Prose and Poetry 8th Semester

WEEK 1
WW1 left through Europe a sense that the bases of civilization had been destroyed, that all
traditional values had been wiped out. we see this sense reflected in the years immediately after
the war in different ways in, for ex T.S Eliot’s (waste land) and Aldous Huxley's early fiction.
but the poets who wrote during the war most directly reflected the impact of the war experience.

If civilization is this, then what is the humanity was the question in young minds who had to
fight for their country. The young ones started to understand what it is going on and they
understand that they are brutally dying just because the politicians want that. This war changed
mind in many ways.

In this war women get some rights because they show their importance, they work as an
ambulance driver, nurse etc., they fought for equality. Media was also influence for this era.

War poets wrote their firsthand experiences.

RUPERT BROOKE 1887-1915

BROOKE was the most popular of the gordians, pastoral poets who infused nature with
nationalist feeling.

He was well educated poets. They read all classical and took a class about all these subjects.

Winston Churchill sounded a note * joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic
symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days
when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most
freely proffered. *

"THE SOLDIER" – colonialism in the poem / when he dies his body will transform the land
where he died into England /he equals his body with his country/ dualism patriotism. this poem
explores the bond between a patriotic British soldier and his homeland.

JULIEN GRENFEL 1888-1915

His parents were members of the Victorian high society known as "the souls". His gentle
manners may have eked to his decision to join the royal dragoons in 1910. one of his best poems
is into battle. he died in his first year of war, soldiers’ poets are descended from aristocratic
families he volunteers in army, and he served, and he died in hospital.

"INTO BATTLE" – nature support soldiers in battle. into battle the titles means that this is his
idea about battle and how it will be. war is a natural thing soldier is happy. This poem follows
some traditional and conservative forms of Edwardian poetry which make it inspired by nature.
the poem was written right before WW1, so it shows us the state of mind and what the war is for
the soldier poet.
SIEGFRIED SASSON1886-1967

He is different than the first 2 poet he did experience war and he is well educated he fought St.
Mametz wood his nickname was MAD JACK after he got wounded by a sniper he was sent back
to England, and he starts to change his image about war. he made a public letter he sent it to his
commanding officer. the military authority said that he was suffering from shell shock and sent
him to hospital where he met welfare own. He is attacking the authorities and church,
government, who for him are responsible of the war in his poetry he is so critical. his poems
satirically play on contrasts between the romanticization of war and the grim realities.

“THEY” – ambitions of politicians and generals make them suffer. it focuses on religious
authority, embodied in the poem by the bishop. this poem satirically contrasts the moral
improvement to British soldiers promised by a bishop with the physical damage and moral
degradation that they experience.

"GLORY OF WOMEN” – women are supporting the soldier and national effort with idea of
war. Romanticizing the battle. people didn't believe that soldiers of Britain run away but they
need to accept it. German is the enemy but both experiencing the same thing reality is far than
the illusion.

ISAAC ROSENBERG 1890-1918

He is Jewish, he was soldier and he died in the battle.

"BREAK A DAY IN THE TRENCHES" – war to the speaker make a mockery of nature itself.
while sunrise is normally associated with warmth, light, life and new beginnings, the break of
day for a World War 1 soldier only means another day of horrific trench warfare. Rat is freer
than soldiers, this is ironic because the rat will live, and the soldiers will die. rat has more chance
than the soldiers.

WILFRED OWEN 1893-1918

He fought as an officer in the battle of the sum then he suffered from shell shock, and he was
sent to hospital where he meets Sassoon. the influence of Sassoon’s satiric realism was a useful
tonic to OWEN's lush. his mental health was affected by the war he starts to see the seams in his
dream, and he started to reflect it in his poems he died 1 week before the war ends.

"AUTHEM OF DOOMED YOUTH" – no hope and no funeral for the soldiers. they are not
giving them a proper funeral. the generals and nations acting blind to this situation. this poem
describes memorial tributes to the soldiers who die in war. the poem ironically compares the
sounds of war to the choirs and bells which usually sound at funerals. it also compares familiar
funeral practices to the bleak farewells of young men who should have their whole lives in front
of them.
"DULCE ET DECORUM EST" – (from Horace and it is means of course it is sweet and meet to
die for one's country , letter to his mother ) taking for Horace letter to his mother, gas a poison
used in war , a gas attack and also shell bombs, people lost their feet and they are blinded and
dead he drowning because of blood and gas, soldiers are mentally and emotionally exhausted, he
still see the soldiers in his dream he said to jessie pop if you really know what's happening in the
battle you will never encourage people to volunteer to war. war is not a no biking experience it is
a horrible thing.

