier collection with thirty
new poems, earned him the much acclaimed Pulitzer Prize. His other
important works are The Testing-Tree (1971), The Terrible
Threshold (1974), The Coat Without a Seam (1974), The Lincoln
Relics (1978), The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (1979), The Wellfleet
Whale and Companion Poems (1983), and Next-to-Last
Things (1985). The Collected Poems (2000) presents Kunitz’s
lifework. Kunitz’s poems have influenced many 20th century poets
including W H Auden, Robert Lowell, James Wright, Mark Doty,
Louise Gluck, Joan Hutton Landis and Carolyn Kizer.
There was a marked departure from the intellectual and
philosophical verse of his early poetic life, influenced by his admiration
for John Donne and George Herbert, to the simple, personal style of
his later poems written in a freer, looser style. He comments on his
early poetry thus “I had fallen in love with language and was excited
by ideas, including the idea of being a poet. Early poetry is much
more likely to be abstract because of the poverty of experience.”
His early poetry was written in iambic pentameter while in his later
poetry he moved to free verse. He comments that his early poems
“were very intricate, dense and formal. . . . They were written in
conventional metrics and had a very strong beat to the line. . . . In
my late poems I’ve learned to depend on a simplicity that seems
almost non-poetic on the surface, but has reverberations within that
keep it intense and alive.”
Lowell remarks of this stylistic shift as “the smoke has blown

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off. The old Delphic voice has learnt to speak words that cats and
dogs can understand.” Kunitz looked at the simultaneity of life and
death as the very fact of existence and famously said “the deepest
thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction
is to report that dialogue.” Robert Campbell affirms his stature as
perhaps “the most distinguished living American poet.” His work
has been translated into various languages like Japanese, Dutch,
French, Arabic and many other languages.
“The Layers” is a ‘haunting yet hopeful’ poem that delineates
the intricacies of the universal journey of life. It is written in free verse
in a single stanza. Kunitz probes deep beneath the surface of things
into life in all its complexity and richness. The poem is an attempt to
embrace the ups and downs of life that lead to an enhanced
understanding of life. A quest for identity, it explores how experiences
enrich and transform the self, while paradoxically retaining the essential
‘principle of being.’ The past is essentially a guide to the future. As the
poet moves on in his journey of life, he is anguished to watch his peers
die, nevertheless nothing stops him from pursuing the layers of life.
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing

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from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

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I. Answer the following in two or three sentences

1. “I am not done with my changes.” Explain.
2. What symbols does Kunitz use throughout the poem to signify
death?
3. What does the poet convey through the paradoxical expression
‘feast of losses’?
4. What is the figure of speech in the expression ‘scavenger angels’
and what does it convey?
5. “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Explain.
6. Can you guess the age of the speaker? Justify your answer.
II Answer the following questions in a paragraph
1. Discuss the significance of the title “The Layers.”
2. Images of loss in the poem.
3. How do the past experiences of the poet transform him?
4. Symbolism in the poem.
5. What obstacles does the speaker have to overcome in order to
experience a transformation?
6. What is the poet’s attitude to adversities?
III Write an essay on the following
1. “The Layers” is all about transformations. Elucidate.
2. Discuss the poem as a metaphor for the journey of life.
3. “The Layers” celebrates the insight that man gains as he carries
on with his life. Discuss.

Activity
Given below is an excerpt from Stanley Kunitz’s “ Testing Tree”
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
Through dark and deeper dark
And not to turn.
Compare the above lines with “The Layers.”

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I am Your Man
Leonard Cohen

Introduction
Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016) is a Canadian singer, songwriter
and poet, who is considered equal to the Nobel Prize winning Bob
Dylan. He hailed from an orthodox Jewish family – his mother was
Lithuanian and his father was Polish, both of whose parents had
migrated to Canada. He says that he “had a very Messianic childhood
– (he) was told (he) was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest.” At
school his mentor was the Canadian poet Irving Layton. The other
writers who influenced him were William Butler Yeats, Walt
Whitman, Federico García Lorca, and Henry Miller. He was
interested in poetry and music from his school days. It was his mother
who triggered his passion for music when she sang songs at home.
“She would sing with us when I took my guitar to a restaurant with
some friends; my mother would come, and we’d often sing all night.”
As an adolescent he loved to play the guitar. His foray into music
began with the formation of a country-folk group that he called
Buckskin Boys. Initially he trained himself to play the acoustic guitar,
later he switched over to classical guitar on being inspired by a Spanish
guitar player.
His first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956),
(dedicated to his late father) was published by Dudek as the first
book in the McGill Poetry Series. Northrop Frye wrote a review for
the same in which he lavished praise on Cohen. His next major
work The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) gave him a better outreach
and brought him acclaim as a distinctive voice in Canadian poetry.
The critic Robert Weaver declared that Cohen was ‘probably the
best young poet in English Canada right now.’” During the 1960s, he
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published two poetry collections Flowers for Hitler (1964) and

Parasites of Heaven (1966) and two novels, The Favourite Game
(1963), an autobiographical bildungsroman and Beautiful
Losers (1966) a novel censured for its explicit treatment of sexuality.
His novel Beautiful Losers earned him the epithet “the James Joyce
of Montreal.” His other important poetry collections are Death of a
Lady’s Man (1978), Book of Mercy (1984), Stranger Music:
Selected Poems and Songs (1993) and Book of Longing (2006).
Book of Mercy which comprises fifty prose-poems that Cohen
describes as “prayers” won him the Canadian Authors Association
Literary Award for Poetry. It was influenced by the Hebrew Bible
and Zen writings. The Book of Longing is dedicated to his mentor
Irving Layton.
On finding poetry not financially rewarding, he made up his
mind to try songwriting and moved to the US in 1966 in order to
learn more of the city’s folk-rock music. “I decided I’m going to be
a songwriter. I want to write songs.” The same year he met the folk
singer Judy Collins, who included two of his songs, including the
early hit “Suzanne,” on her album In My Life. His debut album was
“Songs of Leonard Cohen” (1967). His other famous albums are
“Songs from a Room” (1969), ”Songs of Love and Hate” (1971)
and ”New Skin for the Old Ceremony” (1974). His songs “The
Stranger Song”, “Winter Lady”, and “Sisters of Mercy” featured in
the movie McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Tim Grierson wrote in 2016, shortly
after Cohen’s death, that ‘“The movie (McCabe & Mrs Miller) is
inextricably connected to Cohen’s songs. It’s impossible to imagine
Altman’s masterpiece without them.” Cohen travelled across the
world and gave stunning musical performances. In 1976, he gave 55
shows, including his first appearance at the famous Montreux Jazz
Festival. His magnetizing stage performances drew audiences far
and wide and were rapturously received.
He won acclaim for his two famous albums Recent Songs
(1979) and Various Positions (1985). “Recent Songs” blended his
acoustic style with jazz and Oriental and Mediterranean influences.
Various Positions included his masterpiece “Hallelujah” which has
been described as “oft-performed songs in American musical history.”
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A meditation on love, sex and music, “Hallelujah” has been performed

by almost 200 artists in various languages. “I’m Your Man” (1988)
is his most popular album. The Future (1992), the title track of which
was written in the backdrop of 1992 Los Angeles riots, celebrates
perseverance, reformation and hope in the wake of the dark realities
of life. More Best of Leonard Cohen (1997) included a previously
unreleased track, “Never Any Good”, and an experimental piece
“The Great Event”. The album “Ten New Songs” (2001) won him
four Canadian Juno Awards in 2002: Best Artist, Best Songwriter,
Best Pop Album and Best Video. In 2003, he was honoured as
the Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian
award. In 2011, Cohen received one of the Prince of Asturias
Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize. Dear Heather
(2004), Blue Alert (2006), Popular Problems (2014) and You Want
It Darker (2016) are his other famous albums. Necropsy of Love
(2018) is his posthumous album. Bruce Eder hails him as “one of the
most fascinating and enigmatic ... singer-songwriters of the late
’60s ... Second only to Bob Dylan (and perhaps Paul Simon).” Bob
Dylan considered him as the ‘number one’ songwriter of their time. In
1995, Cohen took a break from the world of music on being initiated
into Buddhism. He spent five years as a recluse at Mt. Baldy Zen
Center near Los Angeles, where he became a Zen Buddhist monk
and took on the Dharma name Jikan, meaning “silence”. On his death
in 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked that “no
other artist’s music felt or sounded like Leonard Cohen’s. Yet his work
resonated across generations. Canada and the world will miss him.”
His songs abound in themes of political and social justice. He
hails the coming of democracy as he sang “from the wars against
disorder/ from the sirens night and day/ from the fires of the homeless/
from the ashes of the gay/ Democracy is coming to the USA.” He
believed that “love’s the only engine of survival.” He comments on
current topics like abortion, anal sex and the use of drugs. The theme
of war also figures in many of his writings. “Lover Lover Lover,” a
song written in the backdrop of Israel-Arab encounter, which he
intended to be “a shield against the enemy”, denounces armed
conflict.
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“I am Your Man” is a romantic song that describes the

passionate and desperate love of the man for his beloved. Written in
free verse in asymmetrical stanzas, it describes the willingness of
the lover to take on any role for the sake of his beloved. The lover
has made many promises to his beloved which he could not keep.
That does not prevent him from making further promises. The poem
is replete with erotic imagery which heightens the romantic mood
and the desperation of the lover, who is willing to go to any extent
for the sake of his beloved.
I’m Your Man
If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you
If you want a partner, take my hand, or
If you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I’m your man
If you want a boxer
I will step into the ring for you
And if you want a doctor
I’ll examine every inch of you
If you want a driver, climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can
I’m your man
Ah, the moon’s too bright
The chain’s too tight
The beast won’t go to sleep
I’ve been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah, but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I’d crawl to you baby and I’d fall at your feet
And I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat

