2
5
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Content
�Content
Об издании
Основной титульный экран
Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 1
Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 2
�Content
Министерство образования и науки Российской Федерации
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение
высшего образования
«Алтайский государственный педагогический университет»
Т. Д. Максимова
Discovering
History of English
Учебное пособие
Барнаул
ФГБОУ ВО "АлтГПУ"
2015
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
ISBN 978–5–88210–791–7
�Content
УДК 811.111’0(075)
ББК 81.432.1–03я73
М171
Максимова, Т. Д.
Discovering History of English [Электронный ресурс] : учебное пособие / Т. Д.
Максимова. – Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2015.
ISBN 978–5–88210–791–7
Рецензенты:
Пшенкина Т. Г., доктор филологических наук, профессор (АлтГПУ);
Кремнева А. В., кандидат филологических наук, доцент (АлтГТУ
им. И. И. Ползунова)
Данное пособие посвящено изучению основных моментов в истории английского
языка, необходимых для понимания современного состояния языка. В нем дается
классификация и характеристика периодов развития английского языка и
рассматриваются изменения в фонетическом, морфологическом и синтаксическом
аспектах. Материал излагается концентрировано в виде таблиц, схем, дается также
тезисное освещение отдельных вопросов. Лекционные знания закрепляются в
последовательно организованной системе тестов и заданий для работы, как в
аудитории, так и для самостоятельной тренировки. Блок тестов для самостоятельной
работы снабжен ключами.
Учебное пособие предназначено для студентов бакалавриата, обучающихся по
направлениям «Лингвистика» и «Педагогическое образование» очной, очно-заочной
и заочной форм обучения.
Рекомендовано к изданию редакционно-издательским советом АлтГПУ 12.11.2015 г.
Текстовое (символьное) электронное издание.
Системные требования:
Intel Celeron 2 ГГц ; ОЗУ 512 Мб ; Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ; SVGA монитор с
разрешением 1024х768.
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
�Content
Электронное издание создано при использовании программного обеспечения Sunrav
BookOffice.
Объём издания - 17 144 КБ.
Дата подписания к использованию: 25.01.2016
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение высшего
образования «Алтайский государственный педагогический университет» (ФГБОУ ВО
«АлтГПУ»)
ул. Молодежная, 55, г. Барнаул, 656031
Тел. (385-2) 36-82-71, факс (385-2) 24-18-72
е-mail: rector@altspu.ru, http://www.altspu.ru
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
�Content
Content
ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ
Part 1. DATA
Indo-European Languages
Old Germanic Changes
The First Consonant Shift
Verner’s Law
The Second Consonant Shift
Periods in the History of English
Old English Phonetics
OE Phonetic Structure
Qualitative phonetic changes in OE vowels
Quantitative phonetic changes in OE vowels
Phonetic changes in OE consonant
Middle and New English Spelling and Phonetics
Spelling changes in Middle English
Qualitative changes in stressed vowels in Middle English
Quantitative changes in stressed vowels in Middle English
Phonetic changes in New English vowels
Phonetic changes in New English consonants
Old English Grammar
OE Nouns
Pronouns and Adjectives in OE
Old English Verb Categories
Morphological classification of the verb
Main groups of Verbs in OE
Preterite-Present verbs
Middle and New English Grammar
Middle and New English Nouns
�Content
Middle and New English Verbs
Old English Vocabulary
Part 2. ASSIGNMENTS and TESTS
Part 1
Germanic Phonetic Changes
Assignments 1
Test 1
Test 2
Old English Phonetics
Old English Phonetic Structure
Old English Phonetic Changes
Assignments 3
Test 4
Old English Nouns
Assignments 4
Test 5
Test 6
Old English Verbs
Assignments 5
Test 7
Test 8
Old English Grammar and Phonetics
Test 9
Test 10
Test 11
Progress Test 12
Spelling Changes in Middle English
Assignments 6
Test 13
�Content
Phonetic changes in Middle English
Phonetic and spelling changes in Middle English
Test 14
Test 15
Spelling and Phonetic Changes in New English
Phonetic and spelling changes in Middle and New English
Test 16
Test 17
Test 18
The Nominal Parts of Speech in Middle and New English
Verbs in Middle and New English
Grammar and Phonetics in OE, ME, NE
Test 21
Test 22
Final Test 1
Part 2. SELF-DEPENDANT WORK
Germanic Phonetic Changes
Germanic Phonetic Changes
Old English Phonetic Structure
Old English Phonetic Structure
Old English Phonetic Changes
Old English Grammar and Phonetics
Middle and New English
Spelling and Phonetic changes in Middle English
Spelling and Phonetic changes in Middle and New English
Grammar and Vocabulary in Middle and New English
Final Test 2
Keys
Библиографический список
�Content
ПРЕДИСЛОВИЕ
Цель курса «История языка» – ознакомить студентов с этапами развития английского
языка на протяжении веков, помочь осознать связь изменений в языке с
историческими процессами в обществе, выявить внутренние закономерности
развития языка. Прослушав данный курс, студент должен уметь объяснять нормы
современного английского языка и его особенности с точки зрения законов его
исторического развития, видеть процесс развития языка как систему, владеть
терминологией, связанной с тематикой курса. В задачи курса входит раскрыть
диалектический характер развития языка, показать взаимосвязь развития языка и
общества, выработать у студентов умение сопоставлять и связывать различные
языковые явления, развить у студентов практические навыки анализа языковых форм
в различные исторические этапы развития английского языка.