WEEK 2
Modernist Poetry
 The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures
emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into
the new.
 These were Yeats and Thomas Hardy.
 Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from the new poetic movements that
sprang up around him and adapted his writing to the new circumstances. Hardy was, in
terms of technique at least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for
various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the 1950s onwards.
The Georgian Poets
◦ The Georgian poets were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian era.
◦ Their work appeared in a series of five anthologies called Georgian Poetry which were
published by Harold Monroe and edited by Edward Marsh.
◦ The poets featured included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H.
Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, and Siegfried Sassoon.
◦ Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the decadence of the 1890s and tended
towards the sentimental.
◦ Brooke and Sassoon were to go on to win reputations as war poets and Lawrence quickly
distanced himself from the group and was associated with the modernist movement.
◦ Other notable poets who wrote about the war include Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas,
Wilfred Owen and, from the home front, Hardy and Rudyard Kipling.
◦ Although many of these poets wrote socially aware criticism of the war, most remained
technically conservative and traditionalist.

The background of modernism

◦ Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859)
◦ radically altered the nineteenth century romantic view that nature, especially human nature,
was kind.
◦ The work of Marx, and Freud, as well as other great intellectual explorers and rebels had
mounted an assault against orthodox religious faith that lasted into the twentieth century.
◦ World War I in particular deepened doubt and reauthorized disillusionment.
◦ Another source of disillusionment was the rapid transformation of British society that
accelerated with World War I.
◦
Modernism
  Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and
architecture, design, literature, music, dance, painting and other visual arts which
emerged in the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in the years following World
War I.
 The term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of
associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching
changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
 Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.
 Modernism rejected the persistent certainty of Enlightenment thinking.
 Modernism also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God in
favor of the abstract, unconventional, largely uncertain ethic brought on by modernity,
initiated around the turn of century by rapidly changing technology and further catalyzed
by the horrific consequences of World War I on the cultural psyche of artists.
 In general, the term modernism involves the activities and production of those who felt the
"traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization, and
daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions
of an emerging fully industrialized world.
 The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 command to "Make it new!" was model of the movement's
approach towards the outdated.
 The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that
the term "avant-garde", with which the movement was labeled until the word
"modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and
political context).
 Surrealism gained fame among the public as being the most extreme form of modernism,
or "the avant-garde of modernism.
Thematic characteristics of Modernism are:
 Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
 Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normalcontext
 Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future
 Disillusionment, uncertainty, fragmentation
 Stream of consciousness, term coined by William James in principles of psychology to
denote the flow of inner experience. It refers to depict the continuous thoughts and
feelings which pass through the mind.
 Overwhelming technological changes of the 20thCentury.
 Among the foremost avant-garde writers were the American-born poets Gertrude Stein, T.
S. Eliot, H.D. and Ezra Pound, each of whom spent an important part of their writing
lives in England, France, and Italy.
 Pound's involvement with the Imagists marked the beginning of a revolution in the way
poetry was written.
 English poets involved with this group included D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, T. E.
Hulme, F. S. Flint, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward and John Cournos.
 Eliot, particularly after the publication of The Waste Land, became a major figure and
influence on other English poets.
Technical Elements
 Free verse: Verse composed of variable, usually unrhymed lines having no fixed metrical
pattern.
  Discontinuous narrative: a narrative style in which the narrative moves back and forth
through time. This particular style is usually associated with Modernist literature.
 Juxtaposition: a literary device that is used as an important tool in Literature to bring a
dramatic effect to certain situations and thereby make more of a mark for the work of art
in its entirety.
 Intertextuality: refers to the way in which texts gain meaning through their referencing or
evocation of other texts.
 Intertextuality forms one of the crucial grounds for writing studies and writing practice.
Texts do not appear in isolation, but in relation to other texts. We write in response to
prior writing, and as writers we use the resources provided by prior writers. When we
read, we use knowledge and experience from texts we have read before to make sense of
the new text, and as readers we notice the texts the writer invokes directly and indirectly.

Classical allusions

 Allusion is a literary term, though the word also has come to encompass indirect references
to any source, including allusions in film or the visual arts. In literature, allusions are
used to link concepts that the reader already has knowledge of, with concepts discussed
in the story.
 Metanarrative: an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of
historical experience or knowledge. The prefix meta- means "beyond" and is here used to
mean "about", and narrative is a story constructed in a chronological way. Therefore, a
meta-narrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories"
within totalizing schemes.
 Fragmentation: a broad term for literary techniques that break up the text of narrative.