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And I’d claw at your heart, and I’d tear at your sheet
I’d say please (please)
I’m your man
And if you’ve got to sleep a moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I’ll disappear for you
If you want a father for your child
Or only want to walk with me a while across the sand
I’m your man
If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. What does the expression ‘dog in heat’ signify?
2. What does the act of wearing mask signify?
3. What do ‘chain’ and ‘beast’ suggest?
4. How does the poet justify his situation of making promises but not
keeping them?
II Answer the following questions in a paragraph
1. What are the different roles the lover is willing to take on to
satisfy his beloved?
2. What effect does the action words ‘crawl’, ‘fall’, ‘howl’, ‘claw’
and ‘tear’ create in the poem?
III Write an essay on the following
1. “I am Your Man” as the supreme expression of desperate love.
2. Imagine you are the poet’s beloved. How would you respond to
his pleas?

Activity
Read Leonard Cohen’s “Ain’t No Cure for Love” and compare it
with “I’m Your Man.”

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Module 3: World Poetry

Childhood
Rainer Maria Rilke

Introduction
Rilke (1875-1926) was an Austro-German poet who won
world wide recognition as a poet and philosopher. Born in 1875 he
was the only child of German -speaking parents in Prague. He had
an unhappy childhood. Rilke’s father had compelled him to attend a
military boarding academy to become an officer. The sensitive boy
found it too demanding and beyond his capacity owing to his poor
health. He left school prematurely and this adversely affected his
education. Further, dissatisfied with their marital relationship his
parents got divorced. Later he matriculated from Charles University
in 1895 and enrolled for courses in German literature and art history.
Rilke’s first collection of poetry appeared in 1894. This
reinforced his conviction that he was destined to be a writer. During
this time he started trotting across the European continent. His
meeting with Lou Andreas Salome in Venice in 1897 and his affair
with Salome was a decisive influence. In 1899 Rilke visited Russia
twice with Salome. Rilke described Russia as his “spiritual
fatherland”. He met Tolstoy there. These were the formative
moments of existential materialism and of perceiving art as a religion.
Rilke envisaged god as a life force. Inspired by Nietzsche, Rilke
formulated the concept of god as the final result of the cosmic process
and not as the initiator. Rilke’s The Book of Hours is a search of
god as well as a journey into his inner life. The critic Hester Pickman
sums up Rilke’s concept of god: “God is not light but darkness— not
a father, but a son, not the creator but the created”. Eudo C Mason
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quotes Rilke: “Religion is the art of those who are uncreative”. The
Book of Hours regarded as Rilke’s “apotheosis of art” is pivotal to
the understanding of his later poetry. In 1902 a German publisher
approached him to write a book about Rodin, the French sculptor.
The anthology New Poems was the result of his association with
Rhodin. According to W H Auden Rilke expressed his ideas with
“physical rather than intellectual symbols.” Paul Cezanne and Rodin
induced in Rilke the capacity for perceptive observation.
In 1912 Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies which has been described
by Colin Wilson as “the greatest set of poems of modern times”. In
his next work Sonnets to Orpheus there is a joyous mood in contrast
to the Elegies. These two works have been hailed as the best of
Rilke. Rilke once said “the point is to live everything. Live the
questions now perhaps you will then gradually without noting it, live
along some distant day into the answer.” Rilke died of leukemia in
1926. He faithfully followed his anti Christian practices and declined
the presence of a priest on his death bed.
“Childhood” is included in the collection of poems Das Buch
der Bilder published in 1902.The title of the volume was translated
as ‘The Book of Images ‘or ‘The Book of Pictures’. The poem
reflects the typical tone and theme of Rilke’s poetry. The dark, elegiac
tone latent in his poems is found here as well. Rilke seems to be
hankering after a reason to mourn. He explores two of his choicest
themes here: loneliness and passage of time. Contrary to the reader’s
expectation of encountering a carefree, joyous period of childhood,
the poem leaves us disturbed. The unpleasant childhood days had
inevitably cast their gloom on his entire life, but paradoxically he is
unable to relish the fact that those days have vanished forever.
Edward Snow who has translated this collection of Rilke’s poems,
observes that these poems “tend to epitomize what it means to
characterize ...a mood, a stance, a cadence, a quality of voice, a
way of looking”. Like the other images in this volume, childhood
also is an image that dawns in an adult mind. Rain acts as a catalyst
triggering the poet’s memory. The poem is deeply nostalgic. The
poet is bewildered when he perceives some mysterious power
dictating his destiny, coaxing him to move on to infinity.
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Childhood
It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?

We’re still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us

except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd

and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us
I Answer the following in two three sentences
1. Explain the phrase “long childhood afternoons”.
2. Explain the figure of speech in “as lonely as a shepherd.”
3. What bewilders the poet at the end of the poem?
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Describe the image of childhood that is portrayed in the poem.
2. How does Rilke picture the bewildering present of the poet?

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III Write an essay on the following

1. The poem laments the passage of time. Discuss.

Activity
Rilke has written two other poems on childhood entitled “Duration
of Childhood” and “The Child”. Compare the three poems and the
images depicted in them.

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Tonight I can write the saddest lines

Pablo Neruda

Introduction
Pablo Neruda (Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto) who
later adopted the name Pablo Neruda (1902- 1973) , comes from
Parral, a small village in the central valley of Chile. His poetic talent
was spotted by Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) who was the first
recipient of Nobel Prize for literature from a Latin American country.
Interestingly Neruda also received the Nobel prize for literature in
1971. Neruda’s poetry is influenced by surrealist and symbolist
movements. Out of his admiration for East European poetry and
poets he took the name Neruda from Ian Neruda, the Czech short
story writer, poet and the leader of the East European symbolist
school. Critics have not been able to discover the source of his first
name Pablo. But it is surmised that it follows from Paul which in
Hebrew means “ he who speaks beautiful things.” Some of his
notable contributions to world poetry are The Heights of Macchu
Picchu, The Residence Cycle and Canto General. Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair is the most widely translated work
of Neruda. The American poets W S Merwin and Robert Bly are
some of the well known poets who have translated Neruda.
Neruda’s poetry exhibits lyrical impulses and romantic longings
for persons and places. But Neruda’s oeuvre also includes poems
that are deeply political. The topical and deeply political nature of
some of his poems has been eclipsed by the popularity of Twenty
Love Poems and a Song of Despair with which he is identified in
public imagination. Neruda wrote poems about dictionaries, a cup
of tea, and also poems about very ordinary objects including the
national dish of Chile. For him no topic was too low to be rejected as
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a subject of poetry. Neruda served as his country’s ambassador to

