https://www.ignouassignmentwala.

in/

BEGE -106

Understanding Poetry
Disclaimer/Special Note: These are just the sample of the Answers/Solutions to some of the Questions given
in the Assignments. These Sample Answers/Solutions are prepared by Private Teacher/Tutors/Authors for the
help and guidance of the student to get an idea of how he/she can answer the Questions given the
Assignments. We do not claim 100% accuracy of these sample answers as these are based on the knowledge
and capability of Private Teacher/Tutor. Sample answers may be seen as the Guide/Help for the reference to
prepare the answers of the Questions given in the assignment. As these solutions and answers are prepared
by the private Teacher/Tutor so the chances of error or mistake cannot be denied. Any Omission or Error is
highly regretted though every care has been taken while preparing these Sample Answers/Solutions. Please
consult your own Teacher/Tutor before you prepare a Particular Answer and for up-to-date and exact
information, data and solution. Student should must read and refer the official study material provided by the
university.

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 1

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

Attempt all questions. Answer all questions in approximately 450 words.

Q. 1. Critically analyse Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising”.
SOLUTION Discussion: The speaker commends the main commemoration of beginning to look
all starry eyed at. He has turned out to be very philosophical. He has passed a year in affection
and had a chance to pursue the development of time on the planet. The lyric mirrors this
double development of time. He makes reference to significant political achievements the
adjustments in the fortunes of the sovereigns and the rulers. Every one of them have endured a
change. The sun has additionally turned out to be more established by a year. And after that he
talks love in which there is no misfortune, no distortion, no change. Love alone is over all
change. It is by all accounts consistent and once it happened it basically keeps on being.
Donne's sonnets are an activity inargument and a wonderful technique by which the speaker
wins the dearest's heart. The speaker discusses the passing as he state – we should leave finally
in Death. In any case, this is all flashing. He says to persuade that the genuine grave is the body
from which the spirit, right now of death, will discover fast and sure discharge.

Along these lines, the two are genuine sovereigns between whom there is zero chance of break
of trust and they should keep on living in adoration for the following three scores of years.
Appreciation
Now we can understand what metaphysical conceit is. It is a use of images from diverse worlds,
an extended metaphor that combines two entirely different ideas into a single one. As in the
Sun Rising the poet uses alchemy, sphere and eclipse in a context of love. The Anniversary
juxtaposes the solar movement and political affairs against love’s constancy. These poems
shows Donne’s interest in politics and science. Donne has independent thinking and secular
interests. He uses unconventional situations like the bedroom scene, celebration of
anniversary, a planning of the future, or simply a continuation of a quarrel. Donne is
melancholic and yet capable of rising above the fit of sadness to a brilliancy of wit.
Q. 2. Discuss the themes of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 2

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

SOLUTION An Analysis: In sonnet 29, the poet bemoans some regression in his fortune and in
30, the loss of friends and many things he sought in life which he could not get. In both poems,
the poet cheers up when he remembers his friend. He overcomes the hurt caused by his
outcast state or depression inflicted by his lack of achievements or loss of friends. However,
Sonnet 30 presents the intimate experiences of the poet, its language imbedded in formal court
vocabulary may appear wooden on cogitationis seamless in providing the contrasting aesthetic
experience of suffering and happiness. In Sonnet 29, Shakespeare seems to bemoan certain
qualities and influence he did not have: “Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope”. In
sonnet 30, he laments the lack of many a thing he wanted to have. The reason for the down
cast state in which he finds himself is fall from favour of goddess Fotuna and people around
him. Nothing precipitous accounts for the dip in happiness in sonnet 30 but idle memory:
Sessions of sweet silent thought. In sonnet 29, the poet like Job in the Old Testament troubles
deaf heaven with his bootless cries, while in sonnet 30 he wastes ‘dear’ time summoning old
thoughts to the court of his mind. A setback in hiscareer forces the poet to take recourse to the
reassurance of religion in sonnet 29; in sonnet 30, the relaxed indulgence in past memories
makes him so what distant, aloof and offish. So while in sonnet 30 he is conscious of the
wastage, his time, in sonnet 29 the experience is more intense and the poet like Job curhis
fate. Shakespeare seems to have written the sonnets when he was in his late twenties and
early thirties. During that time, Marlowe, born in the same year as Shakespeare himself and
the only contemporary poet Shakespeare alluded to in his plays died in 1593 and his only son
Hamnet passed away in August 1596 and in Spenser 1599. In Sonnet 30, the poet asserts that
his eyes are ‘unused to flow’. The loss remembered is so personal in nature and affecting his
person that he cannot help crying:
And weep afresh love’s long since can celled woe, And moan the expense of many a vanished
sight:
The memory of his son Hamnet may have been profound and moving. Did Shakespeare use
Hamnet to buttress some scene or character in some of his early plays which comes to him
with a sense of guilt? The poet bemoans ‘The expense of’ some of his vanished sight.’ These
two sonnets are complementary. In sonnet 29, the poet is full of tear and cries and in sonnet

