She Walks in Beauty Summary

 

 

She Walks in Beauty Summary

Source: http://www.cardinalspellman.org/ourpages/auto/2012/5/31/49049357/She%20Walks%20in%20Beauty%20Summary.doc

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Author of the text: not indicated on the source document of the above text

• Poetry
• Lord Byron
• “She Walks in Beauty”
• Line 1 -2  Readers of poetry often get confused because they stop when they reach the end of a line, even if there is no mark of punctuation there. This could be the case with this poem, which opens with an enjambed line, a line that does not end with a mark of punctuation. The word enjambment comes from the French word for leg, “jamb”; a line is enjambed when it runs over (using its “legs”) to the next line without a pause. If read by itself, the first line becomes confusing because the reader can only see a dark image, almost a blank image. If “she walks in beauty, like the night,” a reader might wonder how she can be seen. But the line continues: the night is a cloudless one and the stars are bright. So immediately the poem brings together its two opposing forces that will be at work, darkness and light.
• Lines 3 – 4 These lines work well because they employ an enjambed line as well as a metrical substitution — a momentary change in the regular meter of the poem. When poets enjamb a line and use a metrical substitution at the beginning of the next line, they are calling attention to something that is a key to a poem. Here Byron substitutes atrochaic foot (an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one) for the iambic foot at the start of the fourth line. Why? Because he is putting particular emphasis on that word “meet.” He is emphasizing that the unique feature of this woman is her ability to contain opposites within her; “the best of dark and bright / meet” in her. In the same way that enjambment forces lines together, and a metrical substitution jars the reader somewhat, this woman joins together darkness and light, an unlikely pair. They “meet” in her, and perhaps nowhere else besides a starry night. It’s also important to note that the joining together can be seen in her “aspect,” or appearance, but also in her “eyes.” A reader might think of the eyes simply as a feature of beauty, but the eyes also have been associated in literature with the soul, or the internal aspect of the person: the eyes reveal the heart.
• Lines 5 – 6 The emphasized word “meet” is here again echoed with the initial “m” sound in “mellowed.” This woman joins together what is normally kept separate, but there is no violent yoking going on here; instead, the opposites meld together to form a mellowed, or softened, whole. By joining together the two opposing forces, she creates a “tender light,” not the gaudiness of daytime, but a gentler light that even “heaven” does not bestow on the day. If a reader were to think of night in terms of irrationality and day in terms of reason — as is implied by the term enlightenment — that would not be apt for this poem. Neither night nor day seem pleasing to the speaker; only the meeting of those two extremes in this woman pleases him. She is a composite, neither wholly held by rationality nor by irrationality.
• Lines 7 – 10 Once again the opposites are combined here. “Shade” or darkness is combined with “day” or light, and “raven tress” or dark hair is linked with a lightened face. The speaker suggests that if the woman contained within her and in her appearance either a little bit more of darkness or a little bit more of light, she would be “half impaired.” A reader might expect the speaker to say she would be totally ruined or impaired, but if things were not just in the right proportion, she’d be half impaired, but still half magnificent. A key word in this section is “grace.” Although the poet is seemingly talking about appearances, in actuality he is referring to the “nameless grace” that is in her hair and face. Once again, it is something internal as well as external that is so attractive about this woman.
• Lines 11 – 12 Although this poem begins with the image of a woman walking, the reader should notice by now that no images are given of her legs or arms or feet; this is a head poem, confined to hair and eyes and face and cheeks and brows. The conclusion to the second stanza emphasizes this. The reader is given an insight into the “dwelling place” of the woman’s thoughts, an insight into her mind. The repetition of the “s” sounds is soothing in the phrase “serenely sweet express”; because the poet is referring to her thoughts, and her thoughts are nothing but serene, readers may infer how pure her mind is.
• Lines 13 – 18 Byron concludes the poem with three lines of physical description that lead to the final three lines of moral characterization. The soft cheeks, the winning smile, the tints in the skin eloquently express not only physical beauty, but they attest to her morality. The physical beauty, the speaker concludes, reflects days spent doing good, a mind at peace, and “a heart whose love is innocent.” Whether Byron would have preferred a less innocent cousin, someone with whom he could enjoy Byronic passions, is left unspoken for the reader to decipher.
• “When We Two Parted”
• Thomas Hardy
• “The Darkling Thrush”
• Stanza 1 The opening lines of "The Darkling Thrush" establish the tone and the setting of the poem. Hardy underscores the speaker's meditative mood by describing him leaning upon a "coppice gate," meaning a gate that opens onto the woods. The presence of frost tells readers it is winter, and the adjective "spectre-grey," a word Hardy coined, suggests a haunted landscape. The word "dregs" means the last of something, but here the dregs act upon the "weakening eye of day," making the twilight "desolate." In the fifth and sixth lines, the speaker uses a simile to compare "tangled bine-stems" to "strings of broken lyres." Bine-stems are the stems of shrubs, and a lyre is a stringed musical instrument similar to a harp. Although "score" is a musical term, Hardy uses it to create an ominous visual image. While the speaker is outside contemplating a bleak landscape, the rest of the world is comfortably inside, warmed by "their household fires."
• Stanza 2In this stanza, the speaker uses metaphor to describe the barren landscape as the corpse of the nineteenth century. The now personified century is entombed in the sky ("the cloudy canopy"), and the wind is its "death lament." Lines 13 – 14 refer to the seeds of spring, which are now "shrunken hard and dry." The description literally depicts what happens to seeds during winter, but figuratively the speaker implies that the very processes of nature are at a standstill and that the next spring might not come. In the last two lines, the speaker compares himself with "every spirit upon earth," projecting his despondency onto the world.