Imagism

 It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete language
and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom, and avoidance of
romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise
visual images.
 Initially led by Ezra Pound, then Amy Lowell, and others.
 The Imagist manifesto which came out in 1912 showed three.
 Imagist poetic principles:
- direct treatment of the "thing (no fuss, frill, or ornament),
- exclusion of superfluous words precision and economy of expression,
- the rhythm of the musical phrase rather than the sequence of a metronome (free verse
form and music).
 They’re existed great influence of Chinese poetry on the Imagist movement. Imagists
found value in Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is, by virtue of the
ideographic and pictographic nature of the Chinese language, essentially imagistic
poetry.
 Also influenced by Japanese Haiku

The Major Representatives of the Modern Poetry

  Ezra Pound (1885- 1972)
 T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)
 Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
 William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963)
 Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
 E.E. Cummings (1894 - 1963)

"In a Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd.
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound
In the poem,
 The "Metro" is the underground railway of Paris.
 The word "apparition", with its double meaning, binds the two aspects of the observation
together:
 Apparition meaning "appearance", in the sense of something which appears, or shows up;
something which can be clearly observed.
 Apparition meaning something which seems real but perhaps is not real; something ghostly
which cannot be clearly observed.
 The poem is an observation by the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station.
It looks to be a modern adoption of the Japanese haiku.
 He tries to render exactly his observation of human faces seen in an underground railway
station. He sees the faces, turned variously toward light and darkness, like flower petals
which are half absorbed by, half resisting, the wet, dark texture of a bough.
 Repeating it, you can have a colorful picture, also you can feel the beauty of music through
its repetition of different vowels and consonants.
 Feeling of wistfulness, ambiguity; sense of touch and sight.

Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord

O fan of white silk, clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.
Ezra Pound

◦ Apostrophe*: directly addressing the fan.

◦ Imagery: frost on grass-blade (contrast)
◦ Metaphor: she is the fan-piece.
◦ Theme: feeling unwanted; fleeting feelings.

* a figure of speech in which a speaker directly addresses someone (or something) that is not
present or cannot respond in reality- often introduced by the exclamation "O,".

WEEK 3
Characteristics of Modern Poetry:
 1.Modern poetry is written in simple language, the language of everyday speech and even
sometimes in dialect or jargon like some poems of Rudyard Kipling (in the jargon of
soldiers).
2.Modern poetry is mostly sophisticated as a result of the sophistication of the modern age, e.
g. T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land.'
3.Alienation. The poet is alienated from the reader because of the alienation of the modern
man.
4.Fragmentation: the modern poem is sometimes fragmented like a series of broken images,
and a gain like "The Waste Land".
5.Modern poetry is highly intellectual; it is written from the mind of the poet, and it
addresses the mind of the reader, like the poems of T. S. Eliot.
6.It is interested in the ugly side of life and in taboo subjects like drug addiction, crime,
prostitution, and some other subjects. Like the poems of Allen Ginsberg.
7.Modern poetry is pessimistic because of the bad condition of man in many parts of the
world, such as most of the poems of Thomas Hardy.
8.Modern poetry is suggestive; the poem may suggest different meanings to different
readers.
9.Modern poetry is cosmopolitan. It appeals to man everywhere and at every time because it
deals with the problems of man or humanity.
10. Experimentation is one of the important characteristic features of modern poetry. Poets
try to break new grounds, i.e., to find new forms, new language, and new methods of
expression.
11. It is irregular, written without meter and rhyme scheme and sometimes written in prose
like the pro’s poem.
12. Interest in politics and the political problems of the age.
13. Interest in the psychology and in the subconscious. Many poets wrote unconsciously
under the effect of wine or drugs.
14. Irregularity of form. Modern poetry is mostly written in free verse and prose (the prose
poem).
15. Ambiguity: Most of the modern poetry is ambiguous for many reasons.
16. Interest in myth and especially Greek myth.
17. Interest in the problems of the average man and the lower classes of society.