Курс истории английского языка состоит из следующих разделов:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Общие сведения о германских языках и место английского языка.
Древний период истории английского языка.
Средний период истории английского языка.
Новый период развития истории английского языка.
Относительно древнеанглийского периода (OLD ENGLISH PERIOD) рассматриваются
следующие аспекты:
1. Classification of Germanic Languages.
2. Periodisation.
3. Phonetic and grammatical peculiarities of Germanic languages.
4. Old English phonetic changes.
5. Old English nouns, pronouns and adjectives
6. Old English categories of the verb.
7. Old English morphological characteristics of the verb.
8. Old English syntax.
9. Old English vocabulary.
Средний и новый периоды MIDDLE AND NEW ENGLISH PERIODS представлены
следующими аспектами:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Middle English spelling.
Middle English Phonetics.
New English Phonetics.
Nouns in Middle and New English.
Verbs in Middle and New English.
New verbal categories.
�Content
Библиографический список
1. Аракин, В. Д. История английского языка [Электронный ресурс] /
В. Д. Аракин. – Москва, 1985. – Электрон. верс. печ. публ. – Режим доступа: http://
knigi.tr200.net/v.php?id=377916.
2. Аракин, В. Д. Очерки по истории английского языка / В. Д. Аракин. – Москва,
1955.
3. Арсеньева, М. Г. Введение в германскую филологию / М. Г. Арсеньева, М. Г.,
С. П. Балашова, В. П. Берков и др. – Москва, 1980.
4. Иванова, И. П. История английского языка / И. П. Иванова, Л. П. Чахоян,
Т. М. Беляева. – Санкт-Петербург, 2006.
5. Rastorguyeva, T. A. History of English / Т. А. Rastorguyeva. – Mосква, 2005. –
Электрон. верс. печ. публ. – Режим доступа: http://www.twirpx.com/file/35873/ вопрос о
правообладании
6. Иванова, И. История английского языка : учебник, хрестоматия, словарь /
И. П. Иванова, Л. П. Чахоян, Т. М. Беляева. – Санкт-Петербург, 1999.
7. Ilyish, B. History of the English language / В. Ilyish. – L., 1973. – Электрон. верс.
печ. публ. – Режим доступа: http://knigi.tr200.net/v.php?&id=345405.(нерабочая ссылка)
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Максимова, Татьяна Дмитриевна
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Discovering History of English
Subject
The topic of the resource
1. Языкознание. 2. Германские языки. 3. английский язык. 4. история языка.
Description
An account of the resource
Discovering History of English [Электронный ресурс] : учебное пособие / Т. Д. Максимова ; Алтайский государственный педагогический университет. — 1 компьютерный файл (pdf; 16.3 MB). — Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2015.
Данное пособие посвящено изучению основных моментов в истории английского языка, необходимых для понимания современного состояния языка. В нем дается классификация и характеристика периодов развития английского языка и рассматриваются изменения в фонетическом, морфологическом и синтаксическом аспектах. Материал излагается концентрированно в виде таблиц, схем, дается также тезисное освещение отдельных вопросов. Лекционные знания закрепляются в последовательно организованной системе тестов и заданий для работы, как в аудитории, так и для самостоятельной тренировки. Блок тестов для самостоятельной работы снабжен ключами. Учебное пособие предназначено для студентов бакалавриата, обучающихся по направлениям "Лингвистика" и "Педагогическое образование" очной, очно-заочной и заочной форм обучения.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Максимова, Татьяна Дмитриевна
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2015
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Алтайский государственный педагогический университет
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
25.01.2016
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
©Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2015
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf, exe
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Учебное пособие
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
<a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/maksimova.exe">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/maksimova.exe</a><br /><a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/maksimova.pdf">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/maksimova.pdf</a>
английский язык
Германские языки
история языка
Языкознание
-
http://books.altspu.ru/files/original/133/189/_[650].png
7a9f92e366f2aa77731528dfe88771c9
http://books.altspu.ru/files/original/133/189/kosina.pdf
be8736a62e8c1cac7daf96c66c7ccdd4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Козина Оксана Викторовна
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
English For Senior Students
Subject
The topic of the resource
1. Языкознание. 2. Германские языки. 3. английский язык. 4. лексические темы. 5. тексты. 6. задания
Description
An account of the resource
English For Senior Students : учебное пособие / Е. Н. Меркулова, О. В. Козина ; Алтайский государственный педагогический университет. — Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2023. — 240 с.