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 3

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

30, he has gained self-control and authority even compensating for the loss in the former. In
sonnet 29, the second quatrain reveals the poet’s inner most desire. Unlike Henry and Robert
i.e. Southampton and Essex, Shakespeare was a commoner but was conscious of his gifts. And
still, he must have felt that he was inferior even as a play wright to Christopher Marlowe of his
own age. He must have wanted to have the art of Marlowe and Spenser and the scope of earls
of Southampton and Essexto whose circle he belonged. Marlowe was University educated;
Shakespeare had to give up his education owing to some catastrophic decline in his father’s
fortune. The latter’s status in the late 16th century was that of a hanger on and an ordinary
actor and at best an in significant playwright. He lacked many things: The skills of Marlowe as
well his scope as one of Walsingham’s circle and of course the influence of Essex who was very
dear to Queen Elizabeth. But more than all these Shakespeare sought the company of Henry
Wriothsley, Earl of Southampton the world’s fresh ornament’ of which he never felt he had his
full. The third quatrain of Sonnet 30 is a more formal public conscious utterance, so
Shakespeare introduces the idea of now grieving over his grievances already mentioned in the
preceding quatrains. In a way, the melancholic strain is strengthened in the third stanza which
gives and epiphanic character to the concluding lines of the poem: But if the while I think on
thee, dear friend, All losses are restored and sorrows end. This revival of spirit comes faster in
sonnet 29. The third quatrain reverses the melancholic atmosphere of the foregoing quatrains.
Here, Shakespeare tells his reader that while he is despising himself on several counts he
remembers his friend, i.e. Southampton, his state’ or body begins to sing, Like to the lark at
break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; Shakespeare has used an
epic simile in a lyric and an extremely fresh and rejuvenating one. The poet’s gloom was like
the darkness of night, like the solidness, sullenness and miserableness of the dark earth but the
lark symbolizes joy and light just like the break of day’ and it rises from the sullen earth
carrying with it earth’s music in the form of – hymns’ at heaven’s gate. Shakespeare has
offered a scintillating image of light in the lark in sonnet 29 which reminds us of the main of
light in sonnet 60 where nativity the birth of an infant is compared, by suggestion to dust
particles in a shaft of light in an otherwise dark room. The sonnet 29 is luminescent at the end
as the image of the lark at break of day arising:

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 4

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Both the sonnets have the theme of memory but while the former is rich in passion the latter is
restrained in emotion. The poetic devices have enriched the texture of the poem and enriched
the aesthetic experience of the readers.
Q. 3. Comment on the literary devices used in Lord Byron’s poem “Roll on Thon Deep and
Dark Blue Ocean”.
SOLUTION The Stanza Form: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has old stanza form, which was
invented by Edmund Spenser (1552-99) and used in his great work The Faerie Queene (1590,
1596). It is also called the Spenserian stanza. In his preface to the first and second cantos of the
poem Byron wrote that the the Spenserian stanza admits of every variety. James Beattie
believes that he uses this stanza form to express his variety of moods effectively. Byron was in
the same tradition with Ludovico Ariosto, the author of the famous romantic poem Orlando
Furioso (1532), James Thomson (1700-48), author of The Seasons (1726-30) and James Beanie
(1735-1803) who wrote The Minstrel in Spenserian stanza.
Byron uses blank verse in five-foot iambic pentameter and Alexandrine in six-foot iambic line.
For example:
////
Roll on/thou deep/ and dark/blue O’/ can, roll,
/////
Ten thou/sand fleets/ sweep o/ ver thee/ in vain
/////
Man marks/ the earth/ with ru/in; his/ control
/////
Stops with/ the shore; / upon/ the Wat / cry main
/////
The wrecks / are all / thy deed; / nor doth/ remain
/////
A sha/dow of / man’s ra/vaage save his own

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 5

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

/////
When for / a moment like / a drop / of rain
/////
He sinks / into /thy depths / with bub / bring groan
//////
Without / a grave, / unknelled / unco / fined, and / unknown.

