Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya (Autonomous),

Latur

Syllabus

Core Course English

B. A. Second
(Semester Pattern)
(MCQ + Theory)

w.e.f. June, 2019

 Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya (Autonomous), Latur
B. A. Second Year
Core Course English
(MCQ + Theory Pattern)
Semester – III
Course Code Course Title Lect. Lect. per Marks
per Sem. Internal External Total
Week
U- ENG-306 Reading Drama 04 56 30 45 75
V
U- ENG-307 Reading Poetry- 04 56 30 45 75
VI

Semester - IV
Course Code Course Title Lect. per Lect. per Marks
Week Sem. Internal External Total
U- ENG-406 Reading 04 56 30 45 75
Drama - VII
U- ENG-407 Reading 04 56 30 45 75
Poetry-VIII
 Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya (Autonomous), Latur
English
B A Second Year (Semester-IV)
Course Code- U- ENG-407
Course Title –Reading Poetry- VIII
Max. Marks: 75 Credits: 03
Total Lectures: 56 Lectures: 50 Practical: 06

Objectives:
I. To acquaint the students with the major poets in English literature.
II. To sensitize them to themes and styles of the major poets in English literature.
III. To make them learn critical appreciation of the poems.
Outcomes:
I. The students will acquaint with the major poets in English literature.
II. They understand the themes and styles of the major poets in English literature.
III. They will learn critical appreciation of the poems.

Unit I Poetry Theory and History

I. Stanza Forms
II. Rhetoric and Prosody
III. Critical Appreciation

Unit II Poetry for Detail Study

I. John Donne i. The Canonization ii. A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning
II. Alexander Pope i. Ode on Solitude

Unit II I Poetry for Detail Study

I Alfred Tennyson i. Break, Break, Break ii. Crossing the Bar
II. W B Yeats: i. Sailing to Byzantium

Unit IV Poetry for Detail Study

I. W.B. Yeats: i. The Second Coming

II. W.H. Auden: i. Funeral Blues ii.The Unknown Citizen

 The Canonization
BY JOHN DONNE
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honor, or his grace,
Or the king's real, or his stampèd face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
The phœnix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,

And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love.

And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love

Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
 Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love!"

"The Canonization" is a poem by English metaphysical poet John Donne. First published in
1633, the poem is viewed as exemplifying Donne's wit and irony. [1] It is addressed to one friend
from another, but concerns itself with the complexities of romantic love: the speaker presents
love as so all-consuming that lovers forgo other pursuits to spend time together. In this sense,
love is asceticism, a major conceit in the poem. The poem's title serves a dual purpose: while the
speaker argues that his love will canonise him into a kind of sainthood, the poem itself functions
as a canonisation of the pair of lovers.
New Critic Cleanth Brooks used the poem, along with Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man"
and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802", to
illustrate his argument for paradox as central to poetry.
The speaker begs his friend not to disparage him for loving, but to insult him for other reasons
instead, or to focus on other matters entirely. He supports his plea by asking whether any harm
has been done by his love. The speaker describes how dramatically love affects him and his
lover, claiming that their love will live on in legend, even if they die. They have been "canonized
by Love".
The poet demands that some complainer leave him alone to love. The complainer should turn his
attention elsewhere, and nobody is hurt by the love. They are not sinking ships or causing floods,
delaying spring or causing others to die, or supporting wars or lawsuits. The poet and his lover
take their own chances together; they are unified in their love. They are like candles that will
burn out on their own, yet they have been reborn together in fire like the fabled Phoenix. On the
other hand, their love is a beautiful example for the world that will be immortalized, canonized, a
pattern for all other love in the world.

Analysis
In “The Canonization,” Donne sets up a five-stanza argument to demonstrate the purity and
power of his love for another. Each stanza begins and ends with the word “love.” The fourth and
eighth lines of each stanza end with a word also ending -ove (the pattern is consistently
abbacccaa), all of which unifies the poem around a central theme.
The title leads the reader to expect a poem concerned with saints and holy practices, but the very
first lines sound more like a line delivered on stage. “For God’s sake hold your tongue” is nearly
blasphemous when following the sacred title. By the end of the poem, the reader determines that
“canonization” refers to the way that the poet’s love will enter the canon of true love, becoming
the pattern by which others judge their own love. As usual, this hyperbole also leads the reader to
find a spiritual or metaphysical meaning in the poem, and as usual, this will lead us to see that
Donne sets out the perfection of divine love as the only realistic model for all others.
In the first stanza the poet complains that his verbal assailant is misguided. Has he no more
important work to do than criticize others’ love? He could just as easily attack Donne’s “gout” or
“palsy” (line 2) or even his “five gray hairs” (line 3), but he should get a job or go to school or
enter a profession, so long as he leaves the poet alone. The king’s “stamp'd face” (line 7) most
likely refers to coinage with the king’s likeness. The things of the world can be left to the critic
and the world, so long as the critic “will let me love (line 9).

The second stanza takes a live-and-let-live individual rights perspective: “who's injured by my
love?” (line 10). The lovers are not making war, fighting lawsuits, interfering with commerce, or
spreading disease. They respect others’ property; his tears do not trespass. They take their own
chances together in their fleeting lives, as the third paragraph notes. To the rest of the world, they
are tiny flies, or candles that will burn together in peace.

They may destroy themselves in the act of burning with passion for one another, yet by the
middle of the poem, Donne translates their love to a higher plane. First he compares himself and
his beloved to the eagle and dove, a reference to the Renaissance idea in which the eagle flies in
the sky above the earth while the dove transcends the skies to reach heaven. He immediately
shifts to the image of the Phoenix, another death-by-fire symbol (the Phoenix is a bird that
repeatedly burns in fire and comes back to life out of the ashes), suggesting that even though
their flames of passion will consume them, the poet and his beloved will be reborn from the
ashes of their love.

In their resurrection, their relationship has become a paradox. The key paradox of love is that
two individuals become one. By uniting in this way, they “prove/Mysterious by this love” (lines
26-27). These words may imply the mystery of marriage as it reflects the relationship
of Jesus and his church, as stated by Paul in I Corinthians. Indeed, the new union is unsexed even
though it incorporates both sexes: “to one neutral thing both sexes fit,” just like in Christ there is
no longer any male or female (Galatians 3:28). Compare the story of love in
Plato’s Symposium where the original human beings had the marks of both sexes before they
were split into male and female, each person being left to seek his or her other half.
The fourth stanza opens out to consider the legacy of the poet’s love with his beloved. Their love
will endure in legend; the language of “verse” and “chronicle” suggests canonization at nearly
the level of Scripture, which is counted by verses and has books called Chronicles. Even if their
love is not quite at that level, songs will be sung and sonnets composed commemorating their
romance.

On the one hand, their love is self-contained and perfect, like a “well-wrought urn.” (This is a
phrase that would become famous after poet John Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and critic
Cleanth Brooks wrote a book treating each poem like its own beautifully and carefully crafted
urn, full unto itself.) On the other hand, the ashes in this urn are meant to spread, in this case
covering half an acre but symbolic of spreading the tale of perfect love throughout the world.

The final stanza voices the poet’s sense of future vindication over the critic. The poet expects
that the rest of the world will “invoke” himself and his beloved, similar to the way Catholics
invoke saints in their prayers. In this vision of the future, the lovers’ legend has grown, and they
have reached a kind of sainthood. They are role models for all the world, because “Countries,
towns, courts beg from above/A pattern of your love” (lines 44-45). From the lovers’
perspective, the whole world is present as they look into each other’s eyes; this sets the pattern of
love that the world can follow.
The word 'Canonization' means the act or process of changing an ordinary religious person into a
saint in Catholic Christian religion. This title suggests that the poet and his beloved will become
'saints of love' in the future: and they will be regarded as saints of true love in the whole world in
the future.
John Donne (1572-1631)
The speaker of the poem is an old man who has just got the good luck of having a young
beloved! But, unluckily, he is being disturbed by a man who comes to a place where he is
making love. This intruder (one who disturbs) seems to have told him not to do like this. The old
lover gives energy to reply to him. Donne's "Canonization" is an example of metaphysical
poetry. It uses conceits, allusions from the medieval philosophy of metaphysics, a dramatic
situation and an impassioned monologue, a speech-like rhythm, and colloquial language, all of
which make it a typical "metaphysical" poem.