Учебное пособие содержит лексические темы, предусмотренные рабочей программой дисциплины для пятого курса: "Appearance", "Character", "Feelings and Emotions", "Painting", "English as a World Language", "Literature", "Ecology", "Music". Каждый раздел включает в себя тексты с заданиями на активизацию словаря, понимание и усвоение прочитанного материала, индивидуальные и групповые проектные задания, направленные на самостоятельный поиск информации, логическое осмысление обсуждаемой проблематики, а также совершенствование навыков демонстрации подготовленного проекта. Разнообразные виды деятельности рассчитаны на обучение студентов свободному высказыванию (подготовленному и спонтанному) по изучаемым темам. Основными видами работы на занятиях являются обсуждения, дискуссии, презентации. Особое внимание уделяется заданиям, которые нацелены на подготовку к сдаче экзамена по изучаемой дисциплине в традиционной форме или в формате демонстрационного экзамена. Таким образом, при отборе материала авторы стремились представить студентам актуальный фактический материал, расширяющий их кругозор, повышающий общую гуманитарную культуру, развивающий способности критически мыслить и способствующий совершенствованию иноязычной коммуникативной компетенции обучающихся. Данное учебное пособие предназначено для организации аудиторной и самостоятельной работы студентов пятого курса очной формы обучения по направлению 44.03.05 «Педагогическое образование (с двумя профилями подготовки): Начальное образование и Английский язык, История и Английский язык» по дисциплинам «Практикум по культуре речевого общения», «Коммуникативный практикум английского языка».
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
<strong><a href="http://library.altspu.ru/ecat/zgate?ACTION=follow&SESSION_ID=28782&TERM=%D0%9C%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,%20%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F%20%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0%5B1,1004,4,6%5D&LANG=rus">Меркулова, Евгения Николаевна</a></strong>
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2023
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Алтайский государственный педагогический университет
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
23.03.2023
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
<strong><a href="http://library.uni-altai.ru/ecat/zgate?ACTION=follow&SESSION_ID=30357&TERM=%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0,%20%D0%9E%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0%20%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0%5B1,1004,4,6%5D&LANG=rus">Козина, Оксана Викторовна</a></strong>.
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
©Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2023
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf, exe
Language
A language of the resource
русский
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
учебное пособие
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
URL: <a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/kosina.pdf" target="_blank">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/kosina.pdf<br /></a>URL: <a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/kosina.exe" target="_blank">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/kosina.exe</a>
английский язык
Германские языки
задания
лексические темы
тексты
Языкознание
-
http://books.altspu.ru/files/original/77/177/_[650].png
d4e855dc0a4c1a734cef74f86fca0463
http://books.altspu.ru/files/original/77/177/Erich_Segal.pdf
e2de987f2d80a756f5e10d89e7d85c40
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Козлова, Любовь Александровна
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Erich Segal "The Class": Home Reading Guide for the 5th-year Students
Subject
The topic of the resource
1. Сигал, Эрик. 2. Однокурсники. 3. Языкознание. 4. Германские языки. 5. английский язык. 6. англоязычные тексты. 7. художественные тексты. 8. англоязычная проза.
Description
An account of the resource
Erich Segal "The Class": Home Reading Guide for the 5th-year Students : учебно-методическое пособие / Л. А. Козлова, И. Ю. Кочешкова, Т. А. Климова. — Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2022. — 42 с. — Дата подписания к использованию: 19.04.2022. — Режим доступа: свободный. — URL: http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/segal.pdf (дата обращения: 01.06.2022). — URL: http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/segal.exe (дата обращения: 01.06.2022). — Текст (визуальный) : электронный.