France. He also visited the East in official capacity and his poetry
bears the impress of his travels. Being a close friend of Salvador
Allende who later became the President of Chile, Neruda had to
undergo political trial for his writings which appeared in the national
dailies of Caracas and had to flee for his life under the dictatorship
of Gonzales Videla. During these dark days of his life he was
supported and protected by his people. These experiences are
recounted in his Memoirs. In 1973, Quimantu the famous publishing
house founded by Salvador Allende published Neruda’s political
work A Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the
Chilean Revolution. Neruda saw the poet as an artisan - an idea
that he stressed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Neruda died
of cancer in 1973. Historians of Latin American Poetry mark his
death as the end of a great period not just in Latin American Poetry
but in the lives of Chileans. Marjorie Agosin writes: “The death of
Pablo Neruda, who vindicated Latin American poetry in the eyes of
the world and especially in his own country, coincides with the death
of another person, Salvador Allende, who symbolizes the Latin
American democratic spirit. With their passing ends a period of hope
lived by the Chilean people.”
‘‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines’’ which appeared in
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair has been translated
into many languages. Marjorie Agosin assesses the importance of
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair for Neruda and for
world poetry thus: “The year 1924 marks a watershed in the poetic
route of Neruda. In that year, he published Twenty Love Poems
and a Song of Despair. The unexpected impact of this slim volume
of poetry on Spanish-American and world poetry cannot be
overemphasized. In it, an adolescent speaks to a woman of sensual
and erotic love with a clarity and simplicity of expression unknown
until then in Spanish-language poetry.”
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines” is about an experience
that cuts across all kinds of boundaries and cultural barriers. It talks
about one of the most powerful emotions, love and the loss of love.
In simple words the narrator in the poem speaks about the loss with
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clarity of vision that is rarely seen in life. The poem is built on a

contrast. The past was beautiful because the narrator was in love
and was loved. The present is unbearable because he is no longer
loved. The loss of the loved object is compounded by the fact that
his beloved is in love with someone else. The poem is also about
survival. In certain respects the poem belongs to that category of
poems that Donald Davie calls articulate remedy. Wordsworth’s
‘Immortality Ode’, and Coleridge’s ‘Dejection Ode’ belong to this
category. Articulation, in such poems, has a redemptive quality. It
redeems and relieves the narrator/author of some problem. The poem
ends on a resolution. The narrator declares in a resolute manner that
he shall no longer be affected by the pains caused by his beloved
and his last poem on her is already over. The love that Neruda talks
of is deeply sensuous. It rejects Platonic versions of love and grounds
his experience of love in the body of his beloved. The uninhibited
mode of expression adds to the appeal of the poem.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

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Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.

Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

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Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. Why does the narrator say he can write the saddest lines?
2. What is the final attitude of the narrator of the poem?
3. Describe the night in the poem.
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Consider the universal qualities of the poem.
2. The poem is about love loss of love and survival. Discuss.
III Write an essay on the following
1. “Tonight I can write the Saddest Lines” is about love, loss and
coping with loss. Discuss.

Activity
Compare “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” with Pushkin’s
“No Tears.”

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Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve

Time in Prison
Nazim Hikmet

Introduction
Acclaimed as the “first modern Turkish poet “ Hikmet (1902-
1963) was born in Salonica, part of the Ottoman empire then, which
is now Thessaloniki in Greece. Hikmet’s grandfather was a poet
and his mother was an artist, all these could have kindled the poetic
fervour in him. When his hometown Istanbul came under the control
of the left allies, immediately after the First World War, Hikmet moved
to Moscow and attended the University there. Moscow proved to
be a great platform wherein Hikmet met an array of writers and
artists and got acquainted with different cultures and perspectives.
During these years he was drawn towards Communism and was
extremely fascinated by the Bolshevik ideals. He joined the
Communist party in 1922. In 1924 when Turkey became an
independent nation Hikmet returned to his country, but got into trouble
with the authorities due to his left-wing associations. Hikmet had
started his career as a writer and contributed profusely to left-wing
magazines. He returned to Russia because his literary activity was
not hindered or censored there. Hikmet’s writings had the same
revolutionary vigour as that of his politics.
In 1928 following a general amnesty, Hikmet returned to Turkey
.During the next ten years Hikmet published nine books of poetry.
He also worked as a proof reader, journalist, script writer and
translator. But Turkey always cast a shadow of suspicion on him
and he was not received amicably. Hikmet’s radical thoughts made
the government hostile and earned him a long jail sentence. He left
Turkey in 1951, never to return.
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Hikmet was a great champion of communism. He was greatly

influenced by the Russian futurists. He was a revolutionary hero of
the Turkish left. His early verses were patriotic in nature and written
in syllabic form. Later he turned to Turkish folk tradition. Hikmet
wrote in Turkish. But most of his works have been translated into
English and other languages. The conversational style and colloquial
texture of his poetry marked a great deviation from the heavily stylized
poetry that prevailed in Turkey. He was the first Turkish poet to
conquer the hearts of the common people. Critics have compared
him to Whitman. His aspirations as a poet were outlined thus: “I
want to write poems that both talk only about me and address just
one other person and call out to millions, I want to write poems that
talk of a single apple, of the ploughed earth, of the psyche of someone
getting out of prison, of the struggle of the masses for a better life, of
one man’s heart breaks. I want to write about fearing and fearing
death”. One of his famous poems, “I Come and Stand at Everyone’s
Door,” is written from the point of view of a child who was killed in
Hiroshima bombing. Some of Hikmet’s significant works are Human
Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (2009),
Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (1975), The Day Before Tomorrow
(1972), Moscow Symphony (1970), Selected Poems (1967).
Tristan Tzara, Hikmet’s French translator, observed that his
poetry “exalts the aspirations of the Turkish people and articulates
the common ideals of all nations”. Hikmet had admirers all over the
world - Picasso, Neruda and Robeson, who campaigned for his
release from prison when he fell ill. In 1963, his Turkish citizenship
was taken away. He died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963.
Prison literature has emerged as a powerful genre with the
increasing number of jailed dissidents. They are testimonies to the
tenacity of the spirit of the prisoners. As Ernest Hemingway declares
in The Old Man and the Sea, man can be destroyed, but not
defeated. The poem reveals the unyielding prisoner’s insatiable
thirst for life. Abominably long years of imprisonment would normally
depress a prisoner. Hikmet offers various ways to surmount the
drudgery and suffocation, having devised these defensive
mechanisms for survival during his thirty odd years of imprisonment.
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According to Hikmet, survival and endurance are powerful modes

of protest that deprive the authorities the satisfaction latent in
imprisonment. The poem unravels as a long, humane piece of advice
to fellow prisoners, to endure and face the risks unflinchingly. They
are advised not to contemplate suicide, to sustain their life, to preserve
their voice, to engage their minds relentlessly with literary pursuits,
to laugh, to ignore painful losses and not to succumb to the stultifying
monotony.
Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve
Time in Prison
If instead of being hanged by the neck
you’re thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, and people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left
you won’t say,
“Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag”—
you’ll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it’s your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
like a stone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up
in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.
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To wait for letters inside,

to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,
and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread—
also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.
I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more—
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!

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I Answer in two or three sentences

1. Point out two instances of simile in the poem.
2. Explain the metaphor in the concluding lines of the poem.
3. Why are the prisoners advised to think of mountains and seas?
4. Indulging in what activities are dangerous and not advisable
according to the poet?
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Summarize the pieces of advice given by the poet.
2. Comment on the style of writing employed.
3. Justify Hikmet’s objective in composing a poem like this.
III Write an essay on the following
1. Discuss the poem as a defensive mechanism to survive the
incarceration.
2. Analyze Hikmet’s poem as a poem of protest.

Activity
Read Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail and
Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom and discuss
the features common to prison writings.

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Mother to Son
Langston Hughes

Introduction
James Mercer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) also known as
Langston Hughes is the most important poet of the Harlem
Renaissance (The New Negro Renaissance.) Often called the Dean
of African American Writers, Hughes grew up in the deeply racist
Joplin, Missouri and Kansas City. Racial discrimination to which he
was subjected from early childhood made him a poet of social issues
faced by his race in America. His writings primarily aim at creating
positive images of black life and identity, one of the avowed objectives
of Harlem Renaissance. Through the use of simple and direct style
of writing he was able to win over the hearts of many a coloured
person who did not have a gift of words to express what they felt.
His writings in various genres including Children’s literature made
him the poet laureate of the negro race. Inspired by the
encouragement of Vatchel Lindsay who declared to the world that
he had discovered a new black poet in Hughes, Hughes continues to
inspire the public by a bold portrayal of his people from all walks of
life, particularly those who belong to the lowest rung of the social
ladder. His first collection The Weary Blues (1926) contains his
most famous poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” which he wrote
while crossing the Mississippi River to meet his dying father. His
two part autobiography, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander
reflects the struggles of his race in America where everything is
based on the visibly invisible colour line. Hughes was an active
member of the NAACP which strove to change the quality of the
life of blacks in America. Profoundly inspired by Jazz and Blues,
Hughes explained life as having the rhythm of jazz. Hughes resembles
Whitman in his belief in American Dream. It is also interesting to
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note that later Afro American writers severely criticized Hughes for
his unreflecting belief in the American Dream. James Presley argues
that Hughes promoted the idea that “the Negro’s bed has been lined
with injustices, but eventually the American Dream will triumph.”
Some of his important works are Fine Clothes for the Jews (1927),
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Selected Poems of
Langston Hughes (1959), and Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for
Jazz (1961). He has also written a number of stories in which one
finds the character Simple through whom Hughes talks about what
it is to be a Negro in America.
Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
(1922) which appeared in Nation throws light on his views and
objectives. “We younger Negro artists . . . intend to express our
individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people
are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know
we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom
laughs. If coloured people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the
mountain, free within ourselves.”
Julia Peterkin notes of Hughes: “He has taken the joys and
woes of dish-washers and bell-hops, crap-shooters and cabaret girls,
broken women and wandering men and, without losing their strong
racial flavor, he has moulded them into swift patterns of musical
verse.” The technique of Hughes is succinctly put by Theodore R.
Hudson when he states Dipping his pen in ink, not acid, [Hughes’]
method was to expose rather than excoriate, to reveal rather than
revile.
“Mother to Son”, also alternatively titled “Crystal Stair” was
first published in the 1922 December Issue of Crisis, the organ of
NAACP. Later it was included in The Weary Blues. Having the
structure of a dramatic monologue, it uses the trope of advice. The
central metaphor of the poem is the stair and the act that reflects the
struggle of the black race is presented through the action of climbing
the stairs. It is also Hughes’ version of his understanding of the idea