The personal in the poem speaks about the transformation of worldly lovers into holy saints as in
the Catholic Christian custom of 'canonization'. The speaker in the poem claims that he and his
beloved will be canonized when the poet immortalizes their love, and that lovers of the future
will invoke to them to give them the strength of spiritual love. The physical passion is to unite
them into one soul and transform them into saints of love.

The poem takes the form of a drama where the speaker is speaking back with angry arguments
against a third person who seems to have told him not to indulge in such love affair in old age!
The speaker argues with the intruding stranger so as to justify his metaphysical logic of love. As
the argument develops, the comparison of the relation between lovers develops with other
metaphors of myth, religion and so on. The speaker equates worldly human love with the ascetic
life of unworldly saints. The whole poem can be seen as an extension of the central unusual
comparison of the canonization of a lover! The poem makes an impressive beginning with an
abrupt jump into the situation: 'Hold your tongue and let me love.' The lines are highly dramatic.
They illustrate the shock tactic used in most of Donne's metaphysical poems.

The argument in the poem is forceful, suggestive and witty. The speaker uses colloquial words,
rough idioms and broken rhythm, all of which characterize metaphysical poems. The very
beginning "For God's sake....." is a good example. The whole poem is in such shockingly new
language and rhythm. Though the rhythm is rough and conversational, the poem is written
mainly in iambic pentameter. Each of five stanzas is of nine lines, and a rhyming scheme such
as: abbacccaa. But the word loves is, for some reason, always used in slant rhyming as in love/
approve, love/ improve, etc.

Use of surprising registers (words) is another feature of the poem. The speaker uses words from
the register of trade, commerce, medicine and myth so as to elaborate his concept of
metaphysical love. 'Palsy' and 'gout' for instance belong to the register of medicine while
'merchant' and 'ship' signify the realm of trade and commerce. While 'Phoenix' relates to myth,
'hymns' concerns religion and 'chronicles' means 'history'.

'Canonization' links together disharmonious images. In other words, there is 'a yoking together of
heterogeneous images by violence'. As the speaker faces an intruder and argues with him, he
links 'lover's sigh' with 'merchant's ships', 'colds' with 'spring', 'heat' with 'plague' and 'love songs'
with divine hymns. As the argument proceeds, the comparison of the relation between lovers
moves from the register of trade and myth to a climax where true lovers are equated with
canonized saints.

Fusion of emotion and intellect is another important feature of the poem. The fusion is observed
in the comparison of the lovers to the mysterious phoenix and the divine saints. The speaker
assumes that like the phoenix, the lovers would 'die and rise at the same time' and prove
'mysterious by their love'. Reference to this mythical being well sums up Donne's theory of
sexual metaphysics; a real and complete relation between a man and a woman fuses their soul
into one whole. The poet is both sensuous and realistic in his treatment of love. The romantic
affair and the moral status of the worldly lovers are compared to the ascetic life of unworldly
saints.

The poem uses an elaborate conceit. In the beginning the speaker expresses his commitment to
love. He addresses an intruding stranger and warns him to keep out of the lover's way. Next, he
discusses love in terms of 'sighs', 'cold' and 'heat'. In the lines that follow, the poet uses more and
more of disharmonious associations. He equates lovers to 'flies' and 'tapers', 'Eagle' and 'Dove',
'Phoenix' and 'saints'.

Thus, 'canonization' is in many ways a typical metaphysical poem where the complexity of
substance is expressed with simplicity of expression. The general argument and its development
are clear like its dramatic situations. The allusions are sometimes too forced, but that is a part of
such poetry.
 A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
JOHN DONNE
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
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.

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is a metaphysical poem by John Donne.