Цель пособия – формирование и развитие навыков восприятия, понимания и интерпретации англоязычного художественного текста, формирование коммуникативной и социокультурной компетенций студентов, находящихся на продвинутом этапе изучения английского языка. Пособие содержит разработку 13 уроков, которые предполагают подготовку презентаций, работу со словарём, обсуждение содержания и языка изучаемого произведения, поиск дополнительной культурологической и исторической информации. В завершении предлагаются дискуссионные темы для обобщающих выступлений по проблематике произведения и творческое задание. Учебно-методическое пособие предназначено для практических занятий по практике устной и письменной речи (модуль «Чтение»), интерпретации иноязычного текста. Оно может быть использовано для организации аудиторной и самостоятельной работы студентов старших курсов, обучающихся по направлению подготовки бакалавров 44.03.05 «Педагогическое образование (с двумя профилями подготовки)», профили «Английский язык и Немецкий язык», «Английский язык и Китайский язык»). Рекомендовано к изданию редакционно-издательским советом АлтГПУ 25.11.2021 г.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
<strong><a href="http://library.altspu.ru/ecat/zgate?ACTION=follow&SESSION_ID=24351&TERM=%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0,%20%D0%9B%D1%8E%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8C%20%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0%5B1,1004,4,6%5D&LANG=rus">Козлова, Любовь Александровна</a></strong>
Source
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Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2021
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Алтайский государственный педагогический университет
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19.04.2022
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И. Ю. Кочешкова,<br /> Т. А. Климова
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©Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2021
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русский
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учебно-методическое пособие
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ОБ ИЗДАНИИ
Основной титульный экран
Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 1
Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 2
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МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение
высшего образования
«Алтайский государственный педагогический университет»
(ФГБОУ ВО « АлтГПУ» )
Л.А. КОЗЛОВА, Л.Л. ШЕВЧЕНКО
FURTHER STEPS IN TEXT ANALYSIS
Учебное пособие
Барнаул
ФГБОУ ВО « АлтГПУ»
2018
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
ISBN 978-5-88210-915-7
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УДК 811.111(075)
ББК 81.432.1я73
К592
Козлова, Л.А.
Further steps in text analysis [Электронный ресурс] : учебное пособие / Л.А. Козлова,
Л.Л. Шевченко. – Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2018. – Систем. требования: PC не ниже класса
Intel Celeron 2 ГГц ; 512 Мb RAM ; Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 ; Adobe Acrobat Reader ;
SVGA монитор с разрешением 1024х768 ; мышь.
ISBN 978-5-88210-915-7
Рецензенты:
Рогозина Ирина Владимировна, доктор филологических наук, профессор (Алтайский
государственный технический университет им. И.И. Ползунова);
Кочешкова Ирина Юрьевна, кандидат филологических наук, доцент (Алтайский
государственный педагогический университет)
Настоящее пособие предназначено для занятий со студентами V курса по
лингвостилистическому анализу и интерпретации текстов различных жанров: эссе,
биографии, автобиографии, короткого рассказа, публичной речи, научного текста и
поэзии. С учетом того, что начальные навыки лингвостилистического анализа
закладываются на IV курсе, данное пособие ставит своей целью расширение знаний и
закрепление навыков интерпретации текстов различных жанров, выявление жанровых
особенностей текста и тех стилистических приемов, которые формируют в своей
совокупности идиостиль конкретного автора.
Рекомендовано к изданию редакционно-издательским советом АлтГПУ 21.02.2018 г.
Текстовое (символьное) электронное издание.
Системные требования:
PC не ниже класса Intel Celeron 2 ГГц ; 512 Мb RAM ; Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 ; Adobe
Acrobat Reader ; SVGA монитор с разрешением 1024х768 ; мышь.
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
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Электронное издание создано при использовании программного обеспечения Sunrav
BookOffice.
Объём издания - 9 012 КБ.
Дата подписания к использованию: 21.05.2018
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение высшего
образования «Алтайский государственный педагогический университет» (ФГБОУ ВО
«АлтГПУ»)
ул. Молодежная, 55, г. Барнаул, 656031
Тел. (385-2) 36-82-71, факс (385-2) 24-18-72
е-mail: rector@altspu.ru, http://www.altspu.ru
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
�Содержание
СОДЕРЖАНИЕ
Introduction
PART I. THE LANGUAGE OF NONFICTION: A LITERARY ESSAY
The Origin and the Main Types of Essays
Virginia Woolf. The Common Reader. How Should One Read a Book
Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book”
A Few Hints on Essay Writing
Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf
St. Jean de Crevecoeur. What is an American?
Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?”
Samples of Student’s Essays
What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes
Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland
What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-Reliance
Laurie Lee. Appetite
Biography and Autobiography as Nonfiction Genres
Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography
Evelyn Waugh. General Conversation: Myself
Margaret Atwood. Great Unexpectations
Essays for Self-Guided Analysis
H.G. Wells. Ellis Island
Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface
Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar
Susan Sontag. Beauty
PART II. THE LANGUAGE OF PUBLIC SPEAKING
The Main Features of Publicistic Style
Analysing Speeches
Analysing Political Speeches
Donald Trump. The Crossroads In Our History
Theodore Roosevelt. The Man with the Muck-rake
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Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis
Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech
Donald Trump. Inaugural Address
Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS
PART III. THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE
The Main Features of Scientific Style
Anna Wierzbicka. English: Meaning and Culture. English as a Cultural Universe
Steven Arthur Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language
Scientific Texts for Self-Guided Analysis
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language
Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning
Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say
PART IV. THE LANGUAGE OF FICTION: A SHORT STORY
The Art of Reading and Analysing a Story
James Joyce. Eveline
Oscar Wilde. The Model Millionaire
Katherine Mansfield. A Cup of Tea
Somerset Maugham. The Happy Man
O. Henry. The Cop and the Anthem
Ernest Hemingway. Cat in the Rain
Stories for Self-Guided Analysis
Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon
Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour
Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather
Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras
PART V. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY
Analysing Poetry
Sir Walter Raleigh. Even Such Is Time
John Donne. Holy Sonnets. Sonnet XIII
Robert Herrick. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
William Blake. A Poison Tree
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Edgar Allan Poe. Alone
Emily Dickinson. There is no Frigate like a Book
Christina Rossetti. Up-hill
William Butler Yeats. For Anne Gregory
Edwin Arlington Robinson. Richard Cory
Robert Frost. Gathering Leaves
Edward Estlin Commings. Pity this Busy Monster, Manunkind
Dylan Thomas. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Dorothy Parker. Frustration
Allen Ginsberg. A Supermarket in California
Tom Clark. Poem
Poems for Self-Guided Analysis
Selected Bibliography
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INTRODUCTION
As we have stated earlier (see the introduction to the manual for 4th year students) there are
various kinds and purposes of reading: we may read for information, for relaxation etc.