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of Black Womanhood. “Mother to Son” creates a counter narrative

to the dominant discourse perpetrated by the whites that sees black
women as a domineering, egotistical figure, a kind of spider woman.
This stereotype is deeply ingrained in the minds of the white race.
Hughes through this poem talks of the qualities of a black mother
who exudes warmth, care, love, and understanding. Contrary to the
racist notion, the mother is presented as someone with enormous
strength and unflagging vitality. The need to go on without fear and
without despair - the mother in the poem is that and much more not
just to her son mentioned in the poem but to the entire black race.
Elsewhere Hughes calls his race “loud mouthed laughers in the face
of fate” and the poem is an apt expression of the sentiment. The
optimistic tone with which the poem concludes is indicative of the
general mood of Hughes’ poetry.
Mother to Son
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
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For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. What is the central image in “ Mother to Son”?
2. What is the impression of the mother that you get from the poem?
3. What advice is given to the son by the mother?
4. What term of endearment is used by the poet to show the love of
the mother for her son?
5. Explain the expression crystal stair?
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Comment on the language used in the poem.
2. Write a note on the mother in the poem?
III Write an essay on the following
1.“Mother to son” is about the endurance of human spirit. Elaborate.

Activity
Compare “Mother to Son” with Langston Hughes’ “Montage of a
Dream deferred.”

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Stonemasons, My Father and Me

Namdeo Laxman Dhasal

Introduction
A revolutionary Marathi poet and Dalit activist of the twentieth
century, Dhasal(1949-2014) was born into the Mahar caste and led
a life of dire poverty. In 1972 he came up with his first collection of
poetry entitled Golpitha. He has also published two novels and
innumerable prose pieces apart from anthologies of fiery poems.
The medium he chose to write was Marathi. His favourite genre
was poetry. In June 1972, Dhasal along with Raja Dhale, JV Pawar
and Arun Kamble, founded the Dalit Panthers Movement inspired
by Dr BR Ambedkar and the Black Panthers of the United States,
which largely comprise the educated slum dwellers of Mumbai. The
objective of this movement was to resist and terminate the atrocities
against Dalits. Later Dhasal began a magazine called ‘Vidroh’(revolt)
to publish the works of the Dalits and the non conformists. Dalit
writers have always attempted to steer clear of the mainstream
literature which is reluctant to publish the anguish of the downtrodden
and the oppressed.
Dhasal’s residence was close to Kamathipura, India’s largest
colony of sex workers and the Durga Devi Udyan which was the
niche of transgenders. This has resulted in the evolution of a very
subversive perspective in the writer about women and transgenders.
Dhasal’s affinity and loyalty has always been with a larger section
of humanity. He chose to address the common man’s perspective.
In this pursuit he was led by Ambedkarite and Marxist ideologies. In
his poem “Man You Should Explode,” Dhasal is determined to throw
all the classic poets, philosophers, dramatists and critics into the
manhole of sewers and allow them to rot and to hang the descendants
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of Buddha, Jesus and Vishnu. The poem ends with the exhortation
that “man should sing only the song of man.”Dhasal’s poems such
as “Gandu Bagicha 2” equate sanitization with the Brahmanical act
of Sanskritisation. The persona of the venomous Dalit spokesperson
is revealed here. We come across arresting metaphors such as the
‘worm of Karmanyevadhikarasthe’ and the ‘crippled cockroach of
karma yoga‘. The Dalit Panthers, during one of their protest
campaigns, had burnt the Gita .The same is reenacted in the corrosive
lashing at the upper caste evident in “Gandu Bagicha.” Dhasal’s
poetry was a blistering indictment of the Indian culture and history.
A major influence on Dhasal’s poetry was the photographic realism
of Baburao Bagul. Dhasal took great pains to reproduce the language
of the Dalits in his poems. The use of the expressions prevalent
among the inhabitants of the Red Street, was a rude jolt to the middle
class and elite sensibility.
Dhasal did not dissociate politics and art in his life. According
to him “poetry is politics”. In another context he has observed: “I
enjoy discovering myself. I am happy when I am writing a poem and
I am happy when I am leading a protest of prostitutes fighting for
their rights”. He owed his life to poetry which had sustained him in
moments of turmoil. Two of the avidly discussed themes in his poems
are gender and sexuality. A large number of his poems are on women.
Chindhyanchi Devi Ani Itar Kavita (2012) is an anthology on
women. Dhasal has written a number of odes. Some of his odes are
addressed to Dr Ambedkar whose vision has deeply influenced
Dhasal. One of his odes was addressed to Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi in 1976. In this poem Dhasal vehemently condemns all those
who denounced Mrs. Gandhi’s political strategies and presents her
as goddess Durga. Dhasal ignored the criticism against him since
Mrs. Gandhi had acquitted the Dalit Panthers from all the charges
against them following the Worli riots in 1974.
Arundhati Subrahmaniam sums up Dhasal’s poetic prowess:
“Dhasal is a quintessentially Mumbai poet. Raw, raging, associative,
almost carnal in its tactility, his poetry emerges from the underbelly
of the city, its menacing and unplumbed nether world. This is the
world of pimps, of smugglers, crooks and petty politicians of opium
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dens, brothels and beleaguered urban tenements.” Dilip Chitre who

has translated some of Dhasal’s poems into English, titled his work
Dhasal, Poet of the Underworld. He astounds us with his amazing
range of linguistic register wherein he incorporates the Kamathipura
dialect, the exalted Buddhist precepts, the Marxian tenets, the oral
and folk tradition and subversive Sanskrit words. Dilip Chitre
described it as a “bastard language”. Dhasal’s intolerance towards
stereotypes gets reflected in his poetry. Some of his poems are densely
philosophical and ambiguous. He makes abundant use of surrealistic
imagery in his poems. In one of his untitled poems we come across
expressions like “water walks without feet” and “the self sheds its
skin in water”. K Satchidanandan’s anthology of 100 Indian poets
entitled Signatures includes Namdeo Dhasal. Apart from the many
awards and honours conferred upon Dhasal, he was awarded the
Padma Shri in 1999. He was invited to the Berlin international
literature festival to present his poems. He died of cancer in 2014.
The poem emerged in his first anthology Golpitha. It is a violent
disowning of the dehumanizing, unjust past. The stonemasons
represented by his father, have been much sinned against, like the
other marginalized and oppressed people. Society glorifies the myth
of the stonemasons only to reinforce the vicious statuesque. The
docile acceptance of their karma imprisons the stonemason father,
but not the retaliating son, who has nothing but contempt for the self
–denying occupation. Vinay Dharwadker in Dalit Poetry in Marathi
comments about the Vadaris: “It is back breaking, unrewarding,
dehumanizing work, often assigned in modern India to convicts
sentenced to hard labour”. Stonemasons belong to an untouchable
community called the Vadari. They inhabit the eastern border of
Maharashtra. They break huge blocks of stones into gravel and chips
for their livelihood, leading a nomadic life and move across the country
in groups offering their services to the world of construction. The
poet detests any attempt to eulogize or romanticize the stonemasons
and vehemently protests. Each stanza is a retaliation and negation
of the first line. As Satchidanandan observes, the “high sounding
platitudes are obliterated with a violent jerk.”