• Stanza 3 This stanza marks a break in the tone and action of the poem, as the speaker hears an old thrush break out in song. Thrushes are fairly common songbirds and usually have a brownish upper plumage and a spotted breast. "Evensong" means a song sung in the evening, significant here both for an "aged" bird and because it is the last day of a century. The image of the bird "choosing" to "fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom" suggests both hope and desperation and resonates with the speaker's own emotions. The image also evokes the phoenix, a mythological bird with a beautiful song that self-reincarnates from its own ashes.
• Stanza 4 In this stanza, the speaker expresses incredulity at the bird's singing ("carolings"), literally wondering what on Earth ("terrestrial things") could make it so happy. The incongruity of a joyful bird amidst such a stark landscape is striking, and it puzzles the speaker who, though he can recognize joy, cannot experience it himself. However, the word "blessed," the capitalization of "Hope," and the limiting phrase "terrestrial things" open the possibility that there might be religious or spiritual reasons for the thrush's behavior. The speaker's acknowledgement that he is "unaware" of the cause of the bird's singing also suggests the possibility that there may indeed be a cause for it and that the speaker might in time come to know that cause.
• “The Man He Killed”
• Lines 1-4 The poem is being set up; the action in the poem has already taken place and the narrator of the poem is ruminating on this action. This is a technique that in contemporary literature would be considered a flashback. He imagines himself near “some old ancient inn,” not a specific inn, but a cozy imaginary place. The diction of the poem (particularly “right many a nipperkin”) suggests that the speaker is not a high brow sort, but a common bloke and this diction is important in establishing the persona of the narrator — an educated philosopher he is not. “Nipperkin” is a half-vessel that is filled, in this situation, one suspects, with alcoholic drinks.
• Lines 5-6 The speaker locates both himself and the other fellow on a battlefield, a far cry from the ancient inn he imagines in retrospect. The men are not distant from each other, but close enough to look into each other’s faces.
• Lines 7-8 These lines are as jarring and sudden as a gunshot. Two people on opposing lines shoot; one is left dead and the other still enjoys the ability to be able to reflect on the actions. This is the plot of the poem and its climax.
• Lines 9-10 In these lines there is a justification for the killing and it is a simple justification, without deliberation.
• Line 11 The repetition of the concept of “my foe” and the “of course” in this line signify a need for the speaker to convince himself of his justification for the killing. The “Just so:” which prefaces the repetition is similar to the modern phrase: “That’s it; that’s the ticket.”
• Line 12 The “although” in this line serves as the pivot point for the following lines, in which the speaker deliberates his justification.
• Lines 13-16 In these lines the narrator begins deliberation, speculating about the man he has just killed and beginning to attribute his own motives to the dead man. Remember that in line 7, they shot at each other, and the narrator could just as easily have been the dead man. In fact, he imaginarily becomes the dead man. We as readers know this is a imaginary life he has placed the dead man within, but we learn something about the narrator’s life — that he enlisted (’list) in war because he was out of work, and had sold his “traps” which we can read as “possessions,” not because of a cause he believed in, but as something to do. He did it offhand, without much thought about the possible consequences, including the situation he has just encountered.
• Line 17 Now the speaker gives some thought to the condition of war. The word “quaint” is an unusual one to use here. One can think of it as a word which describes antique shops, not a war, but it can also be taken to mean cunning. Still, the explanation point suggests a tone that is not dire but almost ponderingly wondrous and the word “curious,” while suggesting perplexion, do not suggest despair that another speaker in the same situation might have voiced.
• Lines 18-20 Here the narrator defines the curious nature of war — you shoot a man, who under other circumstances you would act kindly toward, a man who could possibly become your friend. “Half-a-crown” is roughly about sixty cents, and it is probably not so much that the narrator imagines the fellow as a beggar as it is that he feels that his own character — in a different context — is one which would be willing to do a stranger who needed it, a kindness, and so by the end of the poem he has also arrived at a kind assessment of himself. He has done so with the presumption that his actions are universal, saying, “You shoot a fellow down / You’d treat” in lines 18-19, rather than using the first person as he did in “I shot at him ” in line 7. This movement from individual accountability to universal justification leads the speaker to a distance within himself and perhaps causes the use of the second person when the poet may still be speaking of himself.
• Dylan Thomas
• “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
• Lines 1-3 The first tercet introduces the poem’s theme; it also introduces the two recurring refrains that end alternate stanzas. Although these two lines, the first and the third, both state Thomas’s basic theme about resisting death, they contrast in several ways. Each of the predominant words in line one finds its opposite in line three. “Gentle” is paired with “rage,” “good” with “dying,” and “night” with “light.” The tone of the two lines also is quite different. Line one is subdued; the verbs are deliberately simple, vague. Thomas uses the predicate adjective “gentle,” making it describe the personality of the individual, rather than the more obvious choice “gently,” an adverb which would only refer to the action of the verb. “Good night” when it refers to dying becomes a paradox for Thomas, meaning a good death. Although this line may be an exhortation to resist death, its entire tone is gentle. Compare this to the beginning of line 3 where “rage” is repeated twice. Here the poet urges a furious resistance to death. The second line introduces Thomas’s advice to those who near death. The idea of burning is frequently associated with the passion of youth; however, Thomas wants the elderly to cling as passionately to their lives as anyone would. The phrase “close of day” establishes a connection with the “good night” of the previous line, while the words “burn” and “rave” move the reader into the third line of the stanza.