Analytical reading is a more complex intellectual activity and it requires an attentive and
inquisitive reader. The main aim of analytical reading is to understand the message of the
author, to get aesthetic pleasure and to be able to discuss the merits and demerits of a book, a
story or a poem. In this type of reading the reader starts a dialogue with the author, accepting
or rejecting his/her views and aesthetic principles. But to be able to carry on such a dialogue
you have to really understand the author, to achieve equality with him (according to Raphael, to
understand an author is to become equal to him). Francis Bacon once remarked that “some
books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be digested and chewed.”
Reading a text analytically and being able to carry on a dialogue with the author actually means
chewing and digesting the text we analyze.
Yet it does not mean that we just share every idea expressed by the author and fully dissolve
ourselves in the author. Stating that reading a text we start a dialogue with the author, we must
keep in mind that both the participants of this dialogue are equal. The author embodied his/her
ideas in the material form of the text and the reader “collects”, or extracts this idea by carrying
out a holistic analysis of lingual, pragmatic, cultural and cognitive parameters of the text. A
really talented text (“an open text” as Umberto Eco calls it) potentially has a possibility of
multiple, or unlimited interpretation. Each reader brings to the interpretation his/her own social,
economic, aesthetic, ethical, religious and political background. In other words, our personal
history, even our present mood may influence our responses and so makes each reading to
some extent our own. Thus the process of interpretation can be no less creative than the text
production, because it presupposes the solution of an intellectual problem – the reconstruction
of meaning which is sometimes not expressed explicitly, but is hidden and requires
reconstruction by means of inference. Of course, there are limits to the degree of our freedom.
The eminent Russian scholar Georgy Bogin said that there exist certain boundaries in the
multiplicity of interpretation, beyond which appears the danger of distortion of the text meaning
or the inadequacy of understanding which usually occurs because of the lack of necessary
knowledge and convincing argumentation based on knowledge. It’s never enough just to say:
“It’s so just because I think soc” or “It’s my personal opinion”. Our opinion must be very well
grounded and based on the knowledge of the topic, only then will it sound convincing.
The famous Russian poet Samuil Marshak said that each talented writer requires a talented
reader. We are hopeful that you will prove to be sophisticated and talented readers and
therefore able to carry on a successful dialogue with the authors and we wish you success in
this challenging work.
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PART I. THE LANGUAGE OF NONFICTION: A LITERARY
ESSAY
The Origin and the Main Types of Essays
Virginia Woolf. The Common Reader. How Should One Read a Book
Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book”
A Few Hints on Essay Writing
Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf
St. Jean de Crevecoeur. What is an American?
Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?”
Samples of Student’s Essays
What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes
Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland
What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-Reliance
Laurie Lee. Appetite
Biography and Autobiography as Nonfiction Genres
Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography
Evelyn Waugh. General Conversation: Myself
Margaret Atwood. Great Unexpectations
Essays for Self-Guided Analysis
H.G. Wells. Ellis Island
Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface
Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar
Susan Sontag. Beauty
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The Origin and the Main Types of Essays
The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, “to try” or “to attempt”. In English
essay first meant “a trial” or “an attempt”, and this is still an alternative meaning. The
Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as
essays; he used the term to characterize these as “attempts” to put his thoughts adequately into
writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres
morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne
began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two
volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and
composing new ones. Francis Bacon’s essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and
1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first
used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Other English essayists included Robert Burton (1577–1640) and Sir Thomas Browne
(1605–1682). In Italy, Baldassare Castiglione wrote about courtly manners in his essay Il
libro del cortegiano. In the 1600s, the Jesuit Baltasar Gracián wrote about the theme of
wisdom. During the Age of Enlightenment, essays were a favoured tool of polemicists who
aimed at convincing readers of their position. In the 1700s and 1800s, Edmund Burke and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote essays for the general public. In the 20th century, a number of
essayists tried to explain the new movements in art and culture by using essays (e.g., T.S.