An Appreciation
‘Roll on, Thou Deep and Dark Blue Ocean’ is a ceremonial song. Written in praise of the sea, it is
considered as an anthem to the Ocean. It is written not in the Apollonian but in the Dionysian
tradition. The poem has the enthusiasm, the exuberance and joy of youth. Like other Romantic
poets, he presented the God’s variegated creation, its soothing power, destructive aspect and
creative force. What Shelley saw in the Wild West Wind, Byron sees it in the sea. Byron’s ocean
chastises the vain man, melts his Armadas and the spoils of Trafalgars into the yeast of its
waves. The monsters of the sea emerge from its slime. The poem mirrors the almighty’s
glorious creation. It is the image of eternity itself. It conveys God’s grandeur in its varied
aspects – calm and violent as in a breeze or gale, or storm and frigid as in the polar regions and
dark and tempestuous as in the equatorial. Taking the sea as a symbol of the Divine due to its
variegated beauty, Byron pre-empts Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89). Hopkins in ‘Pied
Beauty’ saw God represented in beauty that is in many colours, as in certain birds, or the
skyazure and white—or the fish (trout) with its ‘rose-moles’ (red dots)—or the landscape with
its bends, portions fallow and ploughed, or the freckled skin. What is presented in the last
stanza of ‘Roll on’ is magnified many times by Hopkins in ‘Pied Beauty’, but the sea of
experience in both cases is the same. The ‘Roll on’ is an address to the sea. It is the expression
of the rapture of communion with the ‘Universe’ which Byron thinks he can ne’er express, yet
cannot all conceal. However, Byron’s rapture is well presented through the images. The first
stanza sets the tone of the poem Byron finds music in the roar of the sea. He was a poet of the
mountain peaks and the sea like Wordsworth of the child and the meanest flower and Keats of
the ‘unravished bride’ and the fruit with ripeness to the core. Byron’s rejection of man’s pride

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 6

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

and power is presented in the image of man compared to rain drop falling on the surface of the
sea. Like the rain drop, he dies with no more than a ‘bubbling groan’. The poems says man
claims to rule over the waves and assumes titles like ‘arbiter of war’, but the truth is that it is
the sea which has complete control over the monarch. His ships are objects to play for the sea.
Byron talks about the decay of ancient civilizations of Assyria, Greece, Rome and Carthage. He
feels that man’s acquisitive instinctive has led him to ruin. Byron presents the sea as an image
of eternity. The pattern of rhyme with the words – roll, vain, control, plain, remain – bring the
elation to the heart as the sight of the gigantic waves in the sea themselves bring. Byron
believed that the Spenserian stanza was capable of expressing a variety of moods.
Q. 4. Mac Flecknoe has all the features of a mock-heroic fantasy. Elaborate.
SOLUTION Mac Flecknoe (1682): Mac Flecknoe, or A Satyr Upon the True–Blue Protestant Poet,
T.S. (1682) is a satire on Thomas Shadwell, a friend, whohad satirized Dryden’s The Medal
(1682) in a poem. The title of the poem was given after the name of Richard Flecknoe, an Irish
priest and a poetaster who wrote a little good verse and a great deal of bad, who was astock
subject for satire. Mac Flecknoe is written in a mock-heroical epical framework. Constructed in
Homeric style, it has all the solemnity and grandeur. Its scheme is highly ingenious. Dryden
displays all the classical power of form in this writing. It was a clear and well thought out plan
and the framework of his construction acquires almost an architectural quality. It has all the
features of a mock-heroic fantasy. From the very beginning in which the aged monarch of
Dullness, Flecknoe, is represented in the epic manner down to the closing speech in which he
advises his heir Shadwell, the supreme dullard, to trust nature and not labour to be dull. The
poem opens with:
“All human things are subject to decay,
And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.
This Flecknow found, who, like Augustus, young
Was called to empire and had governed long.
In prose and verse was owned without dispute through all the realms of
Nonsense absolute.”

