English Literary Texts

Level 1
Unit One ,two and three
Lecture one
By. Professor
Noha Farouk
 The poetic experience unit one
 Certain experience may trigger emotions worthy to be made into poetry;
but the capable poet may not undergo these experiences himself or
herself. The poet has the ability to assimilate the experiences of others,
internalize them, then turn them into poetry. The following is an example
of how a walk in the English Lake District by William Wordsworth and
his sister Dorothy gave birth to one of the poet’s most famous poems,
usually entitled ‘The Daffodils’. Here is what she wrote in her journal
(diary) first:
 When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few
daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the lake had floated the
seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up.
 But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last under the
boughs of the trees, we say that there was a long belt of them along the shore,
about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful.
They grew among the mossy stones about and about them; some rested their
heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness; and the rest tossed and
reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that
blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever
changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and
there a little knot, and a few stragglers a few yards higher up; but they were so
few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.
 (April 15, 1802)
 The report is factual, realistic, and alive with the writer’s emotion. It has one or
two metaphors but they are almost casual. Her report also seems to have a
‘poetic’ vision, namely the ‘simplicity, unity and life’ of the highway.

 Now her brother internalized the experience. Turning it into a poem, he began by
appropriating the scene, ignoring that he had company, and turning the
experience into one of a happy scene of ‘dancing’. Note how the image of the
dance is introduced in the poem. In fact, there we have a new vision, not of unity
and simplicity, but of joy (glee) and movement. The development of the poem
actually begins with physical movement and ends with the internal ‘dance’ of the
poet’s heart.
 Here is his poem:
The Daffodils
 I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
 When all at once I saw a crowd,
 A host, of golden daffodils;
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
 Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

 Continuous as the stars that shine

 And twinkle on the milky way,
 They stretched in never-ending line
 Along the margin of a bay;
 Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
 Tossing their hears in sprightly dance.
 The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
 A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company:
 I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
 What wealth the show to me had brought:

 For oft, when on my couch I lie

 In vacant or in pensive mood,
 They flash upon that inward eye
 Which is the bliss of solitude;
 And then my heart with pleasure fills,
 And dances with the daffodils.
(1807)
 What are the characteristics of poetry?
Rhyme:
 some poems use rhyming words to create a certain effect.
 Not all poems are rhyming. Poetry that does not rhyme is called “free verse poetry”.

Rhythm:
 Sometimes poets use repetition of sounds or patterns to create a musical effect in their poems.
 Rhythm can be created by using the same number of words or syllables in each line of a poem.
 Rhythm can be described as the beat of the poem.

Figurative language:
 Simile: comparing two things using “like” or “as”.
 Metaphor
 Personification: giving human characteristics to a non-living thing.
Shape:
 Poems are written in stanzas.
 A stanza is a series of lines grouped together to divide a poem.
 A stanza is a division of four or more lines having a fixed length, or
rhyming scheme
 The structure of the stanza is often repeated throughout the
poem.
 UNIT TWO
The Lyric:
 A lyric is a poem in which the speaker is the poet himself.
 the lyric is characterized by an overpowering [rhythm, music].
 Originally meaning a ‘song’, the lyric is always distinguished by rhythm and
rhyme, and is often short.
 It is also characterized by the expression of emotion, though this varies
according to the kind of lyric written and the time in which it was produced.

An Elegy:
 a poem written on the death of someone. It is a sad melancholic poem that
expresses sorrow for someone who has been lost or died.
 The following one is often described as a ‘sublime epitaph’, and is written by
William Wordsworth:
 A slumber did my spirit seal,
 I had no human fears; She seemed a thing that could not feel
 The touch of earthly years.

 No motion has she now, no force

 She neither hears nor sees,
 Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
 With rocks and stones and trees.
 Now this is what we call ‘verse’ or ‘versified’ language because the words when uttered –
when spoken aloud – follow a certain sound pattern (system).
 When you read the first line normally, you stress the syllables (‘slum-), ‘did’, (spir-) and
‘seal’ but pass lightly with your tongue on the syllables ‘A’, (-er), ‘my’ and (-rit). We mark
the stressed syllables with a dash (-) and the unstressed ones with a small (u) thus:
 You will also notice that the stressed syllables are all operative words, nouns that carry the
main scene, which the unstressed ones are inoperative – a preposition and two conjunctions.
 However, it is not only rhythm and rhyme that characterize these lines as poetry: they only
establish them as ‘verse’. What makes the lines ‘poetic’ is the figurative language, that is what
we call imagery. The first line contains a metaphor: the poet says that his ‘spirit’ (not his body)
was subdued and separated from reality by sleep.
 The image of sleep sealing the spirit is explained in the following line: he had no fears about
humanity: he did not fear that a human being (every human being) was doomed to die. This is
further explained in the third and fourth lines by another metaphor: his beloved (who was a
three-year old girl) could not, he thought, be touched by the hand of ‘earthly years’, thus is,
the hand of death. That is, he tells us, what he wrongly thought as a result of the sleep that had
sealed his spirit.
 Now the first stanza gives us his condition in the past, as all verbs are in the past tense. The
second stanza switches, however, to the present tense: it deals with his situation now. He is
faced with the reality he had not been conscious of – death.
➢ The poet creates another image, not metaphoric directly as the ones in stanza one, but
only indirectly. He sees that the girl, though deprived of ‘motion’, has acquired a different
kind of motion – the motion of natural objects, such as the rocks, the stones and the trees.
She is rolling with the earth in its daily revolution: she has become part of the earth, of
both animate and inanimate nature.