Written in 1611 or 1612 for his wife Anne before he left on a trip to Continental Europe,
"A Valediction" is a 36-line love poem that was first published in the 1633
collection Songs and Sonnets, two years after Donne's death. Based on the theme of two
lovers about to part for an extended time, the poem is notable for its use of conceits and
ingenious analogies to describe the couple's relationship; critics have thematically linked
it to several of his other works, including "A Valediction: of my Name, in the Window",
Meditation III from the Holy Sonnets and "A Valediction: of Weeping".
Donne's use of a drafting compass as an analogy for the couple—two points, inextricably
linked—has been both praised as an example of his "virtuoso display of
similitude",[1] and also criticised as an illustration of the excesses of metaphysical poetry;
despite detractors, it remains "the best known sustained conceit" in English poetry. [2] As
well as citing this most famous example, literary critics point to Donne's use of subtlety
and precise wording in "A Valediction", particularly around the alchemical theme that
pervades the text.
Thematically, "A Valediction" is a love poem; Meg Lota Brown, a professor at
the University of Arizona, notes that the entire poem (but particularly the compass
analogy in the final three stanzas) "ascribe to love the capacity to admit changing
circumstances without itself changing at the same time".[20] Achsah Guibbory highlights
"A Valediction" as an example of both the fear of death that "haunts" Donne's love poetry
and his celebration of sex as something sacred; the opening draws an analogy between
the lovers' parting and death, while, later on, the poem frames sex in religious overtones,
noting that if the lovers were "to tell the layetie [of] our love" they would profane it. [21]
Targoff argues that "A Valediction" follows on from Donne's earlier poem "A
Valediction: of my Name, in the Window" in theme, with the opening stanza of one, like
the closing stanza of the other, concerning itself with dying men, [22] while J.D. Jahn,
writing in the journal College Literature, compares it to Donne's Meditation III, from
the Holy Sonnets.[23] Carol Marks Sicherman, however, draws parallels between it and
another Valediction—"A Valediction: of Weeping", saying that "The speaker of
"Mourning" begins where his "Weeping" colleague ends; he knows at the outset that
"teare-floods" and "sigh-tempests" do not suit the climate of love he and his lady enjoy"
 The speaker opens with an image of good men dying quietly, softly urging their souls to
leave their bodies. These virtuous deaths are so imperceptible that the dying men's friends
disagree about whether or not the men have stopped breathing yet.
The speaker argues that he and the lover he's bidding farewell to should take these deaths
as a model, and part ways silently. They should not give in to the temptation to weep and
sigh excessively. In fact, grieving so openly would degrade their private love by
broadcasting it to ordinary people.
Natural earthly disturbances, such as earthquakes, hurt and scare human beings. Ordinary
people notice these events happening and wonder what they mean. However, the
movements of the heavens, while being larger and more significant, go unnoticed by
most people.
Boring, commonplace people feel a kind of love that, because it depends on sensual
connection, can't handle separation. Being physically apart takes away the physical bond
that their love depends on.
The speaker and his lover, on the other hand, experience a more rare and special kind of
bond. They can't even understand it themselves, but they are linked mentally, certain of
one another on a non-physical plane. Because of this, it matters less to them when their
bodies are apart.
The souls of the lovers are unified by love. Although the speaker must leave, their souls
will not be broken apart. Instead, they will expand to cover the distance between them, as
fine metal expands when it is hammered.
If their souls are in fact individual, they are nevertheless linked in the way the legs of a
drawing compass are linked. The soul of the lover is like the stationary foot of the
compass, which does not appear to move itself but actually does respond to the other
foot's movement.
This stationary compass foot sits in the center of a paper. When the other compass foot
moves further away, the stationary foot changes its angle to lean in that direction, as if
longing to be nearer to its partner. As the moving foot returns, closing the compass, the
stationary foot stands straight again, seeming alert and excited.
The speaker's lover, he argues, will be like his stationary foot, while he himself must
travel a circuitous, indirect route. Her fixed position provides him with the stability to
create a perfect circle, which ends exactly where it began—bringing the speaker back to
his lover once again.
 John Donne wrote “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” on the occasion of his
separation from his wife, Anne, on diplomatic business. The poem concerns what
happens when two lovers have to part, and explains the spiritual unification that makes
this particular parting essentially unimportant. The speaker argues that separation should
not matter to him and his lover because genuine love transcends physical distance.
A valediction is a farewell. Donne’s title, however, explicitly prohibits grief about saying
goodbye (hence the subtitle of “Forbidden Mourning”) because the speaker and his lover
are linked so strongly by spiritual bonds that their separation has little meaning. Indeed,
the speaker characterizes himself and his lover as “Inter-assured of the mind.” Donne
created this compound word—which combines the prefix “inter,” meaning mutually and
reciprocally, with “assured,” meaning confident, secure, or dependable—to emphasize
that the two lovers are linked by a mutual mental certainty about their love. They are so
close in this way that the separation of their bodies doesn’t mean much.
The speaker further assures his lover that their souls, as well as their minds, are unified.
Physical separation doesn’t “breach” or break this bond. Instead, their souls expand
outward to cover the distance between them, as a soft metal is beaten to spread thinly
over a larger surface area.
The speaker introduces the most detailed simile in the poem when he compares the soul
of himself and his lover to the two legs of a drafting compass, in order to explain how
they are still connected even when physically apart. The addressee of the poem is the
“fixed foot” of the compass, the point that stays on the paper. The speaker is the moving
point, which draws the circle. Although one leg of the compass doesn’t move, the speaker
points out that it “leans” as the other leg moves farther, making a wider circle, and
“grows erect” when the other leg comes nearer.
The speaker asserts that his lover will play the “fixed foot” to his moving foot. Although
the speaker “must” travel away, he will remain on a “just” path, correct and faithful.
Together, the legs of the compass create a circle, which has an associative resonance with
the spheres in stanza 4. In the popular philosophy of the time, circles and spheres
represented perfection, harmony. The speaker’s faith in his lover’s “firmness” will make
him trace a perfect circle, which ends precisely where it began. This ending also implies a
promise of return, since the speaker intends to “end where I begun,” coming back to his
lover after his travels. True love, in the speaker’s summation, not only can withstand any
separation, but will always bring lovers back to each other.
Physical Love vs. Spiritual Love
The speaker of Donne’s poem argues that visible grief at the lovers’ parting would be a
“profanation of our joys”—that is, that to loudly mourn would belittle the love the couple
shares by proclaiming it to the ordinary world. Yet even as the poem urges a reliance on
the power of spiritual connection in order to soften the pain of separation, it presents such
connection as rare. The speaker disparages more ordinary, earthly love, as well as any
bold proclamations of feeling, as indicative of the need for physical proximity. In doing
so, he elevates the quiet surety he shares with his partner as the mark of true, spiritual
love.
The speaker begins by describing the quiet deaths of “virtuous men.” These deaths are
almost imperceptible as the men “whisper to their souls to go,” indicating their readiness
for death with the smallest possible sound. Their watching friends in fact have difficulty
telling whether or not their breathing has actually stopped, because it is already so subtle
and faint. The speaker argues that his parting with his lover should imitate the quiet
quality of the deaths he describes. He cautions against “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests,”
the usual signs of separation, because they make the grief of parting too readily apparent
to others. Their particular kind of love, he claims, would be degraded by letting other
people know about it. The parting he wants is thus invisible to the outside world. It
doesn’t make a sound, or show signs of physical grief like tears and sighs.
By referring to the rest of the world as “the laity” (usually used to contrast ordinary
people with clergy), the speaker also implies a religious element to the love he shares. He
and his lover have a sacred spiritual bond, which other people cannot understand. In this
way, the speaker further indicates that the love he’s talking about is different from the
usual kind. The speaker then contrasts movements of the earth (possibly referring to
earthquakes and similar natural disasters) with the “trepidation of the spheres” (although
it’s commonly used to indicate anxiety and fear, an archaic meaning of the word
“trepidation” is a physical trembling motion). The speaker points out that disturbances of
the earth are very noticeable, causing “harms and fears.” This is an implied analogy for
the troubles of ordinary lovers, whose separations are stormy and public. In contrast, the
trembling of the cosmos (according to the Ptolemaic model), while actually much more
significant, goes unnoticed by people on earth. For the speaker, then, his parting with his
lover should follow this example. It’s a massive event, yet must remain invisible to
outsiders.
The speaker goes on to stress that his refined, highly mental conception of love is
different from that of “dull sublunary lovers,” who need concrete proximity to one
another. “Sublunary” means both “under the moon” and “mundane" or "worldly.” Donne
thus refers to popular love poetry’s use of the moon as a romantic image, yet dismisses
this as earth-bound and boring. The “soul” of commonplace love is “sense,” or physical
sensation. This kind of love cannot cope with absence, because it is essentially about
sharing pleasures of the body.
The speaker and his lover, in contrast, have a connection of mind and soul that makes
physical presence less important. For them, love has been “so much refined” that it is
beyond even their understanding. What they can understand is the link between them,
which goes beyond ordinary romantic and sexual feeling. They are “Inter-assured of the
mind,” and so do not need their bodies to be near each other in order to preserve their
love. In this way, Donne implicitly separates mundane, worldly love from what, in his
eyes, is more genuine, spiritual connection.
Summary
The speaker explains that he is forced to spend time apart from his lover, but before he
leaves, he tells her that their farewell should not be the occasion for mourning and
sorrow. In the same way that virtuous men die mildly and without complaint, he says, so
they should leave without “tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests,” for to publicly announce
their feelings in such a way would profane their love. The speaker says that when the
earth moves, it brings “harms and fears,” but when the spheres experience “trepidation,”
though the impact is greater, it is also innocent. The love of “dull sublunary lovers”
cannot survive separation, but it removes that which constitutes the love itself; but the
love he shares with his beloved is so refined and “Inter-assured of the mind” that they
need not worry about missing “eyes, lips, and hands.”
Though he must go, their souls are still one, and, therefore, they are not enduring a
breach, they are experiencing an “expansion”; in the same way that gold can be stretched
by beating it “to aery thinness,” the soul they share will simply stretch to take in all the
space between them. If their souls are separate, he says, they are like the feet of a
compass: His lover’s soul is the fixed foot in the center, and his is the foot that moves
around it. The firmness of the center foot makes the circle that the outer foot draws
perfect: “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end, where I begun.”

Form
The nine stanzas of this Valediction are quite simple compared to many of Donne’s
poems, which utilize strange metrical patterns overlaid jarringly on regular rhyme
schemes. Here, each four-line stanza is quite unadorned, with an ABAB rhyme scheme
and an iambic tetrameter meter.

Commentary
“A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” is one of Donne’s most famous and simplest
poems and also probably his most direct statement of his ideal of spiritual love. For all
his erotic carnality in poems, such as “The Flea,” Donne professed a devotion to a kind of
spiritual love that transcended the merely physical. Here, anticipating a physical
separation from his beloved, he invokes the nature of that spiritual love to ward off the
“tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests” that might otherwise attend on their farewell. The
poem is essentially a sequence of metaphors and comparisons, each describing a way of
looking at their separation that will help them to avoid the mourning forbidden by the
poem’s title.

First, the speaker says that their farewell should be as mild as the uncomplaining deaths
of virtuous men, for to weep would be “profanation of our joys.” Next, the speaker
compares harmful “Moving of th’ earth” to innocent “trepidation of the spheres,”
equating the first with “dull sublunary lovers’ love” and the second with their love,
“Inter-assured of the mind.” Like the rumbling earth, the dull sublunary (sublunary
meaning literally beneath the moon and also subject to the moon) lovers are all physical,
unable to experience separation without losing the sensation that comprises and sustains
their love. But the spiritual lovers “Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss,” because, like
the trepidation (vibration) of the spheres (the concentric globes that surrounded the earth
in ancient astronomy), their love is not wholly physical. Also, like the trepidation of the
spheres, their movement will not have the harmful consequences of an earthquake.
The speaker then declares that, since the lovers’ two souls are one, his departure will
simply expand the area of their unified soul, rather than cause a rift between them. If,
however, their souls are “two” instead of “one”, they are as the feet of a drafter’s
compass, connected, with the center foot fixing the orbit of the outer foot and helping it
to describe a perfect circle. The compass (the instrument used for drawing circles) is one
of Donne’s most famous metaphors, and it is the perfect image to encapsulate the values
of Donne’s spiritual love, which is balanced, symmetrical, intellectual, serious, and
beautiful in its polished simplicity.