WEEK 4
T. S. ELIOT
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of New England stock. He entered
Harvard in 1906 and was influenced there by anti-Romanticism of Irving Babbitt. He wrote his
Harvard dissertation on the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradly, whose emphasis on the
private nature of individual experience, “a circle enclosed on the outside,” influenced Eliot’s
poetry considerably.
By November 1921 distress and worry had thought him to the verge of a nervous break-down,
and on medical advice he went to recuperate in a Swiss sanitorium. Two months later he
returned, pausing in Paris long enough to give his early supporter and adviser Ezra Pound the
manuscript of The Waste Land.
His poetry first appeared in 1915, when, at Pound’s urging, “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” was printed in Poetry magazine (Chicago) and a few other short poems were published
in the short-lived periodical Blast.
In 1922 The Waste Land appeared, first in The Criterion in October, then in The Dial (in
America) in November, and finally in book form.
“Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity,
playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must
become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate, if necessary, language into bis meaning." This remark, from Eliot's essay "The
Metaphysical Poets" (1921), gives one clue to his poetic method from "Prufrock" through The
Waste Land.
He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise. Like
the imagists, he emphasized the necessity of clear and precise images.
At the same time the "hard, dry" images advocated by Hulme were not enough for him; he
wanted wit, allusiveness, irony. He saw in the Metaphysical poets how wit and passion could be
combined, and he saw in the French symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme,
Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, how an image could be both absolutely precise in what it
referred to physically and endlessly suggestive in its meanings because of its relationship to other
images. The combination of precision, symbolic suggestion, and ironic mockery in the poetry of
the late-nineteenth-century French poet Jules Lafforgue attracted and influenced him.
Eliot's fluency in French and German, his study of Western and non-Western literary and
religious texts in their original languages, his rigorous knowledge of philosophy, his exacting
critical intellect, his keen sensitivity to colloquial rhythm and idiom, his ability to fuse anguished
emotional states with sharply etched intellectual satire—all of these contributed to his crafting
one of the twentieth century's most distinctive and influential bodies of poetry.
"Prufrock" presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the mutual
interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often ironic, of Hesiod and
Dante and Shakespeare. The Waste Land is a series of scenes and images with no author's voice
intervening to tell us where we are but with the implications developed through multiple
contrasts and through analogies with older literary works often referred to in a distorted
quotation or half-concealed allusion.
In 1948 he was awarded the rare honor of the Order of Merit by King George VI and also gained
the Nobel Prize in literature, his positive qualities were widely and fully recognized—his poetic
cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his original accent, his historical importance as the poet of the
modern symbolist-Metaphysical tradition.

“THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK” – right from the beginning title is an irony.
The title implies an ironic contrast between the romantic suggestions of "love song" and the dully
prosaic name "J. Alfred Prufrock."

“S'io credesse che mia rispostafosse

a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza piii scosse.
Ma per cio cche giammai di questo fondo non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tenia d'infamia ti rispondo.”
Meaning - "If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever return to the world, this
flame would stay without further movement; but since none has ever returned alive from this
 depth, if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy" (Dante, Inferno 27.61—66).
Guido da Montefeltro, shut up in his flame (the punishment given to false counselors), tells the
shame of his evil life to Dante because he believes Dante will never return to earth to report it.
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table:
…half-deserted streets.” – the imagery suggest that evening is lifeless, the identify of “you and
I” shifts throughout the poem. Here Prufrock seems to be alone and talking to himself. Later the
“you” is the woman he wants to seduce, possibly propose to. Lack of life and abandonment is
suggested with the word “half-deserted” it looks like streets are empty and distorted.
“…one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument,
Of insidious intent.” – romantic image is distorted with reference to cheap hotels and sawdust
restaurants – rather than a love image, we feel detachment and isolation.
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house and fell asleep.” – yellow fog described as a cat, a concrete image.
The speaker resembles the fog to a cat as he looks into window or into “the room”, trying to
decide whether to enter and become part of the activity. Eventually, he curls up in the safety and
security of his own soft arms-alone, separate.
“Indeed, there will be time” – there is no hurry, though, the speaker tells himself, there will be
time to decide and then act-time to put on the right face and wear masks-implies lack of sincerity
and communication. There will be time to kill and time to act: in fact, there’ll be time to do many
things, even be time to think about doing things – time to dream and then revise those dreams –
before sitting down with a woman to take toast and tea. (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy
Mistress," line 1: "Had we hut world enough, and time.")
“For a hundred indecision,” – Prufrock as a coward, unenergetic intellectual – the depiction of
modern man who shifts between hope and despair, action and passivity, decision and indecision,
courage, and cowardice.
“In the room the women come and go.
Talking of Michelangelo.” – repetition of the same line, maybe a flashback – we witnessed the
flow of Prufrock’s mind as readers. This is an internal monologue of a middle-aged man who
suffers from alienation, social and sexual frustration. The women are talking to each other, not to
him.
“Do I dare?' and 'Do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,” – Prufrock says there will be time to
wonder whether he dares to approach a woman. He feels like turning back. After all, he is not
well built, a bald man with weak arms and legs. Moreover, he has doubts about the acceptability
of his clothing, a coal and necktie. What’ll people think of him? Prufrock is socially miserable
frightened.
“So how should I presume?” – the poem once more introduces the difficulties of communication
and lack of communication and self-cons.
“And I have known the eyes already, known them all –.” – he has seen their gazes before, man
times – gazes that form and opinion of him, threating him like a butterfly or another insect
pinned into place in a display formulated, pinned, and regulated. How he will be able to explain
himself to them – the ordinariness, the mediocrity, of his life.
“Is it perfume from a dress,
That makes me so digress” – a direct reference to the sexual desire and attachment he feels for
women. The possibility of starting a conversation with a woman and how discouraging it is for
Prufrock since he fells quite unconfident in his relationship with women.
“Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets.” – will he tell a woman that he came
through narrow streets, where lonely men like Prufrock lean out of window watching life go by
but no taking part in it? He should have been nothing more than crab claws in the depth of the
silent ocean.
“To say: I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to hell you all, I shall tell you all’.” – (Lazarus – raised by Jesus from the dead)
Would it have been worth to arise from his lifeless life and dare to engage in conversation with a
woman, only to have her criticize him or reject him. Lazarus here is the representation of
lifelessness.
“And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.'” – would it have been worth all these efforts if, after plumping a
pillow or throwing off her shawl, she turned casually toward a window and told him that he was
mistaken about her intentions toward him?
“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;” – Prufrock and Hamlet are both indecisive.
But Prufrock lacks the mastery. And magnetism of Hamlet so he fancies himself as the fool in
Elizabeth drama generally the wisest.