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Stonemasons, My Father and Me

Stonemasons give stones dreams to dream
I set a match to fireworks
They say one mustn’t step into
one’s father’s life:
I do; I scratch
his elbows,
his armpits.

Stonemasons give stones flowers

I play horns and trumpets.
I overtake the Parsi who stands
turned to stone
by the bodies of four women
bent like bows.
I see my father’s bloodied rump
In the chaos of the dark
I smoke a cheroot
and smolder with memories
till my lips get burnt.

Stonemasons inseminate stones

I count exhausted horses
I harness myself to a cart
I handle
my father’s corpse;
I burn.

Stonemasons mix blood with stones;

I carry a load of stones.
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Stonemasons build
a stone house.
I break heads with stones
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. How are the stonemasons romanticized?
2. Explain the image of the Parsi.
3. What is the irony in stonemasons building a house?
4. Explain the line “I scratch his elbows/his armpits.”
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Use of violent images in the poem.
2. The myths associated with the stonemasons.
3. Structural innovations in the poem.
III Write an essay on the following
1. Dhasal’s poem is a powerful indictment of a caste ridden society.
Discuss.
2. How does Dhasal juxtapose the past and the present in a society
anxious to engender stereotypes?

Activity
Dhasal’s poems seem to celebrate violence. Read the other poems
in Golpitha and compare them

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Without Title
Diane Glancy

Introduction
Diane Glancy (1941- ) was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Her
father was a Cherokee and mother of English-German descent. She
is an accomplished poet, playwright, essayist and fiction writer who
has published over thirty books and received numerous awards and
fellowships. As a child, she could not reconcile the information she
gathered from school about her fathers’ ancestry, with their life as
farmers. She later redefined her identity as a Cherokee Native
American. “I write between cultures...Growing up, the Indians
mentioned in school were Plains Indians who hunted buffalo and
lived in teepees, yet my family was none of that; instead they were
from a woodland, sedentary, corn farmer culture. How could both
be Indian? How does one work across barriers, erasures, syncretism,
misappropriations?” She has been determinedly discussing these
themes in her work.
Glancy shares her experiences of liminality and attempts to
gather the voices that are wiped out by history: “I like to give voice
to those that have been erased or bypassed by history. I want to find
the marginalized voices and explore what they could have said”.
Glancy was at odds with the misrepresentations in history: “History
is a multiplicity and only one group of people, the white male, generally
has been able to tell it”.
From 1980-1986 Glancy was Artist-in-Residence for the State
Arts Council of Oklahoma. Some of her major collections of poetry
are One Age in a Dream (1986), The Shadow’s Horse (2003),
Report to the Department of Interior (2015) and Primer of the
Obsolete (2015).
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Glancy coined the term “She-donism”. She strongly believes

in the power of women and refers to herself as a feminist. As regards
the role of women in culture, she regards women as “the bearer of
culture, the story teller”. In her recent poetry, the tone has become
more ironic and humorous. She attributes her sense of humour and
sense of loss to her Indianness. Glancy has been working as Professor
of English at Macalester College in Minnesota since 1989 teaching
Native American culture.
The poem is about “a Native American who feels trapped in a
different time from his ancestors, which brings about a sense of
cultural loneliness”. The father is unable to reconcile the incongruity
of his glorious past with his urban life, shorn off the ceremonies.
Glancy discusses the cultural segregation experienced by the Native
American tribes and the ensuing trauma arising from the difficulty
to adapt to the drastic changes in their lives. Culture is vital in shaping
identities and to be dispossessed of it, creates a deep sense of loss.
The Native Americans were highly dependent on the buffalo. These
animals were revered for their sacred power and their capacity to
bring good fortune to the tribe. The buffalos were an integral part of
their life and not mere sustenance for them. The spiritual relationship
with buffalos is reinforced through ceremonies. Hunting is regarded
as fundamental to Native American tribal culture. When a Native
American makes his first kill it is celebrated with great pomp and is
regarded as a covetable achievement. Only a person who lives in
close communion with the Native Americans can sense the father’s
plight of having to live such an ironical and insipid life.
Without Title
-for my Father who lived without ceremony

It’s hard you know without the buffalo,

the shaman, the arrow
but my father went out each day to hunt
as though he had them.
He worked in the stockyards.
All his life he brought us meat.

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No one marked his first kill,

no one sang his buffalo song.
Without a vision he had migrated to the city
and went to work in the packing house.
When he brought home his horns and hides
my mother said
get rid of them.
I remember the animal tracks of his car
out the drive in snow and mud,
the aerial on his old car waving
like a bow string
I remember the silence of his lost power,
the red buffalo painted on his chest.
Oh, I couldn’t see it
but it was there, and in the night heard
his buffalo grunts like a snore.
I Answer in two or three sentences each
1. Comment on the dedication appended to the title.
2. Why is the title ironic?
3. How does the mother respond when the father comes home with
horns and hides?
4. Explain the phrase “animal tracks of his car.”
5. What is the aerial on the car compared to? Comment on the
appropriateness of the simile?
6. What is the figure of speech in “buffalo grunts like a snore”?
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Discuss the poignancy and irony of the title.
2. How does Glancy portray the plight of the father?
III Write an essay on the following
1. Analyze the cultural loneliness experienced by the father and the
appropriateness of the title of the poem.
Activity
Read Joy Hajro’s “An American Sunrise” and attempt a comparison
with Glancy’s poem.
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Anniversaries of War
Yehuda Amichai

Introduction
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) winner of Israel’s most coveted
award Israel Prize, by general consensus is Israel’s poet laureate.
Born in Germany, he fled due to Nazi persecution and lived for most
part of his life in Yemin Moshe, the first Jewish neighbourhood
outside the Old City walls. Amichai is often seen as the foundation
stone of Israeliness and his poems have been translated into more
than thirty seven languages. He fought in Israel’s first war of
independence. His first work was Now and in Other Days (‘1955).
His writings include contribution to genres as various as children’s
literature , short story, and theatre. His only novel Not of This Time
Not of This Place (1963) was later dramatized as a play Bells and
Trains (1967). Hailed by critics as “The Walt Whitman of Jerusalem”
he is the author of the cycle of poems Jerusalem 1967. Amichai,
though he fought in three wars, was deeply sensitive to the tragedy
of war and his “Seven Laments for the War Dead” ( 1976) is
sufficient proof of his pacifist leanings. He believed that a peaceful
coexistence was possible with Israel’s Arab neighbours and used
whatever influence he had on Yitzak Rabin to initiate peace talks
with Palestinians while Rabin was Israel’s Prime minister. Dvir
Abramovich sums up Amichai’s poetry thus: “Amichai’s canvas is
characterized by colloquial language, self-deprecating humour, irony
and the autobiographical, showcasing a depth of emotion that is raw
and introspective. With just a few words and images, he delivered
special insights and evocative associations on a breadth of such
weighty issues as the Holocaust, God, loss, love, idealism, war and
national destiny, unlocking a world enriched by allusions to both the
Old Testament and the quotidian.”
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The poem is about the narrator’s visit to Tel Gath considered

to be the birth place of Goliath, the giant who fought against David.
Tel means a site which is made up of many layers where each layer
may be seen as representing a different phase of the history of the
site. Tel Gath is also historically important since it had an Arab
settlement that was eventually abandoned during the Israeli’s war
of independence. The place offers the poet a context to discuss
different layers of history and different wars at various points of
time in history. The place was also once famous for its winepresses.
There is a general consensus among archaeologists that Tel Gath is
Tel es Safi which means white mound since there are lots of white
chalky cliffs near Gath. The place carries biblical echoes. The title
is suggestive of the anniversaries of war that goes beyond the ones
that the narrator fought. It extends to the wars that were fought in
the middle ages.
The poet speaks of taking his children to the burial mounds in
Tel Gath. The poem is a journey through time. The moments are
marked by thoughts of war and events related to war. There is also
a great deal of nature in the poem. The lyricism of the poem is
balanced by an introspective mind that is continually conscious of
the assessments of his past acts in war. The poem is presented as
an oblique learning experience. The narrator is teaching his children
about history and war and the history of war. In war one will be
judged by the acts that one did or did not do.
The poem exploits the passage of time both forwards and
backwards. As the day moves forward the poet moves backward in
time and falls into an expansive mood. He thinks of the battles in the
past and this makes him recall a line from a poem written by Samuel
ibn Naghrillah (Shmuel Ha- Nagid (993-1056) one of the most
important Jewish poets of the middle ages who was well known as
a soldier and statesman. He was a reputed scholar of the Talmud,
and he fought in Spain and also headed the Arab army for nearly
two decades. He wrote poems while he was on the battlefield. The
narrator identifies himself with the earlier poet as he too has written
poems about soldiers. The poet says he talked to his children whereas
the earlier poet talked to his heart from the distant past, thus suggesting
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the greatness of the earlier poet. The poem ends on an assertion of

life over death in the image of the narrator and his children. The
poem suggests that life is both fleeting and eternal; fleeting like the
spring and eternal in its resurrection in the cycle of seasons to which
it belongs.
Anniversaries of War
Tel Gath
I brought my Children to the mound
Where once I fought battles
So they would understand the things I did do
And forgive me for the things I didn’t do.