• Line 4 The next four stanzas describe four different types of old men and examine their attitudes and feelings as they realize that death is approaching. The first type Thomas mentions are the wise men. They may be considered scholars or philosophers. Perhaps because of this, intellectually they accept the inevitability of death. Thomas begins the line with the word “though,” however, to indicate that their knowledge has not prepared them to accept the reality of death.
• Line 5 This line explains why the wise men are unable to act in accordance with their knowledge. Scholars are known and measured by their words. These men have many words still left unwritten or unspoken, so their goals have not been accomplished. Thomas ends this line in mid-thought, leaving the rest of the idea to the next line. This parallels the unfulfilled lives of the wise men, with their messages only partially delivered.
• Line 6 In many villanelles, the refrains simply serve as a chorus. Here, Thomas makes it an integral part of the meaning of the stanza.
• Lines 7-8 “Good” seems to be used in a moral sense here, describing men who have lived worthy, acceptable lives. The phrase “last wave” presents readers with a dual image. The men themselves are a last wave, the last to approach death; they also seem to be giving a final wave to those who they are leaving behind. “Crying,” as well, has two meanings here. In one sense, it simply means speaking out, but it also carries the sense of weeping and mourning. Like the wise men, the good men have not accomplished what they wished to in life. Their actions failed to stand out. Thomas uses rhyme for different purposes here. Rhyming “bright” at the end of line 7 with “might” in line 8 serves to emphasize both words and link the two stanzas. Also, the rhyming of “by,” “crying,” and “dying” unites this stanza, while the use of “deeds” and “danced” is an example of alliteration.
• Line 9 The intensity of the refrain contrasts with the nature of the good men as Thomas has presented them. They seem passive, their actions weak. Now at the end of life, they must finally behave passionately, finally be noticed.
• Lines 10-12 Thomas’s wild men are very different from the good, quiet men in the previous stanzas. The image, “caught and sang the sun,” is joyous and powerful when compared to frail deeds. These men have lived live fully, not realizing that they, too, will age and die. Since Thomas himself cultivated an image as a wild Celtic bard, this stanza seems ironically prophetic about his own death.
• Line 13 The word “grave” carries two meanings here: seriousness and death. These are the men of understanding; paradoxically, although they are blind, they are able to see more clearly than those with sight.
• Lines 14-15 The mentions of blindness are references to his father. Thomas spoke of this blindness again in the unfinished elegy he wrote after his father’s death, describing him as: Too proud to die, broken and blind he died ... An old kind man brave in his burning pride. In this stanza, Thomas contrasts light and dark imagery; for instance, the term “grave” is countered by “gay,” just as “blind” is contrasted with “sight.”
• Lines 16-17 While the last stanza referred to Thomas’s father only obliquely, this stanza is addressed to him. The “sad height” refers to his closeness to death. There are Biblical overtones to Thomas’s request in line 17, as he asks for a final blessing or curse; the patriarchs delivered such parting messages to their sons. As in many Bible verses, with their parallel structure, blessings and curses are paired together. If this line is read as iambic pentameter, however, the emphasis will fall on the words, “bless” and “now.” The image of “fierce tears” shows contrast: the tears acknowledging the inevitability of death, while the use of “fierce” indicates resistance until the end. “I pray” reinforces the Biblical imagery; however, the prayer is addressed to his father, the agnostic, rather than God.
• Lines 18-19 The refrains are repeated for the last time, now specifically requests to D. J. Thomas from his son.
• “The Hand That Signed The Paper”
• First Stanza
• Establishes the power of the hand
• The five fingers are stronger than any king.
• Second Stanza
• The wielder of the hands
• Too much power is given to one individual
• The hand cannot show remorse because it is just a hand.
• Third Stanza
• It cannot commit evil deeds
• Fourth Stanza
• It has no remorse whatsoever
• Robert Burns
• “To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough”
• The poem denotes the narrator of the poem is plowing his field when he cuts through a mouse nest. The poet shows regret and apologizes to the mouse before he goes on a tangent which reveals the deeper meaning of the poem. The connotation is that even when you mean no harm and have pure intentions, you can destroy somebody else's well laid plans. Life is unpredictable, and while preparing for the unpredictable future we are not enjoying the present moment - which the mouse seems to be able to do. The narrator reminisces on "prospects drear," i.e. bad events that have happened in the past which in some ways prevent him from moving on. Furthermore, some say that he is very fearful of the future and that these two reasons do not allow him to enjoy the present. He is also hinting that we humans aren't very empathic or sympathetic towards animals like this mouse, but both species prepare for the future, hoping for nothing to affect their smooth lives. He asks, "So what if the mouse steals our corn? It still wants to survive; this is the same for humans, so why are we so apart?" And, they are best friends: one is tall and one is short; one is strong and one is weak
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• “Sonnet 43”
• Line 1 At this point the reader cannot know whether this is a rhetorical question. The opening line might seem to present an impossibility or an absurdity in its attempt to define an abstract concept, love, by mathematically adding up instances of it.