Like many of Donne’s love poems (including “The Sun Rising” and “The
Canonization”), “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” creates a dichotomy between the
common love of the everyday world and the uncommon love of the speaker. Here, the
speaker claims that to tell “the laity,” or the common people, of his love would be to
profane its sacred nature, and he is clearly contemptuous of the dull sublunary love of
other lovers. The effect of this dichotomy is to create a kind of emotional aristocracy that
is similar in form to the political aristocracy with which Donne has had painfully bad
luck throughout his life and which he commented upon in poems, such as “The
Canonization”: This emotional aristocracy is similar in form to the political one but
utterly opposed to it in spirit. Few in number are the emotional aristocrats who have
access to the spiritual love of the spheres and the compass; throughout all of Donne’s
writing, the membership of this elite never includes more than the speaker and his
lover—or at the most, the speaker, his lover, and the reader of the poem, who is called
upon to sympathize with Donne’s romantic plight.
 Ode on Solitude
ALEXANDER POPE
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find

Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,

Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) is regarded as one of the greatest English
poets, and the foremost poet of the early eighteenth century. He is best known for his
satirical and discursive poetry—including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An
Essay on Criticism—as well as for his translation of Homer. After Shakespeare, Pope is
the second-most quoted writer in the English language, as per The Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations, some of his verses having even become popular idioms in common parlance
(e.g., Damning with faint praise). He is considered a master of the heroic couplet.
With the poem having a title ‘Ode on Solitude’, or uses words such as “commentary,” the
reader is typically given a pretty good idea of what the poem is about early on. Of course,
it would be far too simple an analysis to say that Alexander Pope’s oldest surviving
poem, Ode on Solitude, is simply “about solitude,” but it does provide a solid starting
point from which to analyse the poem. Clearly, when Pope wrote his work, he had the
idea of solitude in mind, as do a great many poets who express themselves best through
the written word, and perhaps less so in the company of others. Solitude itself is an
important thing to attain from time to time, and perhaps it makes sense to think of one of
Pope’s oldest poems as being about a very basic human desire.

Ode on Solitude Analysis

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

This first verse of Ode on Solitude begins the analogy that will carry through the poem,
seen through the life of an anonymous man who is described as being an ideal for
happiness. His deepest desires, the narrator notes, extends a few acres of his own land,
where he is content to live and work. The inclusion of the word “parental” suggests that
the land belongs to this man by inheritance, and therefore belongs solely to him. “Content
to breathe his native air” could also be a commentary on being happy with what a person
has, rather than constantly wishing for more (although this might not have been quite as
significant an idea in 1700, when the poem was written, as it may be interpreted today).
The verse structure and rhyming pattern is established here; three lines of eight syllables
each, followed by one line of four syllables, rhyming in an ABAB pattern. This persists
up until the final two stanzas, at which point the final line lengthens to five syllables.

Whose heards with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

This verse simply means that the man is self-sufficient. His land, now shown to be a
farm, provides for all of his needs — his herds provide him with milk, he is able to bake
his own bread. In the summer, his trees provide ample shade, and in the winter the wood
from those same trees can be lit to keep him warm. He has no need of anything beyond
his own land.
While this verse reads strangely, as “bread” and “shade” do not rhyme, it is important to
remember that Ode on Solitude was written over three hundred years ago. During this
period in Britain, “bread” was pronounced with a longer vowel sound. While word
pronunciation is a difficult thing to estimate and predict throughout different eras of
history, it makes sense to believe that at one point, “bread” and “shade” could be used as
rhymes for one another.

Blest! who can unconcern’dly find

Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
The narrator considered this farmer blessed! Time almost doesn’t have meaning for this
man; his world provides for all of his needs. Hours go by, days go by, years go by, and
everything remains the same. The health the man is in at the beginning of this cycle is the
health he remains in when it is finished. Peace of mind is normal for him — what is there
to trouble him? It seems as though, in a world of peace and quiet, there is absolutely
nothing that could disrupt the life of this farmer, and the narrator sees that as a high
blessing.

Sound sleep by night; study and ease

Together mix’d; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

This verse sees the start of the final lines being five syllables long, and continues the
sentiment of the verse before it. The idea of innocence is introduced here, and is a fair
way to describe a man who lives his life in isolation; he is innocent, which means he
himself probably doesn’t appreciate the kind of life he leads in the same way the narrator,
author, or reader does. It’s a strange idea and casts the character of the farmer in a
different light. He could, in fact, be viewed as a naïve and ignorant individual, one who
simply doesn’t know enough about the world, or he could be viewed as living the ideal
life.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;

Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lye.

The narrator of the poem clearly agrees with the latter of the above sentiments — here he
wishes for escapism, and begs for an unseen life, one where he may live in solitude until
his dying days, which will come and go, unnoticed, unremarked, and unadorned, a perfect
life of solitude and peace.

Historical Context
Because of the very mature concepts expressed by Ode on Solitude, particularly the bit
about wishing to die alone, many might be surprised to learn that Alexander
Pope wrote Ode on Solitude in 1700, at the age of twelve. At the time, Pope had just
moved to a small estate by a forest, in a small village far from the main British towns. His
family had been forced to live there because of their Catholic faith, and it could be here,
in the village now known as Popeswood (named after Pope himself) that the young child
found his ideals in solitude, undoubtedly being inspired by his new natural landscape,
particularly the Windsor Forest.
It was also at this time that Pope’s formal education ended, another unfortunate result of
being Catholic at the time. However, instead of giving up on learning altogether, Pope
attempted to educate himself, drawing on classical literature, paying particular attention
to well-known poets of the era.
With all of this background, it is altogether unsurprising that one of Pope’s earliest works
would be a very mature poem about solitude. Abandoned largely by the world, it makes
sense to think that solace in solitude was an everyday occurrence for the young
Alexander Pope. When discussing earlier whether an entirely isolated farmer was a man
to be looked down upon for his naïvety or respected for his independence, the perspective
of Pope is clear — he envies the man. Understanding that Pope was essentially forced out
of mainstream society because of his religious beliefs might lead one to believe that Pope
would have viewed total exclusion from that mainstream society as the best thing that
could happen to a person.
It is difficult to enter the mindset of the twelve-year-old Alexander Pope. When we
writes, “let me live, unseen, unknown,” is is almost sad to think that this is not at all what
happened — Pope did not live a life of seclusion but rather was a respected poet during
his time, and remains so today. Whether or not he changed his views on solitude is
difficult to say. What is clear is that his Ode on Solitude was just the start of what would
eventually become a literary career of classical fame and definite ingenuity for the now-
famous Alexander Pope.
 Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was a
British poet. He was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much
of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.[3] In 1829,
Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first
pieces, "Timbuktu." He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly
Lyrical in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most
celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although decried by some critics as
overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention
of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson's early
poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Break, Break, Break

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

The sea is breaking on the “cold gray stones” before the speaker. He laments that he
cannot give voice to his thoughts. Yes, the fisherman’s boy shouts with his sister while
they play, and the young sailor sings in his boat, but the speaker cannot express such joy.
Other ships travel silently into port, their “haven under the hill,” and this observation
seems to remind him of the disappearance of someone he cared for. No longer can he feel
the person’s touch or hear the person’s voice. Unlike the waves, which noisily “break,
break, break” on the rocks as they repeatedly come in, the “tender grace” of bygone days
will never return to him.
Analysis
This short poem carries the emotional impact of a person reflecting on the loss of
someone he (or she) cared for. Written in 1834 right after the sudden death of Tennyson’s
friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the poem was published in 1842. Although some have
interpreted the speaker’s grief as sadness over a lost lover, it probably reflects the feeling
at any loss of a beloved person in death, like Tennyson’s dejection over losing Hallam.