The distance between my striding legs and my head

Grows bigger an d I grow smaller.
Those days grow away from me
These times grow away from me too,
And I’m in the middle, without them, on this mound
With my children

A light afternoon wind blows

But only a few people move in the blowing wind
Bend down a little with the grass and the flowers
Dandelions cover the mound
You could say, as dandelions in multitude

I brought my children to the mound

And we sat there , “ on its back and its side”
As in the poem by Shmuel Ha- Nagid in Spain,
Like me, a man of hills and a man of wars,
Who sang a lullaby to his soldiers before the battle.

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Yet I did not talk to my heart , as he did,

But to my children. To the mound, we were the resurrection,
Fleeting like this springtime, eternal like it too
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. Which famous warrior is associated with Gath?
2. How does the poet indicate the passage of time?
3. Which famous poet is alluded to in the poem and what is his
significance?
4. How does the poet of the middle ages describe the mount?
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Describe the nature presented in the poem.
2. Comment on the mood in the closing lines of the poem.
III Write an essay on the following
1.“Anniversaries of War” fuses personal memory and collective
history. Comment.

Activity
Discuss some twentieth century war poems. E.g. Keith Douglas’s
“Vergissmeinnicht”, “Simplify me when I am dead”; Wilfred Owen’s
“ A Strange Meeting”, Thomas Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge”, T S
Eliot’s “To the Indians who Died in South Africa”, Henry Reed’s “
The Naming of the Parts” Alun Lewis’s “All Day it has Rained.”

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Be Drunk
Charles Baudelaire

Introduction
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was the only child of Francois
Baudelaire and Caroline Defayis. Francois Baudelaire was a priest,
who later abandoned priesthood to become a civil servant. With strong
artistic leanings, it was Francois who introduced Baudelaire to art,
which later turned out to be his most consuming passion. As a child,
he had a strong fixation towards his mother, which continued for the
rest of his life. His father’s death gave him the opportunity to be
close to his mother which he described as a “verdant paradise of
childhood loves”. This joy was short lived; it ended with his mother’s
second marriage to Jacques Aupick, a soldier, ambassador and
senator. Critics have attributed his later excesses in life to this
traumatic incident. He wrote to his mother once “There was in my
childhood a period of passionate love for you.” His stepfather’s
death brought him back to his mother and he declares with pride:
“… I belong to you absolutely, and that I belong only to you.”
His maiden works, “Les Lesbiennes” (The Lesbians) and “Les
Limbes” wherein he seeks to “represent the agitations
and melancholies of modern youth” never appeared in book form.
Baudelaire was popular in the Parisian cultural milieu as an art critic
more than a poet. He proposed his theory of modern painting in
Salons.
The first edition of his magnum opus Les Fleurs du mal(1857)
or Flowers of Evil brought him notoriety for dealing with taboo topics
like sex and lesbianism. The poems, which Baudelaire considered to
be original in style and novel in theme, were condemned publicly.

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Thirteen of his poems were found offensive to religion or

public morality. He was tried on 20 August 1857, six of his poems
were to be removed for being obscene and he was imposed a heavy
fine. These six poems were republished in Belgium in 1866 in the
collection Les Épaves (“Wreckage”). Baudelaire responded to the
public outcry in a letter to his mother - “You know that I have always
considered that literature and the arts pursue an aim independent of
morality. Beauty of conception and style is enough for me.” The six
poems that were banned during his lifetime were reinstated only in
1949. In the prefatory poem “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”) to Les
Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire charges his readers of hypocrisy and
double standards, accusing them of not being “bold enough!” He
wrote a novella entitled La Fanfarlo in 1847.
Baudelaire won acclaim in the literary field on translating Edgar
Allan Poe. He found similarities between Poe’s thought and
temperament and his own. His reading of Poe enabled him to develop
his own aesthetic theories of poetry. In 1859, he lived with his mother
after Aupick’s death and produced a series of masterpieces,
beginning with “Le Voyage” in January and culminating in what is
widely regarded as his greatest single poem, “Le Cygne” (“The
Swan”), in December. He also wrote two of his most provocative
essays in art criticism, the “Salon de 1859” and “Le Peintre de la vie
moderne” (“The Painter of Modern Life”). “The Painter of Modern
Life anticipates the key thoughts of Impressionism, a decade before
the emergence of that school.
Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose , an innovative experiment
in prose poetry, was published posthumously in 1869 and was later
entitled Le Spleen de Paris (translated as The Parisian Prowler).
Set in an urban locale, they focused on the suffering that he observed
in the city be it in the hapless street trader, the poor, in awe of the
opulence of the rich, the deranged or the stray dogs. It is considered
a poetic equivalent to Impressionist painting. His unique prose-poetry
influenced writers like Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Stephen
Mallarme. The Symbolists acknowledged Baudelaire as a pioneer
of the movement. Arthur Rimbaud called him ‘the king of poets, a
true God’. Marcel Proust rates Baudelaire, along with Alfred de
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Vigny, as ‘the greatest poet of the nineteenth century’. T S Eliot

quoted the last line of Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ in the last line of
Section I of The Waste Land.
“Be Drunk” is a simple poem that advises the readers to be
pursue wine, poetry or virtue and to be passionate about it, in order
to withstand the attack of time. Time is personified as an enemy or
a tyrant that breaks your back and bends you down. The poetic
persona is a bohemian who urges the readers to be passionate about
anything that will make life much more meaningful and enjoyable
than a monotonous, dull, repetitious way of living life. Everything in
nature seems to be drunk and seems to exhort man to get drunk.
When the effect of the ‘drink’ subsides, it is time to drink again. He
imbues the word ‘drunk’ with newer connotations. Perhaps the poetic
persona is disillusioned with the way lives are lived in the city.
Be Drunk
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s
the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that
breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be
continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be
drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green
grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you
wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the
wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is
flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling,
everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask
what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you:
“It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of
time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on
virtue as you wish.”

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I Answer the following in two or three sentences

1. What are the different things on which one can get drunk?
2. Explain the expression ‘martyred slaves of time.’
II Answer the following questions in a paragraph
1. Explain the significance of the title “Be Drunk.”
2. How is time portrayed in the poem?
3. How does the word ‘drink’ acquire new meanings in the poem?
4. Metaphor in the poem.
III Write an essay on the following
1. The poem as a celebration of life.
2. The poem as an indictment of modern life.
Activity
Read Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and compare its treatment of life
with Baudelaire’s “Be Drunk.”

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Landscape of the Capibaribe River

Joao Cabral De Melo Neto

Introduction
Joao Cabral De Melo Neto (1920-1999), one of the most
distinguished poets from Brazil, comes from Pernambuco. He spent
the early years of his life in sugar plantations and later moved to Rio
de Janeiro in the early 1940s. Cabral is a master of evocative poetry.
There is in him an effective blend of the memories of his first world
and the present. Pernambuco and Capibaribe River are points of
reference in his poems. Cabral served as a diplomat for his country
and was posted in four continents, and Spain played a vital role in
shaping his artistic sensibility and outlook on life.
Cabral entered the literary scene in his twenties with his Stone
of Slumber which he printed at his own expense. (Less than three
hundred and fifty copies were printed). He came to be identified
with the Generation of 45, a group of poets of the post-WW II period,
whose poetry is marked by a bare and austere style. There are
traces of surrealism and cubism in his early poetry. The noted poet
Elizabeth Bishop translated “Morte e Vida Severina”, Cabral’s most
famous work (The Death and Life of Severino). Cabral is seen as
belonging to the concrete poetry movement. Some of his important
works are Uma Faca só Lâmina ( A Knife of All Blade), Museu
de Tudo (Museum of Everything) and Dois Parlamentos (Two
Parliaments). In the last years of his life he lost his eyesight and
stopped writing in 1990, his last work being Walking around Seville.
Cabral’s justification was that there can be no poetry without visual
perception.
For Bishop, Cabral is Brazil’s ‘’most important poet of the