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 7

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

When Flecknoe emerges as afatuous Augustus having “governed long in prose and verse” but
“through all the realms of Nonsense absolute”, the elevated tone of the opening couplet
crashes. A prince among fake poetasters, Flecknoe realizes that he has ruled too long and
decay is only the order of the day and the call of Fate cannot be ignored. The aged prince does
at length debate to settle the succession of his state (of “Nonsense absolute”) and ponders
which of all his sons was fit to reign and wage immortal war with wit.
He decides:
“Shadwell alone my perfect image bears
Mature in dullness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity”.
Thus, Shadwell becomes the right choice for the succession as he is described as “Mature in
dullness from his tender years” and hands confirmed in full stupidity. Dryden’s personal satire
against Shadwell is direct. The poem describes the site of the coronation which has been
selected to be in the disreputable quarters of London:
“Amidst this monument of vanished minds;
Pure cliches the suburban muse affords.....
Here Flecknoe as a place to fame well-known
Ambitiously designed his Shadwell’s throne.”
The place selected for the coronation is also presented sarcastically. The monument chosen has
been described asone of “vanished minds”, and the place chosen is praised ironically as one
well known to fame, and Flecknoe is presented as ambitiously designing his Shadwell’s throne.
The mock-heroic tone is running through the descriptions. This monument chosen in the
disreputable quarters of London is actually only a wretched Nursery– a training centre for
actors, where only stupid dramas are the usual favourites.Then the actual coronation of
Shadwell has been described:
“The hoary prince in majesty appeared
High on a throne of his turnabouts reared,
At his right hand our young Ascanius sat

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 8

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

Rome’s other hope and pillar of the state

His brows thick fogs instead of glories grace,
And Lambent dullness played around his face”.
Flecknoe has been described as the “hoary Prince” and the throne is made up of his own books.
Thereference to Ascanius takes us back to the relationship between Ascanius and Aeneas.
Shadwell is to Flecknoe what Ascanius was to Aeneas. After that come Flecknoe’s unusual
prophecy and unique benediction. The father invokes God’s blessings on the son and visualizes
a bright future for him in a prophetic mood:
“Then thus continued he: My son advance
Still in new impudence, new ignorance.
Success let others teach, learn thou from me
Pangs without birth and fruitless industry”
Shadwell is given an unconventional benediction in which he is blessed to advance still in “new
impudence” and “new ignorance”.
The poem ends with Flecknoe suddenly and dramatically disappearing, thusputting an abrupt
end to the entire procedure. The last few lines givean anti-climactic thud:
“He said, but his last words were scarcely heard,
For Bruce and Longville had a trap prepared.
And down they sent the declaiming bard,
Sinking, he left his drugget robe behind
Borne upwards by a subterranean wind.
The mantle fell to the young prophet’s part
With double portions of his father’s art”
Bruce and Longville are characters in Shadwell’s Virtuoso and the druggist robe is made of
coarse woolen cloth. So as the “declaiming bard” (Flecknoe) says his last words to the young
prophet (Shadwell), the father’s mantle falls on Shadwell with a double bang. Thus, Mac
Flecknoe is a highly entertaining though abusive attack on Shadwell. However, this burlesque
lampooning is surrealistically comic. Mac Flecknoe is a striking example of the mock-heroic in
English Literature.

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 9

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

Q. 5. What made Yeats a modernist poet? Discuss by giving examples from his poems in the
block.
SOLUTION Yeats poetry entered modernist phase by 1912. During that time he also met Ezra
Pound. His poems became suggestive and complex. He used esoteric symbols and concrete
imageries. He uses simple diction with precise, clear and sparse meaning. His poetry became
indirect and elusive. W. B. Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the English language. In the
early phase of his poetic career he relied entirely on inspiration giving himself up to “The chief
temptation of the artistic creation without toil”. In the later phase he became a conscious artist
who took great pains and re-polish his verse. He was very painstaking artist and tried to say
what he has to say in the best possible words. His early poetry has a dreamy luxuriant style full
of sleepy languorous rhythms. The tone is mostly wistful and nostalgic in these poems. There is
an abundance of ornate word pictures as in Spenser. Later on he tried to bring his versification
nearer to the day to day speech. Along with this he tried to give a new directness and precision
to his poetic language. He did away with archaism and poeticism. His imagery also became
more definite and accurate and acquired a new pithy quality. Verbiage and superfluity start
giving way to vigour and intensity. His diction now became terse and his poetry grew in density.
“To A Shade” mixes colloquial tone with formalism and rhetoric is used to help politicize
comments in the poem. The imagery is highly remarkable as well as evocative in the poem, the
poignancy in which the sorrows and illtreatment of Parnell and Hugh Lane is vividly expressed
is also noticeable. The poet has used simile, alliteration and personification.
Analysis
“No Second Troy” plays out through some rhetorical questions. First, the speaker wonders
“why” he should blame “her” for his unhappiness and for her reckless manipulation of the
emotions of Irish commoners to rouse political violence. Then he asks whether it would even
have been possible for “her” to be a “peaceful” person. He thinks her character and beauty.
Last, because there was no “second Troy” for her to destroy, she had to destroy other things –
like the speaker’s happiness, and the lives of Irish commoners. Yeats has used juxtaposition of
the images “little street” and “the great” which confirm his faith in the aristocratic lineage, and
his enthusiasm for the traditional Irish society under the protection of the aristocratic lords.