The poem is four stanzas of four lines each, each quatrain in irregular iambic tetrameter.
The irregularity in the number of syllables in each line might convey the instability of the
sea or the broken, jagged edges of the speaker’s grief. Meanwhile, the ABCB rhyme
scheme in each stanza may reflect the regularity of the waves.

On the surface, the poem seems relatively simple and straightforward, and the feeling is
easy to discern: the speaker wishes he could give voice to his sad thoughts and his
memories, to move and speak like the sea and others around him. The poem’s deeper
interest is in the series of comparisons between the external world and the poet’s internal
world. The outer world is where life happens, or where it used to happen for the speaker.
The inner world is what preoccupies him now, caught up in deep pain and loss and the
memories of a time with the one who is gone.

For example, in the first stanza, the sea is battering the stones. The speaker appears
frustrated that the sea can keep moving and making noise while he is unable to utter his
thoughts. The sea’s loud roar, its ability to vent its energy, is something he lacks. The
repetition of “break” aptly conveys the ceaseless motion of the waves, each wave
reminding him of what he lacks.

In the second stanza, Tennyson similarly expresses distance between himself and the
happy people playing or singing where they are. They possess joy and fulfillment,
whether together or alone, but he does not. The brother and sister have each other; the
sailor has his boat; the speaker is alone. They have reason to voice pleasure, but he does
not. One might sense envy here, but “O, well” also suggests that these blithe young
people have losses yet to come.

In the third stanza the poet sees the “stately ships” moving to their “haven under the hill,”
either to port or over the horizon. Either way, they seem content with a destination. But
the mounded grave is no pleasant haven, in contrast. That end means the end of activity;
there is no more hand to touch, no more voice to hear. Again the speaker is caught up in
his internal thoughts, his memory of the mourned figure overshadowing what the speaker
sees around him. The critic H. Sopher also interprets the contrast in this stanza as such:
“The stateliness of the ships contrasts with the poet’s emotional imbalance; and the ships
move forward to an attainable goal ... while the poet looks back to a ‘vanish’d hand’ and
a ‘voice that is still.’”
In the fourth stanza, the speaker returns to the breaking of waves on the craggy cliffs. The
waves come again, again, again, hitting a wall of rock each time. But for him there is no
return of the dead, just the recurring pain of loss. Why speak, why act? Sopher explains
that “the poet’s realization of the fruitlessness of action draws the reader’s attention to the
fact that the sea’s action is, seemingly, fruitless too—for all its efforts [it] can no more
get beyond the rocks than the poet can restore the past.” Nevertheless, both the sea and
the speaker continue with their useless but repeated actions, as though there is no choice.
The scene evokes a sense of inevitability and hopelessness.

While the feeling here could involve merely the loss of a romantic relationship, it seems
more poignant if the speaker has no hope for the return of the one who is lost. Without a
death, there is no opportunity to connect the “hill” to a mounded grave, the “still” voice
would be harder to interpret, and the “day that is dead” would be a weaker metaphor.

The first stanza of the poem Break, Break, Break, by Alfred Lord Tennyson presents the
picture of the poet sitting near his friend's grave on the sea-beach as he says “Break
Break, Break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me”.

Alfred L. Tennyson (1809-1892)

The speaker is looking at the ocean and wishing he knew how to express his grief. He
sees a fisherman's kid hanging out with his sister, and he hears a sailor singing, but they
don't cheer him up – they just remind him of the "voice that is still," or the voice of his
dead friend that he can't talk to anymore. The ocean waves keep breaking on the beach,
and time keeps marching on, but the speaker can't go back in time to when his friend was
still alive.

He is full of grief at the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. He observes the waves
striking against the rocks. The poet sees the sea-waves rising, advancing and striking
against the rocks. The rock-bound sea-beach is hard and would not melt in response. The
poet feels that just as the sea is unable to express its sorrow, he himself is unable to do so.
His sorrow is too deep for words. It is overwhelming, and in spite of his desire to give
vent to it, he feels tongue-tied. The thoughts, which rise in the poet's heart, cannot find
expression in words. Here we note a contrast between the waves which rise and strike
against the rocks, and the poet's thoughts which arise and remain unexpressed.

In these four lines, Tennyson reflects on the connection between the sea and himself. The
sea breaks up on rocks much as the poet's thoughts seem to break up on his tongue before
he can explain how he feels. This connection between the sea and the poet is reinforced
by the fact that "Sea" rhymes with "me." In addition, the two lines about the sea and the
two lines about the poet have the same three-beat rhythm. Tennyson could have directly
stated how he felt by writing something like: "I wish I could tell you how rotten I feel
today." By using poetry, however, Tennyson helped his readers both understand and feel
how he felt.

Stanza 2. O well …… on the bay! The idea is that there may be gloom in life the world at
large, and specially the community of children is not seized with gloom. The merry-go-
round of humanity continues uninterrupted. The grief of the poet becomes all the more
poignant at the sight of cheerfulness of the fisherman's boy.

Stanza 3. And the stately ships ….. that is still! The poet imagines to be on the sea-shore
near the spot where his dead dear friend lies buried. He observes that the life in the place
is going on as usual. The fisherman's children and the sailor's boy are in a playful and
pleasant mood. The ships coming from abroad are proceeding to their harbour below the
hill to rest and pack themselves for further voyage. Thus, the trend of worldly life shows
no signs of slackness or sadness. Only the poet is sad because his bosom-friend, Arthur
Hallam, is dead, and the poet is deprived of his company and mutual conversation for
good.

Stanza 4. Break, break, break ……… come back to me. These lines constitute the fourth
stanza of the poem "Break, Break, Break", by Lord Tennyson. The poet is lamenting the
death of his friend Arthur Hallam. He is standing near the spot of his friend's burial on
the sea-shore. Seeing the waves of the sea beating against the rocks the poet feels that the
sea might express its grief by lashing the coastal stones, but he himself would never enjoy
the tender beauty of the days when his friend was alive.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star

And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
 For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
Summary
The speaker heralds the setting of the sun and the rise of the evening star, and hears
that he is being called. He hopes that the ocean will not make the mournful sound
of waves beating against a sand bar when he sets out to sea. Rather, he wishes for a
tide that is so full that it cannot contain sound or foam and therefore seems asleep
when all that has been carried from the boundless depths of the ocean returns back
out to the depths.

The speaker announces the close of the day and the evening bell, which will be
followed by darkness. He hopes that no one will cry when he departs, because
although he may be carried beyond the limits of time and space as we know them,
he retains the hope that he will look upon the face of his “Pilot” when he has
crossed the sand bar.

Form
This poem consists of four quatrain stanzas rhyming ABAB. The first and third
lines of each stanza are always a couple of beats longer than the second and fourth
lines, although the line lengths vary among the stanzas.
Commentary
Tennyson wrote “Crossing the Bar” in 1889, three years before he died. The poem
describes his placid and accepting attitude toward death. Although he followed this
work with subsequent poems, he requested that “Crossing the Bar” appear as the
final poem in all collections of his work.

Tennyson uses the metaphor of a sand bar to describe the barrier between life and
death. A sandbar is a ridge of sand built up by currents along a shore. In order to
reach the shore, the waves must crash against the sandbar, creating a sound that
Tennyson describes as the “moaning of the bar.” The bar is one of several images
of liminality in Tennyson’s poetry: in “Ulysses,” the hero desires “to sail beyond
the sunset”; in “Tithonus”, the main character finds himself at the “quiet limit of
the world,” and regrets that he has asked to “pass beyond the goal of ordinance.”
The other important image in the poem is one of “crossing,” suggesting Christian
connotations: “crossing” refers both to “crossing over” into the next world, and to
the act of “crossing” oneself in the classic Catholic gesture of religious faith and
devotion. The religious significance of crossing was clearly familiar to Tennyson,
for in an earlier poem of his, the knights and lords of Camelot “crossed themselves
for fear” when they saw the Lady of Shalott lying dead in her boat. The cross was
also where Jesus died; now as Tennyson himself dies, he evokes the image again.
So, too, does he hope to complement this metaphorical link with a spiritual one: he
hopes that he will “see [his] Pilot face to face.”