Eliot). Whereas some essayists used essays for strident political themes, Robert Louis
Stevenson and Willa Cather wrote lighter essays. Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, and
Charles du Bos wrote literary criticism essays.
An essay has been defined in a variety of ways. I.R. Galperin defines it as literary composition
of moderate length on philosophical, social, aesthetic or literary subject. He also points out that
the most obvious characteristics of the essay is personality in the treatment of the subject and
naturalness of expression. Following Montaigne’s original idea of an essay as an attempt to “to
give something a try”, we may define an essay as a careful and considered piece of writing, a
record of the mind in the act of thinking, which is characterized by an informal style and in
which a writer presents his/her personal opinion on a certain political, social, ethical or literary
issue.
It is difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, gives
guidance on the subject. He notes that “like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying
almost everything about almost anything, usually on a certain topic. By tradition, almost by
definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play
within the limits of a single essay.” He points out that “a collection of essays can cover almost
as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel.” Huxley argues that
“essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively
within a three-poled frame of reference.”
The three poles are:
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• Personal and the autobiographical essays: these use “fragments of reflective autobiography”
to “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description.”
• Objective and factual: in these essays, the authors “do not speak directly of themselves, but
turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme.”
• Abstract-universal: these essays “make the best...of all the three worlds in which it is
possible for the essay to exist.”
According to I.R. Galperin, this literary genre has definite lingual traits which shape it as a
variety of publicistic style. Different writers and publicists specialize in different kinds of essay.
According to their form and style, essays may be classified into several types: narrative,
descriptive, persuasive, and argumentative. These types are used by a range of authors,
including university students and professional essayists.
A narrative essay recounts true events. It uses tools such as flashbacks, flash-forwards, and
transitions that often build to a climax. The focus of a narrative is the plot. When creating a
narrative, authors must determine their purpose, consider their audience, establish their point of
view, use dialogue, and organize the narrative. A narrative is usually arranged chronologically.
A descriptive essay describes people, places, or things. Descriptive writing is characterized
by sensory details, which appeal to the physical senses, and details that appeal to a reader’s
emotional, physical, or intellectual sensibilities. Determining the purpose, considering the
audience, creating a dominant impression, using descriptive language, and organizing the
description are the rhetorical choices to be considered when using a description. A description
is usually arranged spatially but can also be chronological or emphatic. The focus of a
description is the scene. Description uses tools such as denotative language, connotative
language, figurative language, metaphor, and simile to arrive at a dominant impression.
A persuasive essay aims to convince the reader of the author’s opinion or, perhaps, to rouse
the reader to action. Persuasive writing is characterized by strong arguments aimed at
convincing the reader by the use of various means of manuipulating the reader’s
consciousness. This type of essays is characteristic of political discourse.
An argumentative essay is a type in which the author addresses a certain issue and offers
various approaches to it, presenting different viewpoints, considering all the pros and cons and
supplying different arguments for and against various viewpoints. An effective essay often
combines features of different types.
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Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist,
essayist, diarist, publisher, feminist, and writer of short
stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary
figures of the twentieth century.
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in
London in 1882. Her mother, a famous beauty, was born
in India and later moved to England with her mother,
where she served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters.
Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable author, critic
and mountaineer. The young Virginia was educated by her
parents in their literate and well-connected household. Sir
Leslie Stephen’s eminence as an editor, critic, and
biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he
was the widower of Thackeray’s youngest daughter),
meant that his children were raised in an environment
filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. There
was an immense library at the Stephens’ house, from which Virginia and her sister Vanessa
were taught the classics and English literature.
According to Woolf’s memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories, however, were not of
London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The
Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still
standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and
impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction Woolf
wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse.
The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister
Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. The death of
her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly
institutionalised.
Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses.
Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with
few breaks until her suicide.
After the death of their father and Virginia’s second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and
Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury.
Following studies at King’s College, Cambridge, and King’s College London, Woolf came
to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant,
Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of
writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. Despite his low material status the
couple shared a close bond. The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the
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Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia’s novels.
Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement. Her
first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915.
After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the
Acts, Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The
onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool
reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition
until she was unable to work. On 28 March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She put on her
overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, then walked into the River Ouse near her home and
drowned herself.
Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she
experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as
emotional motives of characters. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently
uneventful and commonplace, is refracted and sometimes almost dissolved in the characters’
receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world
overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. Having been brought up in the
atmosphere of literature, painting and music, she always attempted to express in her writing
the outcome of this interaction. She wrote in one of her letters: “I always think of my books
as music before I write them”. Her prose presents a vivid example of intermediality.
Her chief works are: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922),
Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1929), The Waves (1931). Her
works have been translated into over 50 languages.
The Common Reader. How Should One Read a Book
1. In the first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if
I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you.