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 10

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

Thus, for Yeats the agents of nationalism should have been noble and valiant men of the upper
class rather than the “ignorant men”, who have no physical or moral courage equal to desire.
Two similes in the poem imply the nobility of Gonne’s mind and her extraordinary beauty:
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Her mind as pure “as fire” and her physical “beauty like a tightened bow” give her superiority
over the crowd, and makes her presence out of place “in an age like this.” The smile “beauty
like a tightened bow,” is also a symbol of sternness and grace, a mix of austerity and passionate
action, restraint and violence. The poem is like a sonnet, but it does not have the couplet. It
has 12 lines. The rhyme scheme makes the poem into three quatrains abab cdcd efef.
Analysis
The poem has 22 lines, divided into two stanzas. The first stanza has 8 lines and the second has
14 lines. The structure is unconventional, yet compliments the development of its theme. The
first stanza is an intense reflection on the violence and disorder and give way to the fuller
projection of the nightmarish vision presented in the second part. The first stanza has
interconnected images of a fragmented world amid confusion, anarchy and violence. The
image of falcon flying free out of the control of the falconer, who may be taken as a symbol of a
unifying being, the God, presents an impression of a murderous, world let loose which has no
control. The gyre’s spiral movement uponreaching its end at its widest expanse is occasioned by
mindless violence. It acts as a symbol for the end of world’s phase of human history
characterized by an arch blind bloodshed. The innocence is overtaken by violence. The people
with quality and ability are apathetic while the worst are driven by frenzy, escalating social
disorder and violence. In the second stanza, the poet predicts the return of the Christ. The
speaker has an extremely disturbing vision of grotesque figure, “The rough beast, emerging out
of spiritual Mundi.” This repulsive figure, the anti-Christ, with a lion body and a human head is
spotted in a desert scene. Its eyes are remorseless and blank unlike the benevolent eyes of the
Christ. As this figure moves its beastly things, the desert birds of prey hover about it. The poet

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 11

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

surmises that this dreadful figure, the signaler of the new history, had been lying dormant as if
in “a stony sleep” for the last “twenty centuries” when the Christian civilization lasted. As this
civilization ends with enormous violence and chaotic scenes all around, its time for this
creature to come out of its “rocking cradle,” and walk towards Bethlehem, where Christ was
born, to be born and inaugurate the new civilization. The images and symbols are based on the
geometrical figures that lie in the background. The first line refers to the expanding gyro:
Turning and turning the widening gyre. Yeats imagines a pair of antithetical gyres, locked into
each other, as constituting opposite progress of human history. One of the gyres or cones is
widening, while the other is tapering. He links the widening gyre with the elevating flight of the
falcon:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The poem has the flight of the bird as an image of the widening gyre of history in his earlier
poems as well, such as “The Wild Swans at Coole”:
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

The widening gyre implies the historical progress of 2000 years that had started with the birth
of the Christ. The tone in the stanza is somber as well as cynical. “The blood-dimmed tide” is an
intense image symbolizing horrific violence. In Yeats’s philosophy, these figures do not simply
represent movements of History, but also symbolize the subjective and objective forces within
the individual. There is escalation in tone in the second stanza. This figure symbolizes
paganism, destruction, irrationality, passion and evil that would destroy modernity, or the
modem civilization ruined by excessive use of reason and rationality. The poem has been
composed in blank verse. The metre is not regular, but it is written in iambic pentameter

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 12

https://www.ignouassignmentwala.in/

BEGE-106 SOLVED ASSIGNMENT 2018-19 Page 13