• Lines 2-4 Dealing in lofty and abstract ideas, the speaker provides no image or symbol to make her love concrete or easy to grasp. Since "Sonnet 43" appears second to last in the cycle of sonnets, some critics have justified these abstractions by referencing them to other sonnets in the volume, arguing that the sonnets must be read as an intertwined narrative to be fully understood. Be that as it may, the abstractions occuring at this point establish the largeness of her love, maybe even making it beyond comprehension. Several critics have pointed out that "the depth and breadth and height" echoes Ephesians III 17-19, where Saint Paul prays for comprehension of the length, breadth, depth, and height of Christ's love and the fulness of God. The terms "Depth, breadth, and height" all refer to dimensions, and the speaker specifies the condition of her soul at the time these dimensions are largest: "when feeling out of sight." Taken in context, the phrase probably describes a soul that feels limitless. Other phrases can be decoded to similarly spiritual expressions of love and being, including "For the ends of Being" — death or at least a bodily death — and "ideal Grace" — heaven. Specific religious meanings for concepts like "grace," "soul," and "being" are, however, far from given, since the poem provdes a good deal of room individual interpretation.
• Lines 5-6 Sun and candle-light are the first concrete images we come across in this poem. The earthly time frame these lines suggest, however, is still limitless and all-encompassing; "by sun and candle-light" refers to both day and night.
• Lines 7-8 The speaker's perspective narrows or even "comes down to earth" a little, shifting from its most religious tone to a focus on more apparently secular human interests. She does, however, select a particularly glorified image of humanity to identify with her love, personifying it as men who are both righteous and humble.
• Lines 9-10 The perspective contracts further — and provides the sonnet's "turn." The speaker's very broad and abstract view becomes concretely personal, turning away from the limitlessness of religion or the outside world to the within of her individual past. Specifically, she describes her love such that it changes the quality of grief, making that grief almost welcome in retrospect. The word "passion," however, introduces several levels of meaing; most significantly, it brings back the religious allusions of lines two through four by recalling the passion of Christ The image of a childhood faith, distinct from the speaker's current faith, suggests something especially pure and innocent.
• Lines 11-12 It seems that romantic love rescues a lost religious faith, or at least rescues the passion and impulse the speaker used to feel for religious faith. The "lost saints" can be read both literally and figuratively, as the saints of the church, Christian liturgy or ritual, or even people who once guided the speaker — her own personal saints.
• Lines 13-14 "Smiles, tears, of all my life" echoes back to "my old griefs" in line 10, and the speaker begins the closure of the poem where she hopes to be able to achieve an even greater love after death. With humility, the speaker acknowledges that this desire might not be within her power to satisfy.
• William Blake
• “The Lamb”
• The poem begins with the question, “Little Lamb, who made thee?” The speaker, a child, asks the lamb about its origins: how it came into being, how it acquired its particular manner of feeding, its “clothing” of wool, its “tender voice.” In the next stanza, the speaker attempts a riddling answer to his own question: the lamb was made by one who “calls himself a Lamb,” one who resembles in his gentleness both the child and the lamb. The poem ends with the child bestowing a blessing on the lamb.
• “The Tyger”
• The poem begins with the speaker asking a fearsome tiger what kind of divine being could have created it: “What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?” Each subsequent stanza contains further questions, all of which refine this first one. From what part of the cosmos could the tiger’s fiery eyes have come, and who would have dared to handle that fire? What sort of physical presence, and what kind of dark craftsmanship, would have been required to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? The speaker wonders how, once that horrible heart “began to beat,” its creator would have had the courage to continue the job. Comparing the creator to a blacksmith, he ponders about the anvil and the furnace that the project would have required and the smith who could have wielded them. And when the job was done, the speaker wonders, how would the creator have felt? “Did he smile his work to see?” Could this possibly be the same being who made the lamb?
• “Holy Thursday”
• On Holy Thursday (Ascension Day), the clean-scrubbed charity-school children of London flow like a river toward St. Paul’s Cathedral. Dressed in bright colors they march double-file, supervised by “gray headed beadles.” Seated in the cathedral, the children form a vast and radiant multitude. They remind the speaker of a company of lambs sitting by the thousands and “raising their innocent hands” in prayer. Then they begin to sing, sounding like “a mighty wind” or “harmonious thunderings,” while their guardians, “the aged men,” stand by. The speaker, moved by the pathos of the vision of the children in church, urges the reader to remember that such urchins as these are actually angels of God.
• “Poison Time”
• First Stanza
• He is angry with his friend and tells him.
• He is angry with his foe, but does not tell him
• Second Stanza
• Metaphor
• Does not have good intentions for the flower or foe
• Third Stanza
• Plant grows and is almost at final stage
• Symbolizes his hatred for his foe.
• Fourth Star
• Allusion to North Star
• Found his foe dead beneath an apple tree
• “The Chimney Sweeper”
• “Infant Sorrow”
• The poem suggests that childbirth is not always joyful and happy but can bring sorrow and pain. The response of the child itself may be different from that of the child in "Infant Joy" because of the behavior of the parents. In this poem the parents seem depressed by this unwanted birth, and this may be reflecting on the child itself.
  This poem could be considered as a work of societal allusion. It is well known that William Blake was strongly opposed to the industrial revolution; similarly, he was opposed to the mistreatment of children by rich factory owners. When the infant is being brought helpless and naked to the “dangerous world”, this world refers to the industrial revolution. The “swaddling bands” represent the fat that infants are born with, initially to insulate them and provide some form of defense against their inherent vulnerability. Blake utilizes this as a symbol of temporary security. While the child is young, he/she will be nurtured and protected by their parents. But once the child matures, they will find a life devoid of any joy or pleasure, such as working in the factories with no security. The child decides to “sulk” upon the breast of the mother’s child, almost in a manner that allows the child to enjoy what little comfort it has left. This poem is powerful in the sense that it outlines the desperate, sorrowful situation facing all ill-mannered children once they begin to grow and become strong machine operators.