The ABAB rhyme scheme of the poem echoes the stanzas’ thematic patterning: the
first and third stanzas are linked to one another as are the second and fourth. Both
the first and third stanzas begin with two symbols of the onset of night: “sunset and
evening star” and “twilight and evening bell.” The second line of each of these
stanzas begins with “and,” conjoining another item that does not fit together as
straightforwardly as the first two: “one clear call for me” and “after that the dark!”
Each of these lines is followed by an exclamation point, as the poet expresses
alarm at realizing what death will entail. These stanzas then conclude with a wish
that is stated metaphorically in the first stanza: “may there be no moaning of the
bar / When I put out to sea”; and more literally in the third stanza: “And may there
be no sadness of farewell / When I embark.” Yet the wish is the same in both
stanzas: the poet does not want his relatives and friends to cry for him after he dies.
Neither of these stanzas concludes with a period, suggesting that each is intimately
linked to the one that follows.
The second and fourth stanzas are linked because they both begin with a qualifier:
“but” in the second stanza, and “for though” in the fourth. In addition, the second
lines of both stanzas connote excess, whether it be a tide “too full for sound and
foam” or the “far” distance that the poet will be transported in death.

Sailing to Byzantium
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
 Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

"Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928
collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight ten-
syllable lines. It uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople) as a metaphor for a
spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and
the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats's
"Sailing to Byzantium" describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own
vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.

Sailing to Byzantium written in 1926 is an emphatic reminder of the poet's keen interest
in that historic city of Eastern Empire and the significance of art and culture. In the
metrical form, “Sailing to Byzantium” follows an ottava rima stanza pattern. Yeats,
however, modifies the form to suit his own purpose, using ten syllables instead of the
original eleven and using slant rhymes instead of exact ones.

That (Ireland) is not the right place for old men because all are caught in a sensual music
which makes them neglect the ageless artistic achievements of the intellect. In that
country the dying generations of birds and young lovers celebrate things which are a
slave to the natural cycle of birth and death. The young lovers who are in each other's
arms, the births who are in the trees and the salmon-falls and the mackerel-crowded seas,
fish, flesh and fowl all sing only one song-the song of the senses. All these, at the same
time, are creatures who are very much subject to death.

That country (Ireland) not being the right place for an old man who is otherwise a petty
thing with his physical powers decaying continuously, the only alternative available for
the old man is to have his soul educated in such a way that it starts to clap its hands and
sing. In this state of robust joy the soul has to sing louder with every tatter in its mortal
dress. In other words, the newly learnt song of the soul has to become louder and louder
as the physical powers of the old man goes from bad to worse. The only hurdle in this
way is getting the right school where the soul can get an education which is difficult to
find in that country because every singing school, instead of caring for monuments of
unageing intellect is busy studying the monuments of its own significance. As a result of
the difficulty in finding the right school for his soul to be educated in that country, the
poet decides to sail across seas and go to the holy city of Byzantium.

Addressing the sages standing in god's holy fire in Byzantium, the poet says: "O sages
who are standing in God's holy fire in the same way as a figure stands in the gold mosaic
work (inlaid work of small pieces of different colored marble, glass, etc.) of a wall, climb
down from your position in a spiral movement and be the educators of my soul so that
my soul can learn the right kind of song-the song which becomes louder as the body
decays more and more. The first thing one will have to do will be to purify one's heart
because it is tied to the animal instincts of the body and is sick with physical desire. Once
one has purified or consumed the heart away it will be easier for one to do what the
narrator most desires-gathering me into the artifice of eternity. In other words, the
narrator wants to become part of those things which are beyond the cycle of birth and
death."

Once the narrator is out of this circle of nature (being begotten, born and dying), he will
break all contact with natural things i.e., with the physical world. Instead of taking my
bodily form from any natural thing he shall take a form like that which was hammered
into golden shape and golden enamelling by Grecian goldsmiths. This was done by
Grecian goldsmiths to form a golden bird who could sing to a sleepy Emperor and keep
him awake. He also wants to be a golden bird gathered into the artifice of eternity, so that
he is set upon a golden bough in the court of Byzantium, that alone would enable him to
 sing of all times- past, present and future (of what is past, or passing or to come) to the
Lords and Ladies of Byzantium. This song of the narrator will be different from the
sensual music of dying generations and will sing of monuments of unageing intellect.

The Second Coming

W ILLIAM B UTLE R YE ATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed
in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of
verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding
the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war
Europe.[1] It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in
several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
With strong involvement in political, cultural and spiritual matters, William Butler Yeats
the poet was in a unique position to write a poem as far reaching as The Second Coming.
The poem is full of exotic and unusual imagery. The first two lines for instance take the
reader off into the air on the strong wings of a falcon, far away from the hand of the
falconer. Control is already being lost.
Gyre means spiral or vortex, a geometrical figure and symbol fundamental to the cyclical
view of history that Yeats held to. As the falcon sweeps higher and higher this vortex or
cone shape widens and weakens the hold on reality.
Not only is the bird representing a cycle of civilisation, it is a symbol for Nature in its
sharpest, cleanest sense. Humankind is losing touch with Nature and has to bear the
consequences.
 In today's world, that means the effects of such things as climate change and global
warming.
As this trend continues there is an inevitable collapse of systems and society. Again,
Yeats delivers a vivid picture of the consequences, repeating the word loosed in tsunami-
like imagery, as humanity descends into moral confusion.
The Second Coming relies heavily on certain words being repeated, perhaps to emphasise
the cyclic nature of things. So the Second Coming dominates the start of the second
stanza. The speaker exclaims excitedly and the reader has to prepare for what follows: the
genesis of a spiritual creature, taken to be a sphinx, which now begins its unstoppable
journey towards the historic town of Bethlehem.
There are clear biblical echoes here: from the Revelation of St John to the nativity story
of Jesus, the former a disturbing vision of the Apocalypse, the latter a birth that gave
hope to a sinful world.
In broad terms, the cosmic clock is ticking, alignments are being made.

William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" is a short poem that blisters with
apocalyptic ominousness. Its first line, "turning and turning in the widening gyre," locates
the whole poem inside an expanding gyre, or spiral, making it clear that something is
moving and changing, and the world will never be the same.
The poem's second line zooms from that gigantic, unclear beginning straight into a very
specific and symbolic image—the falcon, which has lost touch with its falconer. This line
essentially implies that the "falcon," which likely represents humanity, has become
detached from its "falconer," some sort of controller or holder that once kept it in order.
Now the falcon is roaming free.
Lines three through six describe collapse and turmoil, a dissolution of order and a rising
tide of violence and revolution without cause. Innocence and rituals celebrating purity
have been destroyed, and a wave of violence is washing over the land, drowning
everything in its path. In the seventh and eighth lines, Yeats mourns that the best people
have become silent and resigned to their fate, while villains are the ones in power,
speaking the loudest and caring the most about their causes.

In the second half of the poem, Yeats looks beyond the present into the future. He has
taken stock of all that is going on, and he knows that certainly something large must be
happening—all this chaos cannot be accidental; it must be part of an event of apocalyptic
proportions. This must be a Second Coming, he thinks—this must be an apocalypse like
the one predicted in the Bible's Book of Revelations.