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice,
to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If
this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions
because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality
that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of
Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody
can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily
furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value
to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those
sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions – there we have none.
2. But to enjoy freedom if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves.
We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squiring half the house in order
to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is “the very spot”?
There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and
novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by
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men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the
donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we
to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and get the deepest and
widest pleasure from what we read?
3. It is simple enough to say that since books have classes – fiction, biography, poetry – we
should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us. Most
commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be
true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall
enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that
would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his
fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first you are
preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open
your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from
the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being
unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that
your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirtytwo chapters of a novel – if we consider how to read a novel – first are an attempt to make
something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks;
reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to
understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your
own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has
left a distinct impression on you – how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two
people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also
tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.
4. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand
conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasized; in the process you will
lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. The turn from your blurred and littered pages
to the opening pages of some great novelist – Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be
better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different
person – Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy – but that we are living in a different world.
Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another;
the fact and the order of the fact is enough. But if the open air and adventure mean everything
to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Hers is the drawing-room, and people talking, and
by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And if, when we have accustomed
ourselves to the drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun
around. The moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the mind
is now exposed – the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that shows
in company. Our relations are not towards people, but towards Nature and destiny. Yet
different as these worlds are each is consistent with itself. The marker of each is careful to
observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon us they
will never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of
reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another – from Jane Austen
to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith – is to be wrenched and
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uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.
You must be capable not only of great finesse of perception, but of great boldness of
imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist – the great artist – gives you.
5. But a glance at the heterogeneous company on the shelf will show you that writers are very
seldom “great artists”; far more often a book makes no claim to be a work of art at all. These
biographies, for example, lives of great men, of men long dead and forgotten, that stand cheek
by jowl with the novels and poems, are we to refuse to read them because they are not “art”?
Or shall we read them, but read them in a different way, with a different aim? Shall we read
them in the first place to satisfy that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the
evening we linger in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and
each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in being? Then we are
consumed with curiosity about the lives of these people – the servants gossiping, the
gentlemen dining, the girl dressing for a party, the old woman at the window with her knitting.
Who are they, what are they, what are their names, their occupations, their thoughts, and
adventures?
6. Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable such houses; they
show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until
they die. And sometimes as we watch, the house fades and the iron railings vanish and we are
out at sea; we are hunting, fighting; we are among savages and soldiers; we are taking part in
great campaigns. Or if we like to stay here in England, in London, still the scene changes; the
street narrows; the house becomes small, cramped, diamond – paned, and malodorous. We
see a poet, Donne, driven from such a house because the walls were so thin that when the
children cried their voices cut through them. We can follow him, through the paths that lie in
the pages of books, to Twickenham; to Lady Bedford’s Park, a famous meeting-ground for
nobles and poets; and then our steps to Wilton, the great house under the downs, and hear
Sidney read the Arcadia to his sisters; and ramble among the very marshes and see the very
herons that figure in that famous romance; and then again travel north with that other Lady
Pembroke, Anne Clifford, to her wild moors, or plunge into the city and control our merriment
at the sight of Gabriel Harvey in his black velvet suit arguing about poetry with Spenser.
Nothing is more fascinating than to grope and stumble in the alternate darkness and splendour
of Elizabethan London. But there is no staying there. The Temples and the Swifts, the Harleys
and the St. John beckon us on; hour upon hour can be spent disentangling their quarrels and
deciphering their characters; and when we tire of them we can stroll on, past a lady in black
wearing diamonds, to Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith and Garrick; or cross the channel, if we
like, and meet Voltaire and Diderot, Madame du Deffand; and so back to England and
Twickenham – how certain places repeat themselves and certain names! – where Lady Bedford
had her Park once and Pope lived later, to Walpole’s home at Strawberry Hill. But Walpole
introduces us to such a swarm of new acquaintances, there are so many houses to visit and
bells to ring that we may well hesitate for a moment, on the Miss Berry’s doorstep, for
example, when behold, up comes Thackeray; he is the friend of the woman whom Walpole
loved; so that merely by going from friend to friend. From garden to garden, from house to
house, we have passed from one end of English literature to another and wake to find
ourselves here again in the present, if we can so differentiate this moment from all that have
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gone before. This, then, is one of the ways in which we can read these lives and letters; we can
make them light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous dead in their
familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close and can surprise their secrets, and
sometimes we may pull out a play or a poem that they have written and see whether it reads
differently in the presence of the author. But this again rouses other questions. How far, we
must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer’s life – how far is it safe to let the man
interpret the writer? How far shall we resist or give way to the sympathies and antipathies that
the man himself rouses in us – so sensitive are words, so receptive of the character of the
author? These are questions that press upon us when we read lives and letters, and we must
answer them for ourselves, for nothing can be more fatal than to be guided by the preferences
of others in a matter so personal.