• Robert Browning
• “My Last Duchess”
• This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his “gift of a nine-hundred-years- old name.” As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behavior escalated, “[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Having made this disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in his collection.
• “Love Among the Ruins”
• Love Among the Ruins is based on a contrast between past and present. It speaks of a great city that once stood where sheep and merely ruins now stand. The speaker prefers the carpet of grass that lies where roads once were where armies marched to their fate. The glory of those men came and went. The battles fought and deadly games played were only temporary entertainment and pleasure. Where they played and battled, where their towers once stood tall and powerful, now stands a single little turret. Where a king once looked over a city, a girl now waits, looking at the same spot, though it has changed. There is nothing left of what was fought for, what was won; there is nothing to show for all the blood that was shed. All of that returns to the earth. Through this poem the author expresses that love, a true feeling and emotion is endless and more prominent than any material object or sin. Browning concludes that present love is worth more than past glories.
• “Home Thoughts, From Abroad”
• “Home-Thoughts, From Abroad” celebrates the everyday and the domestic, taking the form of a short lyric. The poet casts himself in the role of the homesick traveler, longing for every detail of his beloved home. At this point in his career, Browning had spent quite a bit of time in Italy, so perhaps the longing for England has a bit of biographical urgency attached to it. The poem describes a typical springtime scene in the English countryside, with birds singing and flowers blooming. Browning tries to make the ordinary magical, as he describes the thrush’s ability to recreate his transcendental song over and over again.
• William Butler Yeats
• “When You Are Old”
• Yeats exhorts his beloved: when you are old and falling asleep by your fire, take down this book, and dream of how you used to be as you read it. Dream of how many people loved you when you were younger. Only one man loved you as you grew older. Murmur to yourself sadly about how Love paced on the mountains and hid his face in stars as you grew old.
• “Sailing to Byzantium”
• The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is “no country for old men”: it is full of youth and life, with the young lying in one another’s arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish swimming in the waters. There, “all summer long” the world rings with the “sensual music” that makes the young neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as “Monuments of unaging intellect.” A most central fact appears when, for the first time, the poet actually experiences or is confronted by the eternal city's reality. The old man of "Sailing to Byzantium" imagined the city's power as being able to "gather" him into "the artifice of eternity"—presumably into "monuments of unageing intellect," immortal and changeless structures representative of or embodying all knowledge, linked like a perfect machine at the center of time. Yeats perfects and makes startlingly real what was previously only imagined as perfect when, in "Byzantium," he seems to envision an actual artifice of eternity and not eternal artifice. The city, as we shall see, generates—or actually smelts—eternal images: lifeless and deathless realities which finally supersede or consume all "complexities," all individual souls, all art, all the forms of temporal life. This contrast between the two poems is central to Yeats's re-imagining of his former theme. The old man, the poet's dramatic character, could not enter the city in reality because he was not dead and was not on a dolphin, as these are the conditions in which the living are conducted as souls to Byzantium; he came by means of artifice, by boat, and his "experience" of the city is solely his own creation. From the point of view of a living character the old man naturally imagines the city's eternity existing in fixed forms of perfect gold; the changeless matter of his "song" is already, perpetually, set, just as he is "set upon a branch to sing" forever "of what is past, passing, and to come." Even the natural form "bird" is never mentioned but merely implied in his speech: the old man is yearning for the perfect—to him, the perfectly unnatural—"bodily form," "such as Grecian goldsmiths make." It is clear in the later poem, once the human mouthpiece or mediator of the author's vision has been removed, that "the artifice of eternity" consists not of perfect forms or representations of eternity (the knowledge of all time) but of that which is nonetheless real yet finally without, or beyond, form and matter. Byzantium consists of the "substance" of what eternity actually is rather than some supposedly physical, changeless substance which, while being conceivable to the human mind, would necessarily involve form and matter and therefore the trappings of change and finity. Again, it would seem that Yeats is imagining and representing in the later poem the actual reality of what was merely conjectured or called upon by the old man of 1927. Apparently the "artifice of eternity" is much less human than that which was, then, imagined or desired.