“THE WASTE LAND part I” – “in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity
and antiquity… It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history… It
is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art." Eliot labeled this
new technique "the mythical method."
Idea is that Eliot is here thinking society and world turning into a wasting land and possibility of
regeneration world and society.
Eliot, following Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and religious material, both
Western and Eastern, to paint a symbolic picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for
regeneration. He vividly presents the terror of that desiccated life—its loneliness, emptiness, and
irrational apprehensions—as well as its misuse of sexuality, but he paradoxically ends the poem
with a benediction. The mass death and social collapse of World War I inform the poem's vision
of a Waste Land strewn with corpses, wreckage, and ruin.
The title of the poem references Eliot’s view of Western civilization in the years after WW1.
Writers, artists, and intellectuals especially, were stunned and dispirited by the inhumanity the
war revealed. The poem is full of images reflecting Eliot’s despair, images of violence, lust,
pollution, death apathy, selfishness, decay – all redolent pf the waste land he believed his world
has become.
“For Ezra pound, il miglior fabbro” – the better craftsman (Italian).
“The Burial of the Dead” – Part one contains four brief narratives. Their plots and characters
disparate, but united by the presence in each of unregenerate death.
“April is the cruelest month,” – from the very beginning, he gave an image in a negative way
which is normally hopeful (April).
“A little life with dried tubers.” – reminder of the idea of death-in-life.
“The dry stone no sound of water.” – a recurring image of death in life.
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” – reminder of the fear of death – dust symbolizes the
dead body as the body turns into dust after death inside the grave. The passage supplements the
previous idea that European society is decayed and disintegrated, pointing to the bareness of the
waste land.
“Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zn,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?” – part of a melody from Wagner2s opera, Tristan, and Isolde, about lovers who
long to be reunited but fail to do so. The German translates as ‘fresh blows the wind to the
homeland; my Irish child, where are you waiting.” The inability to consummate true love is a
recurring motif in the poem.
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago.” – apparently the narrator gives hyacinths to a young
woman, as a romantic gesture, but, in a waste land, love cannot be fulfilled. In Greek mythology,
Apollo, God of music and poetry, loved Hyacinth, a handsome young man, whose mistakenly
killed by him. Then Apollo venerated when hyacinth flowers grew from the boy’s spilled blood.
Note, again here, the motif of death, rebirth and regeneration is emphasized.
“Oed und leer das Meer.” – “waste and empty is the sea.” Here a shepherd tells Tristan there is
no sign of Isolde’s arrival.
“Madame Sosostris,4 famous clairvoyant,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless.
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.5 Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,6
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna,7 the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady situations.” - (Madame Sosostris – telling fortune, tarot cards) The inhabitants of a
waste land put more faith in fortune tellers than in holy men. The future foretold by Madame
Sosostris references death, especially death by drowning. Water brings life back to nature and
privies Christians in baptism but in the waste land it destroys. In Eliot’s own note for this
section, he admits he invents Tarot cards and uses real ones arbitrarily to foreshadow later events
in the poem. Madame Sosostris echoes the Cumaen Sybil of the poem’s epigraph.
“You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable – mon frere!” – you hypocritical reader; my mirror
image; my friend. Eliot quite suddenly breaks the narrative to directly address readers of the
poem. Apparently, he wants his readers to understand they too are part of the waste land and
complicit in its construction.
WEEK 5
Lawrence's Poetic Style
According to Lawrence 'the essence of art is its ability to convey the emotions of one man to his
fellows'. Throughout the evolution of his poetic style, this focus on capturing the intensity of a
moment and detailing the emotion precisely was central to Lawrence’s style.
He believed in living life deeply and experiencing it intensely. Lawrence's poetic style changed
and evolved over the course of his writing career but certain themes such as life and death,
nature, and love, continued to reappear as his beliefs and thoughts developed in response to the
times, he lived in.
His poetry can be broadly divided into three separate stages: His early work focused on themes
of love and relationships and was mostly autobiographical.His middle works focused on the
natural world and capturing his intense experience of it, and his later works where his
approaching death and his disillusionment and frustration with society focused his attention on
the realities of life.
Lawrence's first experiments in poetry tended to imitate the poetic forms favored by the
Romantic poets of his youth. A feature of this Georgian style included a short nature poem in
rhyming verse. 'Call into Death' encapsulates some of this style with its focus on natural world,
its repetition, rhyme, and layered similes.
His themes at times can be overly sentimental but like his more mature work, he uses the natural
world around him as an initiator for his thoughts and emotions.