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post-war generation.’’ Bishop singled out for praise Cabral’s ‘’striking

visual imagery and an insistent use of concrete, tactile nouns.’’ The
anti-lyrical tendencies in his poetry are often taken as a sign of his
dismissive attitude towards everything that is romantic and
sentimental. Elsewhere he explained writing poetry as building a
house, stressing the deliberate, cautious, conscious and structural
aspects of creation. For Cabral there was nothing unpremeditated
about art. It was never accidental.
Cabral’s “Landscape of the Capibaribe River” with its definitive
image of a dog is nearer to his A Dog without Feathers. The
central image of the river and the lives of people on the banks of the
river are presented without any sentimentality. Cabral’s unflinching
vision is hard to miss in the poem. In fact, the New York Times
Obituary described his death as the death of an unflinching poet.
The images in the poem unmistakably present a landscape and
waterscape that are scarred by waste, poverty and environmental
degradation. There is a great deal of social commentary in the poem.
Cabral undertakes an act of indictment. The tradition of describing
rivers is pretty long. Beginning with Spenser to its ironic handling in
TS Eliot, the environmental crisis is best reflected in images of water,
particularly rivers, lakes and oceans. Cabral builds up the poem by
the technique of cataloguing and he presents a series of analogies.
Cabral’s central image for the river is a dog. The analogy is
central to the meaning of the poem. The attempts to define the river
continue till the end of the poem. Rivers are the sources of life and
cradles of civilization. Rivers sustain human life everywhere and the
pollution of the rivers is a threat to life. Put otherwise, it can also be
stated that the pollution of the rivers can be an index of the threats to
the environment caused by human intervention in the landscape.
Cabral uses a casual tone in the opening lines of the poem. The
images of crossing the river and the dog crossing the road suggest
acts of inconsequence. The attitude of the speaker to the river smacks
of an absence of seriousness. Through this analogy Cabral conveys
to the reader that he is critical of man’s lack of concern for the river.
The poem is built on a series of absences and presences. The

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river, the narrator says, does not know the blue rain, the rose coloured
fountain, the water in the pitcher and breeze on the water. These
images are images of relative purity. By suggesting that the river
does not know these, Cabral presents the river as lacking pristine
qualities. In the next stanza the poet moves on to what the river
knows. This stanza can be seen as a continuation of the idea
introduced in the previous stanza. If the previous stanza talked about
what the river does not know, this stanza presents image of dirt and
silt - what the river knows is what the river should not know. To say
that the river knows silt, mud and rust means that it has lost its purity,
and is dying, however slow the process might be. That it must have
known the octopus means the river had greater biological diversity
which it lacks now. Cabral moves forward by introducing another
analogy between the river and the human beings. The colour black
moves from the initial image of the dog to the black people who live
near the river. Cabral masterfully exploits the traditional connotations
of a flower blooming. He introduces it only to frustrate the readerly
expectations by presenting the flowering as black, squalid and
beggarly. The poet presents a series of images like that of the river
opening up in to mangroves, kinky as a black man’s hair and of the
river as smooth like the belly of a pregnant dog. The river, the poet
reminds the reader, does not open to fish.
As the poem reaches its final movement the social fabric is
increasingly incorporated into the poem. Cabral paints an unenviable,
realistic and depressing picture of the river and the people who live
on its banks. The stagnation of the river is not limited to itself. The
poet extends it to the human world. The river reflects the stagnation
of the hospital and asylums in Pernambuco. The various places
through which the river runs are described in the poem. Cabral adds
the image of sugar factories of Pernambuco, his first world, suggesting
the effluence from these factories that pollutes the river. In the images
of human beings with their back to the river and of the ripened water
and the flies that hover over the river he draws the reader’s attention
to the unhealthy state of the water. The river, by its very nature
suggests flow, and river is alive in so far as it flows. Stagnation
means death. The image of the river trudging through suggests
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laboriousness and lack of ease. The river, with its dirt and silt, has
little life left in it.
The poem ends with a series of questions about the origin of
the river and the concluding lines of the poem become an agonizing
cry pointing to the falsified representation of rivers as blue on maps.
The poet wonders whether the river at some point in the past,
somewhere in its course must have been a song or a fountain or
whether it had cascaded in joy. With the images of stagnation
becoming more and more frequent and prominent towards the end
of the poem, the last question in the poem shows pressing concern
about the fate of the river. Like the image of the dog, the colour
imagery too allows the poet to record the life of a river, both imagined
and real. The representation of rivers as blue in colour on maps
offers a sharp contrast to the actual colour of the rivers in its present
state. In the distant past, the rivers must have been pure and blue in
colour and hence they are coloured blue in maps. But now, the poet
says, the rivers do not have blue colour because they are polluted
and are brown in colour. As a poem that uses colour imagery to
describe the present state of the rivers, it presents a befitting final
question. From the very specific Capibaribe river of his homeland,
Cabral moves to the rivers of the world in the last lines. He suggests
that all those rivers that are painted blue may not be blue; they may
have lost their beauty and purity, and their representation on maps
covers up or ignores the environmental pollution that has destroyed
them. When the maps were drawn the rivers must have been blue,
but the rivers are no longer blue. The maps need to recolour them,
the poet seems to suggest.
Landscape of the Capibaribe River
The city is crossed by the river
as a street
is crossed by a dog
apiece of fruit
by a sword.

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The river called to mind

a dog’s docile tongue,
or a dog’s sad belly
or, that other river
which is the dirty wet cloth
of a dog’s two eyes.

The river was

like a dog without feathers.
It knew rose-nothing of the blue rain,
of the rose-colored fountain,
of the water in a water glass,
of the water in pitchers
of the fish in the water,
of the breeze on the water.

It knew the crabs

of mud and rust
It knew silt
Like a mucous membrane
It must have known the octopus,
and surely knew
the feverish women living in oysters

The river
never opens up to fish
to the shimmer
to the knifely unrest
existing in fish.
It never opens up in fish.

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It opens up in flowers ,
poor and black
like black men and women
It opens up into a flora
as squalid and beggarly

as the blacks who must beg,

It opens up in hard leafed
mangroves, kinky
As a black man’s hair

Smooth like the belly

of a pregnant dog,
the river swells
without ever bursting.
The river’s childbirth
Is like a dog’s ,
fluid and invertebrate

And I never saw it seethe

(as bread when rising
seethes).
In silence
the river bears its bloating poverty,
pregnant with black earth

It yields in silence :
in black earthen capes,
in black earthen boots or gloves

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for the foot or hand

that plunges in.

As sometimes happens
with dogs, the river
seemed to stagnate
Its waters would turn
thicker and warmer,
flowing with the thick
warm waves
of a snake.

It had something
of a crazy man’s stagnation.
Something of the stagnation
of hospitals, prisons, asylums,
of the dirty and smothered life
(dirty, smothering laundry)
it trudged through.

Something of the stagnation

of decayed palaces,
eaten
by mold and mistletoe.
Something of the stagnation
of obese trees
dripping a thousand sugars
from the Pernambuco dining rooms
it trudged through.

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(It is there,
with their backs to the river,
that the city’s “cultured families”
brood over the fast eggs
of their prose.
In the complete peace of their kitchens
they viciously stir
their pots
of sticky indolence,)

Could the river’s water

be the fruit of some trees?
Why did it seem
like ripened water?
Why the flies always
above it, as if about to land?

Did any part of the river

ever cascade in joy?
Was it ever, anywhere,
a song or fountain?
Why then
were its eyes painted blue
on maps?
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. What is the central image used by the poet to describe the river?
2. What effect does the series of questions create?
3. Mention two things that the river does not know.
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. Comment on the imagery in the poem.
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2. Discuss the technique used by the poet to describe the river.

3. Comment on the concluding stanza of the poem.
4. What is the impression of the society that you get from the poem?
III Write an essay on the following
1. Cabral’s poem is about environmental degradation. Discuss.
2. Cabral’s poem is as much about the river as it is about landscape.
Substantiate.
3. To what extent can “Landscape of the Capibaribe River” be seen
as a consciousness raising poem?

Activity
Discuss any poem about river pollution that you have read.