• There is no evidence that within the action of the poem the old man is transformed. He reimagines himself not as an old man, "a tattered coat upon a stick," but outside of, free from, his decrepit nature and ephemerally-known time. He yearns for an eternal form, and the deadly irony of this desire is clear; imagining the answer to his prayer, the old man pictures himself as something of a golden robot, a hammered and enamelled bird, quaintly entertaining or pleasantly distracting with its pre-programmed (because eternal and changeless) song. It is difficult to imagine any reader feeling this to be a redemption, or even a freedom. The old man's wish is inhuman; he yearns to be reduced to what is essential in art, and nothing desirable to human life survives in the portrait of what, with such ardent despair, he wants to become. An old man, the speaker says, is a “paltry thing,” merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study “monuments of its own magnificence.” Therefore, the speaker has “sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.” The speaker addresses the sages “standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” and asks them to be his soul’s “singing-masters.” He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart “knows not what it is”—it is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and the speaker wishes to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.”
• The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his “bodily form” from any “natural thing,” but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make “To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,” or set upon a tree of gold “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” A comparison of the first stanzas of each poem is revealing. In the earlier work there is a distance between the speaker and that from whence he came, just as there is revealed a distance between the speaker and that towards which he yearns to move. In the first stanza of "Byzantium" there appears to be none of this physical or mental distance between speaker and subject, as it describes events inside the city, apparently as they occur in reality, or occur to the speaker's mind. Indeed the later poem makes use of a striking present tense in nearly every line, and the second stanza locates the images of the city directly before the speaker's eyes; thus the reader of "Byzantium" has an experience of the city which seems direct because barely mediated to the reader, and therefore strikes one as if it is an experience of a reality and not an idea or imagination of an experience. We are confronted in "Byzantium" with a profound contrast between what the old man in the 1927 poem imagined that eternity would be like, and what it is really like -- how the city actually works and what sort of things are there.
• A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats’s most prevalent themes. In a much earlier poem, 1899’s “The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart,” the speaker expresses a longing to re-make the world “in a casket of gold” and thereby eliminate its ugliness and imperfection. Later, in 1914’s “The Dolls,” the speaker writes of a group of dolls on a shelf, disgusted by the sight of a human baby. In each case, the artificial (the golden casket, the beautiful doll, the golden bird) is seen as perfect and unchanging, while the natural (the world, the human baby, the speaker’s body) is prone to ugliness and decay. What is more, the speaker sees deep spiritual truth (rather than simply aesthetic escape) in his assumption of artificiality; he wishes his soul to learn to sing, and transforming into a golden bird is the way to make it capable of doing so. Byzantium is symbolic of the world of art and poetry. "That is no country for old men" refers to the natural world. The "golden bough" is a reference to James Frazer's study, Bough. Those that are caught in the sensual music of the natural world neglect "monuments of unaging intellect." "Those dying generations" can't understand the eternal, or nearly eternal. Yeats encourages soul to clap its hands and sing, but warns that there is no school to teach singing other than to study monuments of soul's own magnificence. The "perne in a gyre" can be illuminated by Yeats's other work, "The Second Coming," which shows that the falcon in a gyre represents the breakdown of the natural world over time. In this poem it is a request for the sages of eternity to enter time for a space and teach the speaker what he is (or what his heart is) and to gather the speaker back to eternity. The last line is a call to all poets, with a hint of hope at the end...
• T.S. Eliot
• “Preludes”
• It shows the dark, mechanical life lead by the modern man. The poem begins with a winter evening which is unpleasant. The gloomy, depressive mood of the poem sets in. there is a smell of steaks in passage ways, adding to the unpleasantness, indicating badly ventilated congested rooms. The people are at the end of a day which is like the burnt out end of a cigarette and they themselves are burnt out. The rains are not refreshing but just another of troubles and the vacant lots are not like the lush meadows of the countryside but just vacant. The cab horse breathes and its breath appears as a mist. The lighting of the lamps also has a ritualistic appearance, meaninglessness.
  The morning comes to consciousness indicating that the world was unconscious in sleep that sleep is like temporary death. Instead of a fresh morning air, there is a smell of stale beer. The streets are sawdust trampled and people press their feet rather than walk. There is a feeling of mechanical life. People walking to early morning coffee stands make us contrast it to our traditional homelike morning picture of the family sitting to breakfast together. The loosening of family bonds can be visualized by us. The poet uses the word masquerades to describe all these activates as its all like a big show...thousands of shades being raised by thousands of people in thousands of rooms all at once. It gives it a ritual like feel and the people appear to be puppets.
  Now the controversy about the woman being a prostitute or not. I think it’s kind of dumb to think that she is a prostitute just because she "had such a vision of the street/as the street hardly understands."It is just that at that moment early in the morning, when she thinks consciously about her subconscious thoughts, she realizes that all those people out there in the street are living a mechanical, meaningless life while they do not realize this. She is then at a superior position to them as she understands the drabness of life whereas they are puffed with selfimportance. The poet doesn't lose any opportunity to use unpleasant adjectives-"yellow-soled" feet which are anemic and "soiled" hand.
• “The Hollow Men”
• The poem begins with two epigraphs: one is a quotation from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness remarking on the death of the doomed character Kurtz. The other is an expression used by English schoolchildren who want money to buy fireworks to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. On this holiday, people burn straw effigies of Fawkes, who tried to blow up the British Parliament back in the 17th century.
  