Lawrence referred to his creative impulsive as his ‘demon’. He had sought to suppress it in his
early poetry but as his style developed, he tried to allow his ‘demon’ to speak without
interference. This spontaneous, vivacious style can be seen particularly in his volume of poetry
Birds, Beats and Flowers. In this poems nature remains an unknowable and alien thing. Unlike
the romantic poets who sought oneness with nature, for Lawrence, nature always remained
mysterious and beyond the comprehension of man.
Lawrence was influenced by the Imagist style of poets such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. The
Imagist style described images with simple language and great focus. The style also breaks away
from traditional concerns with rhyme and meter and instead uses free verse. The poem ‘Snake’
applies a dialectic style (using a dialogue or conversation) in which Lawrence engages in a
conversation with a creature from the natural World, but an internal one.
The dialogue is also with the voices in his head, the voice of his education telling him the snake
must be killed and the voices of his own self-doubt: “If you were not afraid, you would kill
him!”
Lawrence's writing was deeply rooted in his awareness of and relationship with his surroundings.
The poet is also not afraid to reveal his innermost fears and personal shortcomings. This intense
almost confessional style makes Lawrence's poetry uniquely personal.
Modernist poets concentrate on the personal response to nature and in this manner, Lawrence
follows the modernist style.
Background:
This poem, written in 1920 while the poet and his wife were staying in Sicily, consists of a
simple narrative describing his encounter with a snake at the water-trough at his home.
As with all of Lawrence's poems the simple narrative reveals other layers of meaning that
explore man's place in the natural world, the role of societal conditioning and the pressures of
masculinity.
The fluid structure of the poem matches with the motion of the snake. The rhythm, assonance,
and enjambment throughout gives the poem a quality that reflects the reptilian traits of the snake.
Because of his interest in the analysis of the mind, Lawrence makes use of psychological realism
and imagistic observations; imagism emphasizing precision, clearity and concreteness of images.
Besides he is entangled in Freudian division of the mind into Id, Ego, and Superego where
superego checks ego about what to do (here about what to do about the snake).
The poem opens with a simple statement, 'A snake came to my water-trough'. The day was hot,
and the poet was wearing only pajamas. This leads to a sense of vulnerability evident in the poet.
He is not dressed in protective clothing, just something light and flimsy, no match for the
venomous teeth of the snake.
The sibilant 'strange-scented shade mirrors the slithering snake in the water-trough. The poet
must wait his turn to use the trough, even though it belongs to him, as the snake is there first.
This polite adherence to social custom, 'must wait, must stand and wait', is second nature to the
poet and yet still surprising to the reader as it acknowledges the snake's right to be there.
The repetition of the word waits' echoes the inactivity of the poet as he must wait his turn. The
poet does not seem to fear the snake, instead he is fascinated by his movement and describes him
in great detail.
Some critics have argued that Lawrence criticizes the social classes here.The upper class,
represented by the snake, take what they want from the well while others must wait in line.
The third stanza traces the movement of the snake from his hiding place in the cool earth-wall to
the bottom of the trough where he drinks his fill. The soft sibilance (a figure of speech in which a
hissing sound is created within a group of words through the repetition of "s" sounds) runs
through the stanza: 'slackness soft-bellied down' and 'softly drank through his straight gums, into
his slack long body, silently'.
The snake is described as almost lethargic, 'rested his throat upon the stone bottom' and the
assonance here slows the line to the snake's relaxed pace. The entire stanza has the same loose
rhythm of the snake, with its trailing lines and leisurely pace.
The snake is described in civilized terms - he 'sipped' his water. This civility and decorum
exhibited by the snake is at odds with the impulsive, violent actions of the poet later in the poem.
Lawrence compares the snake to cattle drinking, mildly observing their surroundings. The
comparison to cattle may seem strange at first, but it echoes elements of the story from the book
of Genesis where a snake is also the central figure.
Biblical references are given throughout the poem, but unlike the story of the exile of Adam and
Eve from the Garden of Eden, the snake does not seem to be a devil in disguise. The snake in
fact is respected and admired by the poet. By the end of the poem the snake is compared to'a
god', 'a king in exile' and 'one of the lords/Of life'.
The striking volcanic mass of Mount Etna is smoking and along with the image of the 'burning
bowels of the earth' an atmosphere of turbulence and threatened destruction is created. The
Greek god Typhon was supposedly buried under Etna after being cast down by Zeus. The link
between fire imagery and the snake continues in this stanza as the snake 'flickered' his tongue,
rather than flicked. The harsh, aggressive alliterative 'burning bowels' of the smoking Mount
Etna conveys this underlying threat of violence.
The poet analyses the situation and 'the voice of his education' tells him that the snake must be
killed. The command is uttered in absolutist language, 'He must be killed'. There is no room for
disagreement.
Critics have argued that here Lawrence is questioning how the societal conditioning operates.