Something about the words "The Second Coming" sends the speaker spiraling into a sort
of dream state. He falls out of his physical self and gains contact with the Spiritus Mundi,
or the world-soul or collective consciousness, which Yeats believed each person has
access to in some part of his mind. This collective consciousness is full of strange,
ancient, mythological images, and a few mythological archetypes appear to Yeats in this
surreal dream space. He sees a desert in his mind's eye, and observes a lion with a man's
head, also known as a sphinx, moving slowly around the desert, while angry, fearful birds
flutter around, casting shadows on the sand.
Then Yeats finds himself suddenly back in his own body and mind, out of this surreal,
dreamlike scene. But he has seen something he cannot forget: something is happening
now, something that will shake the world to its foundation. The world has been sleeping
for two thousand years, he thinks, but something is brewing, something terrible, and it is
on its way, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

Analysis
"The Second Coming" is about a rapidly changing world, altered forever by violence and
chaos. The poem's first line, which mentions a "widening gyre," refers to Yeats' belief
(which he expanded on in a later book called A Vision) that the world was created by a
series of interlocking circles, spinning into each other and winding around each other to
catalyze existence. The poem's first line implies that something is turning and changing
within the universe. This first line serves to create a sense of mystery from the poem's
very beginning; it is obscure and complex, ominous withholding of any clues about what
might be happening. It also expands the poem's scale, making it clear that the poem is
really addressing events on a cosmological scale.
With high stakes and a cosmological scale established in the first line, the poem goes on
to deepen this ambiguity in the second line. At first glance, it appears to mourn the fact
that the "falcon," or humanity, has been separated from its falconer—from its God or
ethics or morals. On the other hand, Yeats expressed his admiration for wild birds in
other poems, like "The Wild Swans at Coole," and certainly he himself was uninterested
in convention and order, having broken from his Christian upbringing to pursue occult
leanings. He was even expelled from the London Theological Society because he refused
to follow their rules. Usually, people interpret "The Second Coming" as mourning the
loss of order, in which case the falcon's being separated from the falconer would be an
example of this collapse. But perhaps, through this line, Yeats is implying that the
Second Coming means that the falcon is at last free—and the world has broken from its
past traditions of convention and restraint, and it can move into a new era, discovering
new freedoms and new possibilities.
In the third line, the phrase "the centre cannot hold" implies that the core or heart of the
world is falling apart, so something once seen as fundamental to the world is changing
forever. Yeats uses the word "loosed" twice to describe the onset of the violent changes
occurring, evoking an uncontrollable burst of fury; something is coming unfurled,
unclenched, opening, falling, melting—slouching. A collapse is coming. This could lead
to a new coming-together, a new unity; but most likely will lead to uncontrollable,
possibly dangerous, possibly liberating changes.
Many Yeats scholars believe that this poem is specifically about the Russian Revolution
of 1917, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, which resulted in a bloody seven-year
war that paved the way for the rise of the Communist party in Russia; it also certainly has
echoes of World War I, which rocked the world to its core. But perhaps Yeats could see
even further. Perhaps he could somehow sense the coming of further wars and
violences—World War II, the atomic bomb, technologies that would reshape the world
from the ground up. He knew the world would never be the same after the 20th century,
and it certainly is not.

Yeats gives a name to this whole series of events, placing them under the umbrella of a
"Second Coming." But instead of a second appearance of Christ, this event will be a birth
of a creature as significant as Christ, who will completely alter the state of the world just
as Christ did—but who will operate in a completely different way than the world has
been operating since Christ arrived and civilization began to form.

The second half of the poem finds Yeats delving into mythological imagery through
occult methods. Yeats believed that all humans share a common, vast memory, populated
by universal archetypes and myths. This collective consciousness or Spiritus Mundi, also
described as the Oversoul by Carl Jung, is the source of the bizarre, apocalyptic imagery
that leads the poem to its conclusion. The speaker descends into a bizarre vision,
observing a sphinx staring cruelly at him in a desert, moving its thighs slowly and almost
sexually, perhaps offering him the clues to understanding what is happening around him
while also embodying primal, ancient ways of being and creative, fertile energies that
represent a potential union and rebirth.
When he reemerges from the vision, the speaker reenters reality, having totally departed
from it temporarily. The poem ends where it began: in a haze of ominous foreshadowing,
the specter of a looming monster of the future rapidly approaching, the universe spinning
and growing into something different than it was. Whether that future is an evil mess of
pure chaos, or whether it will offer some sort of freedom and possibility, remains
undecided.
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
An unnamed speaker laments the death of someone close to him. (The speaker's gender is
never given, but we'll refer to "him" from now on for convenience.) The speaker asks for
quiet. He wants to stop all clocks and telephones and to silence barking dogs and pianos.
He says to bring out the coffin of the dead beloved, and for the mourners to come.

He continues on in a similar vein; and asks the airplanes to write "He Is Dead" across the
sky. He says that doves should wear white ribbons and that policemen should wear black
gloves to commemorate the death.

Then things take a turn for the personal. He says that the dead man was everything to
him—all points of a compass, every day of the week, every time of the day. And the
worst part is that this experience has taught him that love won't last forever, as he once
thought.

That's when he starts to really despair. He doesn't want to see the stars, the moon, or the
sun. He doesn't want to see the ocean or the forest. Now that the dead man is gone, there
is no good left in the world. None at all.

Lines 1-2

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

 The poem begins with a series of harsh commands: stop the clocks! Cut off the
telephones!
 We don't know quite who our speaker is yet, but he sounds forceful, even angry.
 And actually, we'll never find out too much about the speaker himself. For the
sake of convenience, we'll refer to the speaker as a "he," but "he" could just as
easily be "she."
 Whoever he is, he sounds angry, and issues harsh commands. In the first line, he
wants to stop the clocks and the telephone. These seem like physical
representations of time and communication to us. He wants everything to just stop.
 In the next line, he asks for silence. He wants dogs to stop barking, too. But we
have to ask: what dogs? Whose dogs? To whom does the speaker address these
lines (and the poem in general)? His noisy, dog-loving neighbor? Dog-lovers in
general?
 There's no one answer to these questions, but since the poem is called "Funeral
Blues," it would be pretty legitimate to propose that the speaker is addressing an
audience of mourners as a funeral. So this is a public poem, in a way—a poem
meant for lots of people to hear.
 And finally, we noticed that these lines are similar in length. Line 1 has ten
syllables, which is a sure as shootin' sign that we're reading iambic pentameter.
Line 2, though, has twelve, and the rhythm is off in both lines, so Auden's keeping
us on our toes for now.

Lines 3-4

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
  Whatever's going on here, this is not a time for pianos. It's a time for muffled
drums. Now that he's asked the dog and the phone to hush, he has no problem
extending that request to musical instruments.
 Except he's not opposed to the drum. Which fits the title. If this is a funeral we're
dealing with, drums are much more solemn and fitting for the occasion than a
joyful, jazzy piano.
 In the next line, he wants the coffin to be brought out and for mourners to come
see it. Maybe the "muffled drum," then, is the sound of mourners walking, or of
pallbearers carrying a coffin. Or maybe it is a slow and stately drumming that the
speaker wants, the kind of drumming that happens at military funerals.
 The interesting thing about these two lines, and the first two as well, is that they
are all commands, also known as imperatives. The speaker is making a big
pronouncement to the world: someone has died, and we must acknowledge it in
dramatic ways.
 These lines might even seem a little exaggerated to you. Should we really stop the
clocks just because someone has died? Probably not. But the speaker's using a bit
of hyperbole or exaggeration to convey just how important all this mourning
business is.
 But of course when someone's being so over-the-top, it raises the question, how
serious is the speaker? Is he exaggerating to create drama, or does he really feel
this deeply about all this?
 Line 3 has eleven syllables, and line 4 has ten. Shmoop thinks it's safe to call this
one iambic pentameter.
 And by the end of stanza 1, we've also got a clear rhyme scheme at work.
"Telephone" rhymes with "bone," and "drum" rhymes with "come." A little AABB
action for you.
 Here's a tip for you budding Shmoopoets: whenever you see a four-line stanza,
or quatrain that has an AABB rhyme scheme in a poem about a funeral, you're
reading an elegiac stanza. Check out our "Form and Meter" section for more on
that fancy term.