The poem is narrated by one of the "Hollow Men."

In the first section of the poem, a bunch of Hollow Men are leaning together like scarecrows. Everything about them is as dry as the Sahara Desert, including their voices and their bodies. Everything they say and do is meaningless. They exist in a state like Hell, except they were too timid and cowardly to commit the violent acts that would have gained them access to Hell. They have not crossed over the River Styx to make it to either Heaven or Hell. The people who have crossed over remember these guys as "hollow men."

In the second section, one hollow man is afraid to look at people who made it to "death's dream kingdom" – either Heaven or Hell. The Hollow Men live in a world of broken symbols and images.

The third section of the poem describes the setting as barren and filled with cacti and stones. When the Hollow Men feel a desire to kiss someone, they are unable to. Instead, they say prayers to broken stones.

In the fourth section, the hollow man from Section 2 continues to describe his vacant, desolate surroundings, in which are no "eyes." The Hollow Men are afraid to look at people or to be looked at.

The fifth and final section begins with a nursery rhyme modeled on the song "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush," except instead of a mulberry bush the kiddies are circling a prickly pear cactus. The speaker describes how a "shadow" has paralyzed all of their activities, so they are unable to act, create, respond, or even exist. He tries quoting expressions that begin "Life is very long" and "For Thine is the Kingdom," but these, too, break off into fragments. In the final lines, the "Mulberry Bush" song turns into a song about the end of the world. You might expect the world to end with a huge, bright explosion, but for the Hollow Men, the world ends with a sad and quiet "whimper."

