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Querries Will Be Entertained From 8am To 5Pm Monday-Friday Only
Querries Will Be Entertained From 8am To 5Pm Monday-Friday Only
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English literature is a broad term used in many educational settings. It refers to the body
of work written or spoken in the English language. For this module, we will focus only in
British an Irish literature which includes prose, poetry, both in written and oral traditions.
The Old English language or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest form of English. The period is a
long one and it is generally considered that Old English was spoken from about A.D. 600 to
about 1100. Notable works from this period are the epic “Beowulf” and “Canterbury Tales”.
The 17th Century was largely dominated by the works of William Shakespeare whose
works include the famous “Romeo and Juliet”. In the Romantic period, most themes in both
prose and poetry is focused on life, love, and nature as shown in the odes of John Keats. Most
people regard his “ode to a Grecian Urn” as one of the best poems written at that time.the post-
romantic or otherwise known as Victorian period up to the the now modern literature saw a lot
of excellently written works but none may be more popular than the poems of Elizabeth and
Robert Browning (“How Do I Love Thee.. Let Me Count The Ways”).
The difficulty encountered in reading Old English Literature lies in the fact that the
language is very different from that of today. Stories are narrated in Old English language and
there was no rhyme in Old English poems.
This module will only discuss two examples, one in prose and the other in poetry and
should serve as an inspiration to the students to read more English literary pieces.
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the
greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called
England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His works consist of
some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of
uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are
performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and
reinterpreted.
Here is an example of one of his most famous sonnets. A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines
using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes, in English typically having ten syllables per
line. In this sonnet, he uses iambic pentameter, which each line is composed of 5 meters with
each meter containing 2 syllables and the second syllable is stressed
Example:
Shall I - compare - thee to - a sum - mer’s day?
SONNET 18 (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.
* The sonnet talks about an everlasting love, contrary of a day or a season which has an end.