Lines 5-6

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,

 Now things are getting really dramatic. As if stopping the clocks weren't enough,
the speaker would like an airplane to write "He is Dead" in skywriting to
commemorate his grief. If a funeral is a public acknowledgment of death, well
then this is a super public acknowledgement of death. You don't get much more
in-your-face than skywriting.
  While earlier he asked for quiet, and for people to cut off their telephones (which
are private communication devices), he wants the whole world to know that "He Is
Dead."
 And it's interesting here that the speaker doesn't provide a name. He could have
written, for example, "John Is Dead." Or "Tommy Is Dead." But he leaves the
dead man's name anonymous. Maybe he wants more privacy after all. Or maybe
he assumes that everyone already knows "his" name. Either way, there's an
interesting mixture between private and public acknowledgments of death going
on here.

Lines 7-8

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

 More public demands here, as the speaker wants even the "public doves"—we
have a strong feeling that these are pigeons—to honor the dead man. And he wants
even the traffic police to acknowledge him, too.
 Do these demands seem a little ridiculous to you? Does the speaker really want us
to put bows on pigeons? It seems our man is getting hyperbolic again.
 And what's up with this dead guy? Why does the speaker care so much about how,
where, and by whom he is mourned? Is the dead man the prime minister? A
famous athlete? A poet? Why does he deserve to be publicly mourned? Let's keep
reading.

Lines 9-10

He was my North, my South, my East and West

My working week and my Sunday rest,

 Ah, this clears things up a bit. This speaker is so broken up about stuff (and wants
everyone else to be broke up about it, too) because he really loved the dead man. It
doesn't seem like he was the leader of England or a world-class gymnast or
anything like that. The dead man is someone the speaker knew and loved in daily
life.
 These lines are incredibly personal, especially when compared to the earlier lines
that are mostly about public mourning. The dead man meant everything to the
speaker, so it's no wonder he'd like all the world around him to reflect the fact that
the guy's dead.
 Metaphor alert. Was the dead man really a calendar of days for the speaker? All
the directions on a compass? Of course not. But in a metaphor, we describe one
thing by way of another thing. So here, the speaker describes the dead man by
 saying that he was like a compass for him, and also like every day of the week for
him. He provided direction, and filled his time. It's a more poetic way of saying,
"hey, I loved this dude! He was important to me!"

Lines 11-12

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

 More metaphors. These lines seem to imply that the dead man filled every hour of
the speaker's day. He brought conversation and joy into the speaker's life.
 And then BAM. Line 12 hits you over the head.
 While the previous lines were lovely and metaphorical, this one is straight-up
harsh. Your loved ones will die. No love lasts forever. Have fun staying up late at
night thinking about that one, suckers.

Lines 13-14

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

 After that devastating line 12, the speaker grows even more mopey in these lines.
Reentering imperative land, he demands that someone, whomever he's talking to,
put out the stars, pack up the moon, and take apart the sun. Now his grief is so
extreme, it's affecting the way he sees the cosmos. This is some serious business.
 Does the speaker expect us to really do this? Of course not. But his extreme,
hyperbolic commands are his expressions of his extreme grief.
 Even though no one could ever "dismantle the sun," the speaker's grief is so
intense that he wishes that we could. All of these romantic and natural images—
the stars, the moon, the sun—are too painful for him. It's almost as if he wants to
blot out everything in the world except his own mourning.

Lines 15-16

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

 In these final lines, the speaker continues his hyperbolic thinking and asks us to
get rid of the ocean and the wood (by "wood," he probably means the forests). He
doesn't want to see any sign of the wonders of nature because he's so down in the
dumps.
 The last line of the poem is another whammy. Totally hopeless, the speaker mopes
that nothing will ever be good again. Not since this guy's death.
 In a lot of elegies (poems like this one that commemorate a person's death), the
speaker will offer some hope for the future, or will talk about how the dead person
will live on in memories and poetry. There's usually a small moment of optimism
buried somewhere in them. But not in Auden's "Funeral Blues." This is just a
really sad poem about death. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for anyone
in "Funeral Blues."

The Unknown Citizen

W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
 He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

The poem begins with an ironic epigraph, “To JS/07 M 378 / This Marble Monument / Is
Erected by the State.”

The Bureau of Statistics and all other reports show that he will complied with his duties
to “the Greater Community.” He worked in a factory and paid his union dues. He had no
odd views. The Social Psychology investigators found him to be normal, as did the Press:
he was popular, “liked a drink,” bought the daily paper, and had the “normal” reactions to
advertisements. He was fully insured. The Health-card report shows he was in the
hospital only once, and left cured.

The Producers Research and High-Grade Living investigators also showed he was normal
and “had everything necessary to the Modern Man”—radio, car, etcetera. The
Public Opinion researchers found “he held the proper opinions for the time of year,”
supporting peace in peacetime but serving when there was war. He was married and had
the appropriate number of five children, according to the Eugenicist. He never interfered
with the public schools.
It is absurd to ask whether he was free or happy, for if anything had been wrong, “we
should certainly have heard.”

Analysis
“The Unknown Citizen” (1940) is one of Auden’s most famous poems. Often
anthologized and read by students in high school and college, it is renowned for its wit
and irony in complaining about the stultifying and anonymous qualities of bureaucratic,
semi-socialist Western societies. Its structure is that of a satiric elegy, as though the
boring, unknown citizen was so utterly unremarkable that the state honored him with a
poetic monument about how little trouble he caused for anyone. It resembles the
“Unknown Soldier” memorials that nations erect to honor the soldiers who fought and
died for their countries and whose names have been lost to posterity; Britain’s is located
in Westminster Abbey and the United States’ is located in Arlington, Virginia. This one,
in an unnamed location, lists the unknown man as simply “JS/07 M 378.”

The rhyme scheme changes a few times throughout the poem. Most frequently the reader
notices rhyming couplets. These sometimes use the same number of syllables, but they
are not heroic couplets—no, they are not in iambic pentameter—they are often 11 or 13
syllables long, or of differing lengths. These patterns increase the dry humor of the poem.
Auden’s “Unknown Citizen” is not anonymous like the Unknown Soldier, for the
bureaucracy knows a great deal about him. The named agencies give the sense, as early
as 1940, that a powerful Big Brother kind of bureaucracy watches over its citizens and
collects data on them and keeps it throughout one’s life. This feeling makes the poem
eerie and prescient; one often thinks of the dystopian, totalitarian states found in the
writings of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley or the data-driven surveillance state of
today. In Auden’s context, one might think of the state-focused governments of Hitler,
Stalin, and Mussolini.

The Big Brother perspective begins from the very outset of the poem, with its evocation
of a Bureau of Statistics. The man has had every aspect of his life catalogued. He served
his community, he held a job, he paid union dues, he did not hold radical views, he
reacted normally to advertisements, he had insurance, he possessed the right material
goods, he had proper opinions about current events, and he married and had the right
amount of children. It does not appear on paper that he did anything wrong or out of
place. In fact, “he was a saint” from the state’s perspective, having “served the Greater
Community.” The words used to describe him—“normal,” “right,” “sensible,” “proper,”
“popular”—indicate that he is considered the ideal citizen. He is praised as “unknown”
because there was nothing interesting to know. Consider, in comparison, the completely
normalized protagonist Emmet in The Lego Movie.
At the end of the poem, the closing couplet asks, “Was he free? Was he happy? The
question is absurd: / Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.” With
these last lines comes the deeper meaning of the poem, the irony that despite all of the
bureaucratic data gathering, some aspect of the individual might not have been captured.
It becomes clear that the citizen is also “unknown” because in this statistical gathering of
data, the man’s individuality and identity are lost. This bureaucratic society, focused on
its official view of the common good, assesses a person using external, easily-catalogued
characteristics rather than respect for one’s uniqueness, one’s particular thoughts,
feelings, hopes, fears, and goals.

Interestingly, and ironically, the speaker himself is also unknown. The professionals in
the poem— “his employers,” “our Social Psychology workers,” “our researchers into
Public Opinion,” “our Eugenicist”— are just as anonymous and devoid of personality.
While a person might be persuaded that he is free or happy, the evidence of his life shows
that he is just one more cog in the faceless, nameless bureaucratic machine.