• “Journey of the Magi”
• Lines 1-5 The first five lines of this poem describe a journey, and from the poem’s title, we know that those traveling are Magi. The Magi, or wise men, were members of the priestly caste of the Zoroastrian religion. They were thought to be knowledgeable about astronomy and able to interpret dreams. (The word Magi is plural; the singular form is Magus.) These lines are adapted from a 1622 Christmas sermon given by Lancelot Andrewes, a bishop who helped establish the Anglican church. Eliot greatly admired Andrewes, not only for his intellectual approach toward faith, but also for his writing style. In a collection of essays published in 1928, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, Eliot singled out Andrewes’s ability to keep his lines moving forward. He felt that each new word Andrewes wrote created an added idea or dimension in his writing. Andrewes’s original line read, “It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year; just the worst time of the year, to take a journey, and especially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali,’the very dead of winter’.” Notice that Eliot keeps the style and tone of these lines in his adaptation. The use of cumulative phrases, the stops and starts of the punctuation, the informal syntax, and the use of alliteration set the pattern for the first section of the poem.
• Lines 6-7 The rest of the first section of “Journey of the Magi” is devoted to a listing of the problems faced by the Magi, using a series of clear and specific images. These lines describe the camels. “Galled” refers to sores caused by chafing. Because the animals were uncomfortable, they grew stubborn and difficult to manage, lying in the snow and refusing to go on. Line 6 starts with “and”; many additional lines in this section begin in a similar manner. This not only helps to reinforce the impression of the enormous difficulties the Magi face as their troubles accumulate, but along with frequent alliteration and a falling cadence, it helps to establish the section’s rhythm.
• Lines 8-10 These lines contrast the difficulties mentioned previously with the world the Magi abandoned when they undertook this journey: summer versus winter; terraces with silken girls as opposed to sharp weather; gentle slopes in contrast with deep ways; and sherbet instead of melting snow. The Magi, however, have no thought of turning back from their quest. The regret is only for loss of ease and comfort, not for having undertaken the journey.
• Lines 11-15 The Magus describes another series of difficulties: a list of all that went wrong. Notice that there are ten “ands” in this sentence. Punctuating the list in a long phrase forces the reader to join one image to another, strengthening the poem’s theme of the difficult quest. In addition, the parallel structure of the phrases helps to create the rhythm.
• Line 16 This is a simple rephrasing of line 1. After the vivid list of problems, the reader now has a far clearer understanding of the hardships that the Magi faced.
• Lines 17-18 Problems caused by hostility of the inhabitants of the lands they travel through actually become more difficult than the hazards of the weather, so the caravan travels by night to avoid human contact. The phrase “sleeping in snatches” conveys their great wariness of the danger around them.
• Lines 19-20 Eliot makes the voices deeming the journey “folly” very unspecific, but the reader can guess that they include the camel men, the hostile villagers, as well as the inner voices of the Magi themselves, questioning the wisdom of going through this long trial.
• Lines 21-22 As the second section opens, the Magi come down “below the snow line” and enter “a temperate valley.” Once again, Eliot provides clear contrasts as the poem moves from summer to winter, barren landscapes to lush vegetation, and night into dawn. Initially, it seems that the Magi have reached their goal, since they have clearly escaped from “the very dead of winter” into a place rich with life.
• Line 23The entire section is filled with symbolism and imagery. Several critics have pointed out that Eliot drew many of the pictures in this scene from his own experience. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot noted that some scenes remain vivid in our memories: “Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a watermill.” Many of these details appear in section two. Critics often use this point to reinforce the autobiographical element in the poem.
• Line 24 Although the entire scene presented in this section is rich and full of life, much of the imagery foreshadows the crucifixion. Here, the “three trees on the low sky” recall the crosses on the hill of Golgotha, where Christ died.
• Line 25 Once again, while the horse running free in the meadow gives an impression of ease and beauty, many critics see it as a reference to the horse of the Bible’s book of Revelation 6:2, the horse of the war and the conqueror. The white horse appears again in Revelation 19:6, carrying the King of Kings when he appears out of the heavens.
• Lines 26-28 These lines are filled with images that come from throughout the Bible: grape vine leaves frequently symbolize Christ; the lintel in the book of Exodus was marked with blood to tell the Angel of Death to pass over the homes of the Jews; the men “dicing for pieces of silver” hold connotations of Judas, who sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver, as well as the soldiers who diced for Christ’s garments during the crucifixion.
• Lines 29-31 The Magi, of course, cannot possibly be aware of the symbolism of the previous images, and they continue on to search for the stable. These three lines are extremely ambiguous. After the hardships of the journey and the lush richness of the temperate valley, they seem extraordinarily understated. There is no visualization of stable or child. The speaker simply says that it was “satisfactory.” To most readers, this word has the connotation of something that does not fully live up to its promise. However, there are several different interpretations of what “satisfactory” means. It may indicate disappointment that the Magi did not find a king and did not receive an answer or enlightenment. The term also could be used to indicate that the birth fulfilled the prophecy that brought them there; in fact, it satisfied all the elements. It could also refer to the fact that Anglican theologians use the term “satisfactory” to refer to Christ’s sacrifice, since Christ’s redemption satisfies the sins of the world.
• Lines 32-36 In the third section, the poem shifts the time frame. Now, long after the journey itself, the Magus ponders the meaning of all that happened. He begins his contemplation by emphasizing that the experience was so valuable that he would do it again, in spite of the hardships of the journey. The phrase “set down this” seems to indicate that he is speaking to an audience, perhaps someone who is writing down his memories. He attempts to explain what he had found so unsettling about the nature of the event.
• Lines 37-39 The Magus is trying to understand the relationship between the birth he observed and death. Although his grasp of the complete implications of the event is imperfect, he senses that in witnessing the birth of this child, he also witnessed the end of the world that he had previously known.
• Lines 40-42 The realm that the Magus used to dominate has changed for him. Once a member of the priestly caste, he no longer feels comfortable in that role. “Old dispensation” refers to his culture and religion that the Magus senses have somehow now been overshadowed by a new culture and religion. Because he is caught between these two cultures, between birth and death, he feels “alien” with his own people.
• Line 43 Eliot deliberately leaves this line open to interpretation. It is not specifically stated what death the Magus wants. It might be the death of the child who will redeem the world. It could be the death of the old era. He could wish his own death, since, in a way, he has been dead to his environment since his return. The line could refer to all of these meanings.
• Choice Reading
• Jane Eyre
• Sonnets and Poetic Elements
• Spenserian
• abab bcbc cdcd ee
• “Sonnet 1”
• “Sonnet 35”
• “Sonnet 75”
• Shakespearean
• abab cdcd efef gg
• “Sonnet 29”
• “Sonnet 106”
• “Sonnet 116”
• “Sonnet 130”
• Petrarchan
• abba  abba cdecde
• Often the octave proposes a problem that is solved in the sestet
• “Sonnet 18”
• “Sonnet 28”
• Short Stories
• “Rocking Horse Winner”
• “Araby”
• “A Shocking Accident”
• “Lagoon”
• “A Devoted Son”
• “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

 

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