We are taught to believe that some things or people are dangerous without questioning the
situation for ourselves.
In addition, the voices in his head also question the poet's masculinity: 'If you were a man/You
would take a stick and break him now ‘The poet, however, does not respond as expected. He
confesses that he liked the snake and was glad he had come to his water-trough to drink, 'I felt so
honored'.
• By repeating the phrase 'Was it ...at the beginning of successive lines in the ninth stanza, the
poet questions his own reasoning for not attacking the snake. The poet, in a moment of self-
reflection, admits his fear. He is afraid, but also honored that the snake has chosen him and
sought his 'hospitality'.
Lawrence is not afraid to reveal his own insecurities in his poetry. These insights provide a
deeper awareness of the poet as man, one who has societal pressures and internal conflicts just
like everyone else. This exposition of his faults and weaknesses can give his poetry an almost
confessional look but also allows the reader to share his dilemma.
The snake, satisfied by his drink, lifts his head and slowly retreats from the scene. This slow,
unhurried movement and the prospect of losing the company of the snake, motivates the poet
into action. The corner he is returning to is described as 'that dreadful hole' and 'that horrid black
hole'.
The poet is disgusted and yet now that the snake is 'deliberately going into the blackness' he
commits the violence that he was incapable of earlier. He puts down his pitcher, picks up a log
and throws it at the snake.
The poet's actions lack the fluidity of the snakes. The log is described as'clumsy' and he does not
think he hit the snake. The snake reacts to this assault. He 'Writhed like lightning and was gone'.
Grieving, the poet can only stare in fascination at the 'black hole' and regret his actions.
The imagery used by Lawrence focuses on the physical and sensual actions of the snake, 'And as
he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther'. The peaceful snake has been
struck by the violent human and leaves in 'Undignified haste' which contrasts with his earlier
slow, deliberate movements.Here, it is man who is violent and aggressive, and the snake is
depicted as the civilized enemy.
The final four stanzas of the poem deal with this regret. The poet realizes that the act was 'paltry',
'vulgar' and 'mean' and he hates the voices of his education that encouraged his actions. He
compares himself to the central character in Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. In
this poem, the sailor, to make amends for killing an innocent albatross, is condemned to repeat
his tale. The poet has caused the snake to disappear and now he must tell the tale to try to
compensate for his mistake.
The snake is now described as 'a king in exile' returning to the underworld. The poet has to live
with his actions and must try to make amends. The use of 'expiate' has religious overtones as it is
usually used to repent for sins. The poet has sinned, but he is left with the absence of the snake as
his punishment. Lawrence wonders why "petty" mankind always tries to rob the dignity from all
Godly creatures.
Themes
Man's relationship with the natural world: The snake is depicted as a civilized, peaceful being
that holds a position of authority. The poet feels like the intruder who must wait in turn for the
snake to drink and feels inferior to the elegant, graceful snake. The departure of the snake leads
to the poet's violent actions and ultimate regret of those actions.
Societal conditioning/prejudice: The voices of his education make the poet question his actions
and push him towards violence. The imperative, 'He must be killed', doesn't allow the poet to
question the wisdom of the order. Society has conditioned the poet to believe the truth of the
statement 'the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous'. The poet subtly
questions the perceived wisdom of societal 'truths': should we always believe what society tells
us to believe or should we question each situation ourselves? The implicit prejudices of society
are brought to the fore by Lawrence and so, raises the reader's awareness of these prejudices.
Masculinity: The association of emotional sensitivity with a lack of masculinity is given in the
poem. The voices in the speaker's head question his masculinity when he fails to instantly kill the
snake according to societal expectations, 'If you were a man/You would take a stick and break
him now and finish him off.
A man is expected to react with violence, as indeed the poet does by the end of the poem.
But, by failing to follow his natural peaceful instinct, he is left regretting his violent outburst.
This exploration of what it means to be a man in the modern world has even more relevance for
the modern reader. The conflict between inherent instinct and the expectations of others is
internalized by the poet but by revealing this conflict to the reader Lawrence raises questions
without being didactic.
Religious Imagery and Mythology
'Snake' has the most obvious examples of religious imagery of the poems by Lawrence. Snakes
have long had association with darkness, evil and temptation.Lawrence uses these connotations
and subverts them in this poem.
The snake is the intruder and takes the life-giving water, but the poet feels honored to have
witnessed him. He calls the snake a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld' and 'one of the
lords of life'. By the end of the poem the poet feels he has sinned and has something to repent.
Even the language used here, "I have something to expiate,
is more in keeping with a religious vocabulary than a secular one.
The mention of the underworld in 'Snake' blurs the boundaries between religion and mythology.