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 Appreciating Poetry

Homeward
Bassey Ikpi

Introduction
Born in (1976- ) in Ikom, Cross River State in Nigeria and later
migrated to the United States, Ikpi has made a great impact in diverse
fields. She is a popular spoken word artist, poet, TV presenter and a
very humane mental advocate. At the age of four she had to leave
behind her Nigerian home to be with her parents in Oklahoma and
later to Washington DC. She suffered the pangs of having left behind
her homeland and was bitterly nostalgic. Her indigenous Nigerian
self refused to accommodate her adopted American self in spite of
the fact that it won her public recognition as an artist.
Ikpi joined the University of Maryland with the purpose of
studying English. During this time she developed a great interest in
performing her poetry. She got in touch with the Nuyorican Poets
Cafe, a performing artists collective. Miguel Algarin, one of the
founders of the cafe, clarifies the objective of the Spoken word artist:
“We must listen to one another. We must respect one another’s
habits and we must share the truth and the integrity that the voice of
the poet so generously provides”. She participated in HBO’s Russell
Simmons Def Poetry Show for five seasons which amply testifies
her popularity.
Ikpi possessed all the traits vital to a spoken word artist. She
had passion, dynamism and histrionic skill in her. She was a roaring
success as a performer on stage. Emotional honesty was of great
significance to her and she never shied from it. It was a life purged
of inhibitions. In 2004 she underwent a bout of depression and the
doctors confirmed her illness as Bipolar II disorder. She discussed
her psychic problems in public persuading others to do so in order to
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overcome the stigma associated with it. She founded the Siwe Project
to promote mental health among people. She was a very socially
committed writer.
“Sometimes Silence is the Loudest Kind of Noise” is one of
her striking poems. Her collection of poetry and prose is titled Blame
My Teflon Heart: Poetry, Prose and Post-It’s For Boys Who Didn’t
Write Back. Some of her other Spoken Word poems are
“Diallo”(2005),” I Want to Kiss You”(2006),” Apology to My
Unborn”(2007)” and Invisible Barriers”(2016). She has also published
a collection of essays on the effects of psychic problems entitled
I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying (2019) which became a best
seller.
Ikpi’s poem “Homeward”, a Spoken Word poem, narrates the
pangs of a Nigerian “who lost the reality of her nationality to the
hands of a foreign land. It’s a poem about a diminished culture”. As
she remarks in an interview with Kola Tubosun, the poem is about
her “Nigerian/American dichotomy...I was raised in the States but
I’m a Naija girl. Always have been and always will be”. In the same
interview Ikpi clarified what the two nations mean for her, “Nigeria
is where I’m from. I want to grow old here. The United States
raised me. It made me bold and empowered. So I can’t run from the
Americanness of my existence”. It is this dichotomy that is at the
root of the poem.
Homeward
Today, I remember my grandmother
As she attempts to connect with her second children
she finds the only english words she knows
from somewhere hidden in the belly of her 4 foot 9 inch body
and instead of awonke she greets us with “bye bye”
beckoning us into her thin clay colored arms
She has my mother’s face etched with time
peers at me me from eyes wide and dark
like mine
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I walk into these arms, the ones that mothered my mother,

taught her how to mother me
inhale the history from her skin
She reminds me of the little girl
bow legged and round faced, holding roasted corn in one hand
and a fistful of chin chin in the other
still begging for Orange Fanta to wash it all down
I remember her voice firm yet loving
“eh eh... mma bassey agi.. awai...”
you must eat, then drink
sometimes I forget but she remembers the small scared girl
carried away on an iron bird to America
Seems like that same bird has returned only to replace, her,
that perfect girl with me
this strange tongue tied woman,
the one that can barely say hello
without the clicks and moans the dips and tones of the
white man’s language
She listens now as I struggle with atum adem

It breaks my heart to realize that

I can only love her clearly in english

But tears do not replace the words

love will not make it easier
make it less heavy
desire will not help me remember
what the words taste like flowing like the Cross River from
my tongue

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But this is not my only tongue

Insolent and heavy with the awkward movements of amber waves
east or west this is not my village
and my heart still longs for my grandmother’s voice
steady and strong crossing rivers and oceans
rounding buildings of mud, thatched roof
of steel and glass
concrete and confusion
still I am afraid that it will not find me here
in this land miles
from the one that welcomed me into this world
lifetimes before I existed in this cosmopolitan space

“nbong non yin ben yami?”

“nbong non yin ben yami?”
what will I teach my children?
what will I tell them of where I’ve been
the earth that shaped me
the hands that held me
the land that made me
what will they call home
and will they hear it if and when it calls them
my heart still holds the salt and clay of Ugep
the strength of our women isn’t lost in me
but sometimes I forget and find it difficult to walk in bare feet
afraid o remember what history feels like dust covered and
peeking from brown toes

oklahoma
DC

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brooklyn
will not help me remember
ikom
ugep
calabar
they will also not let me forget fingers sticky with fuu fuu
swallowed whole
or tongues stinging numb from plantain fried in palm oil
But I have lost the grit and the grain of my grandmother’s gari
I can’t taste past this nostalgic lump in my throat
can’t stomach the reality of this my divided culture
African
American
I am everything
And I am nothing
Nigeria quietly begs me to remember
While America slowly urges me to forget
but it’s for my past
It’s for my future
it is for my children
and it is for you, grandmother
that I must
always
always
remember
I Answer the following in two or three sentences
1. How does the poet reveal her future anxieties?
2. What memories of her childhood does Ikpi sketch?
3. How did the grandmother receive her when she returned?
4. Explain the expression ‘nostalgic lump’.
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5. Why does the poet insist on ‘remembering’?

6. Point out the lines from the poem where the dichotomy of the
poet’s identity is suggested.
7. Explain the image of the ‘iron bird’.
II Answer the following in a paragraph
1. How does Ikpi present the dividedness of the two cultures?
2. What cultural peculiarities does the grandmother represent?
3. What is the purpose of the tonal variations envisaged by the poet?
III Write an essay on the following
1. Analyze “Homeward” as a lament on a diminished culture.
2. The cultural divide and its complex emotional nuances are
transacted effectively by Ikpi through the genre of Spoken word
poetry - Discuss.
Activity
Attempt a comparative study of Ikpi’s poem with Nellie Wong’s
“When I Was Growing Up.”

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II SEMESTER BA ENGLISH DEGREE

EXAMINATION MODEL QUESTION PAPER
(CBCSSUG)
Core Course-English
ENG2B02 – Appreciating Poetry
Time 2.5 Hours Maximum: 80 Marks
I. Answer the following questions in two or three sentences:
(2 marks each)
1. Explain the expression ‘Chorus Hymenal.’
2. What is the figure of speech in the expression ‘feast of losses’
and what does it convey?
3. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears – Identify the
figure of speech.
4. What is a villanelle? Give an example.
5. Comment on the closing lines of the poem Tonight I Can write
the Saddest Lines.
6. What is the beloved compared to by the narrator in Shakespeare’s
poem?
7. What kind of a mother is portrayed in Mother to Son?
8. How are the stone masons romanticized in the poem Stone
Masons, My Father and Me?
9. Explain the expression nostalgic lump in the poem Homeward
10.Comment on the lines ‘lonely as a shepherd’ in the poem
Childhood.
11.Why does the lover request the lady not to shed tears or sigh in
the poem Valediction Forbidding Mourning?

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12.What is the significance of the dedication of the poem Without

Title.
13.Comment on the line ‘better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag’
14. What is hard rhyme and soft rhyme?
15. What is a ghazal? (Ceiling 25 marks)
II. Answer the following questions in a paragraph (5 marks
each)
15.Who’d stoop to blame this sort of trifling? – What does this tell
you about the speaker?
16.Discuss the poem The Layers as a metaphor for the journey of
life
17.The theme of passionate love in I am Your Man
18.Imagery in Be Drunk
19.Comment on the changing mood in Milton’s sonnet
20.The inspirational aspect of Mother to Son
21.Discuss Dylan Thomas’ attitude towards death
22.Attempt a critical appreciation of the poem Vanity of Vanities by
Christina Rossetti
Ah, woe is me for pleasure that is vain,
Ah, woe is me for glory that is
past: Pleasure that bringeth sorrow at
the last, Glory that at the last
bringeth no gain!
So saith the sinking heart; and so
again It shall say till the mighty
angel-blast
Is blown, making the sun and moon
aghast, And showering down the stars like
sudden rain. And evermore men shall go
fearfully,
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Bending beneath their weight of

heaviness; And ancient men shall lie
down wearily, And strong men shall
rise up in weariness; Yea, even the
young shall answer sighingly,
Saying one to another: How vain it is!
(Ceiling 35 marks)
III. Answer any two out of the four questions in an essay:
24. Discuss La Belle Dame Sans Merci as a ballad.
25. How does Pope’s epistle ‘vindicate the ways of God to man?’
26.In Memory of W B Yeats is not just about Yeats. It is about
poetry and poets. Discuss.
27.Describe the impact of nature as presented in Shakespeare’s
sonnet. (2 x 10=20 marks)

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