Unit three
The Sonnet

➢ One of the famous forms in English literature is the sonnet. This form consists of 14 lines,
with varying internal structure and rhyme schemes. The term derives from the Italian
Sonetto which means a ‘little sound’ or ‘song’. It was the Italian poet Petrarch who
established this form.
 There are three basic forms of the sonnet. The commonest is the Petrarchan. This comprises
an octave [a section of eight lines] rhyming abba abba, and a sestet [a section of six lines]
rhyming cde cde, or any combination except a rhyming couplet.
 The second form of the sonnet is the Spenserian, consisting of three quatrains [sections
consisting of four lines each] rhyming abab bcbc cdcd and a final couplet rhyming ee.
 The third form is the Shakespearean, consisting also of three quatrains and a couplet,
rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The first is the commonest (cf. ‫مصر في الشعر اإلنجليزي في القرن‬
‫التاسع عشر‬by M. Enani, where all the sonnets included in the Appendix are Petrarchan,
Cairo, 2015).
 Now the idea of the sonnet is to present a theme– which can be an image, or a thought, or
an (apparently logical) argument, which is developed in the octave, that is presented to the
reader only to be changed, however slightly by the sestet. The change, or turning round is
called a volta: though it grows out of the octave, it may vary the theme so much as to
present a different version of it or a complementary theme.
 In the other two kinds (the Spenserian and the Shakespearean): we have a different idea
expressed in each quatrain, each growing out of the preceding one. Technically these are
called the argument, the theme and the dialect, but these terms should not confuse us: they
simply refer to the ideal form of the process which leads to the ‘conclusion’ which unites all
that has gone before.
Shakespeare’s sonnet No. 94:

 They that have pow’r to hurt, and will do none,

 That do not do the thing they most do show,
 Who moving others, are themselves as stone,
 Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow – 4
 They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces, And husband nature’s riches from expense;
 They are the lords and owners of their faces
 Others but stewards of their excellence.
 The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet,
 Though to itself it only live and die,
 But if that flow’r with base infection meet,
 The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
 For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
 Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
 The sonnet presents three distinct ideas, the first (technically called the ‘argument’) is confined to
the first quatrain. It says that there are people who are true to themselves, but the quatrain consists
grammatically of the ‘subject’ only: it describes the people who guide others to righteousness and
resist temptation (in the sense of sinning).
 In the second quatrain the syntax is resumed with a repetition of the initial subject ‘They’. The
quatrain grammatically consists of two sentences: the first says that these people inherit ‘divine’
qualities [which interpreted could refer to purity, piety, forgiveness etc.]. The second says that they
ensure that these qualities are not wasted: such qualities are, however, described as ‘nature’s
diches’, and that they enlist other people to maintain their distinction. But this ‘theme’ repeats the
idea of ‘being true to oneself’ in different words, namely the quality of abstaining from hypocrisy.
 Now the third quatrain resembles the volta in the Petrarchan sonnet, in spite of the different rhyme
scheme. Here we have a totally new image, namely of a flower [a symbol of those people] which
should safeguard its healthy condition by avoiding any ‘infection’ by evil. As the technical
‘dialect’, the third quatrain gives us the opposite image, namely of those basically good people
who may be diverted from righteousness.
 We are suddenly confronted with a contingency, channeled through one of Shakespeare’s
favourite images, namely a derelict garden overwhelmed by ‘rank’ weeds. The couplet
grows naturally from the third quatrain, and sums up the progress of the idea in the sonnet
by an elaboration of the image given the ‘dialect’. So, while formally this is a Shakespearean
sonnet, in substance it is intimately linked to the Petrarchan.
 Still, the independence of the couplet ensures its difference from the Petrarchan: each line is
an independent sentence, each containing a sensuous image. They combine to link the
‘dialect’ with the ‘argument’ and themes.