“SNAKE” – nature vs. civilization is the idea of this poem. Key word; ‘…of the albatross,’

“HOW BEASTLY THE BOURGEOIS IS” – right from the title we can understand the social
criticism, a common attitude of the modernist poems was to criticize the middle-class lifestyle
and values which were taken empty, shallow and artificial. And choose several metaphors and
symbols here Lawrence tells how beastly bourgeois is.
“How beastly the bourgeois is
Especially the male of the species
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom.” – mushrooms are kind of parasitic things so there is nothing
original for bourgeois. Suggesting that they look okay from the outside but from the inside they
are corrupted and rotten. He likened them to parasites.
“Mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.”
“Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England.
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly.
into the soil of England” – there is no individuality, they are just a skin they are just something
from outside.
WEEK 6
William Butler Yeats 1865 – 1939
He was born to an Anglo-Irish family in Dublin.
In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day, founded the Irish Literary Society,
and acquired late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite ideas of poetry: he believed in this early stage of his
career, that a poet’s language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal.
In Dublin, where he founded the National Literary Society, he was influences by Irish
Nationalism and, although often disagreeing with those who wished to use literature for political
ends, he nevertheless came to see his poetry as contributing to the rejuvenation of Irish culture.
In 1889 Yeats had met the beautiful actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was
desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. She became the
subject of many of his early love poems, and in later poems, such as "No Second Troy" and "A
Prayer for My Daughter," he expresses anger over her self-sacrifice to political activism. He had
also met Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and Yeats
spent many holidays at her aristocratic country house, Coole Park.
Under Lady Gregory's influence Yeats began to organize the Irish dramatic movement in 1899
and, with her help, founded the Abbey Theater in 1904. His active participation in theatrical
production—confronting political censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and
actors, and other aspects of "theatre business, management of men"—also helped toughen his
style, as he demonstrates in "The Fascination of What's Difficult." Yeats's long-cherished hope
had been to "bring the halves together" Protestant and Catholic—through a literature infused
with Ireland's ancient myths and cultural riches before the divisions between rival Christianity’s.
But in a string of national controversies, he ran afoul of both the Boman Catholic middle class
and the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland,
moved to England.

“THE FASCINATIONS OF WHAT’S DIFFICULT” – everything comes from the spirit of the
world for Yeats. He uses Irish legend and myths and he like to use symbolic language. He
chooses to use implications and suggestions.
“I swear before the dawn comes round again,
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.” – It is like he will just shut himself; he won’t do it
again.
It was written when Yeats was director-manager of the abbey Theatre. “Subject. To complain of
the fascination of what’s difficult. It spoils spontaneity and pleasure and waste time. Repeat the
line ending difficult three times and rhyme on bolt, exalt, colt, jolt”.

“THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE” – nineteen tears time differences, and too many things
changed in those years. Unlike the swans, poets heart grows old, some things changed for him
basically. Romantic attitude in this poem. He refers to his past visits in this park, romantic
technique which is recollecting the memories.

“SAILING TO BYZANTIUM” – Yeats wrote in A Vision “I think that if I could be given a

month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I choose, I would spend it in Byzantium, now
Istanbul, a little…”
“Monuments of unageing intellect.”
“Monuments of its own magnificence.
And therefore, I have sailed the seas and come.
To the holy city of Byzantium.”
“…the artifice of eternity.”