7. But also we can read such books with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to
become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers. Is
there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading
and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual
movement – the colts galloping round the field, the woman filling her pail at the well, the
donkey throwing back his head and emitting his long, acrid moan. The greater part of any
library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and
donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its records of vanished
moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you
give yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised, indeed you will be
overcome by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder. It may be one letter –
but what a vision it gives! It may be a few sentences – but what vistas they suggest! Sometimes
a whole story will come together with such beautiful humor and pathos and completeness that
it seems as if a great novelist had been at work, yet it is only an old actor, Tate Wilkinson,
remembering the strange story of Captain Jones; it is only a young subaltern serving under
Arthur Wellesley and falling in love with a pretty girl at Lisbon; it is only Maria Allen letting fall
her sewing in the empty drawing room and sighing how she wishes she had taken Dr. Burney’s
good advice and had never eloped with her Rishy. None of this has any value; it is negligible in
the extreme; yet how absorbing it is now and again to go through the rubbish heaps and find
rings and scissors and broken noses buried in the huge past and try to piece them together
while the colt gallops round the field, the woman fills her pail at the well, and the donkey brays.
8. But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching for what is needed to
complete the half-truth which is all that the Wilkinsons, the Bunburys, and the Maria Allens are
able to offer us. They had not the artist’s power of mastering and eliminating; they could not
tell the whole truth even about their own lives; they have disfigured the story that might have
been so shapely. Facts are all that they can offer us, and facts are very inferior form of fiction.
Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements and approximations; to cease
from searching out the minute shades of human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the
purer truth of fiction. Thus we create the mood, intense and generalized, unaware of detail, but
stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is poetry; and that is the
time to read poetry when we are almost able to write it.
Western wind, when wilt thou blow?
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The small rain down can rain
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation
except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then – how sudden and
complete is our immersion! There is nothing here to catch hold of: nothing to stay us in our
flight. The illusion of fiction is gradual; its effects are prepared; but who when they read these
four lines stops to ask who wrote them, or conjures up the thought of Donne’s house or
Sidney’s secretary; or enmeshes them in the intricacy of the past and the succession of
generations? The poet is always our contemporary. Our being for the moment is centered and
constricted, as in any violent shock of personal emotion. Afterwards, it is true, the sensation
begins to spread in wider rings through our minds; remoter senses are reached; these begin to
sound and to comment and we are aware of echoes and reflections. The intensity of poetry
covers an immense range of emotion. We have only to compare the force and directness of
I shall fall like a tree, and find my grave
Only remembering that I grieve,
with the wavering modulation of
Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands
As by an hour glass; the span of time
Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it;
An age of pleasure, revelled out, comes home
At last and ends in sorrow; but the life,
Weary of riot, numbers every sand,
Wailing in sighs, until the last drop down,
So to conclude calamity in rest,
or place the meditative calm of
whether we be young or old
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is wish infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be,
beside the complete and inexhaustible loveliness of
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And no where did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside –
or the splendid fantasy of
And the woodland haunter
Shall not cease to saunter
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When, far down some glade,
Of the great world’s burning,
One soft flame upturning
Seems, to his discerning,
Crocus in the shade.
to bethink us of the varied art of the poet; his power to make us at once actors and spectators;
his power to run his hand into character as if it were a glove, and be Falstaff or Lear; his power
to condense, to widen, to state, once and for ever.
9. “We have only to compare” – with those words the cat is out of the bag, and the true
complexity of reading is admitted. The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost
understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the
whole pleasure from a book, by author. We must pass judgment upon these multitudinous
impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not
directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down;
walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it,
for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will
float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from the book
received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the
shape from start to finish; it is a barn, a pig-sty, or a cathedral. Now then we can compare
book with book as we compare buildings. But this act of comparison means that our attitude
has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot
be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe. Are they not criminals,
books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of
society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, books that fill the air with decay and
disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the greatest of
its kind. There they hang in the mind the shapes of the books we have read solidified by the
judgments we have passed on them – Robinson Crusoe, Emma, The Return of the Native.
Compare the novels with these – even the latest and least of novels has a right to be judged
with the best. And so with poetry – when the intoxication of rhythm has died down and the
splendour of words has faded a visionary shape will return to us and this must be compared
with Lear, with whatever is the best or seems to us to be the best in its own kind. And we may
be sure that the newness of new poetry and fiction is its superficial quality and that we have
only to alter slightly, not to recast, the standards by which we have judged the old.
10. It would be foolish, then, to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare,
is as simple as the first – to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable
impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow- shape
against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such
comparisons alive and illuminating – that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and
to say, “Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds;
this is bad; that is good”. To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination,
insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible
for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not
be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred
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authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how
impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our own identity as we
read. But we know that we cannot sympathize wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is
always a demon in us who whispers, “I hate, I love,” and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is
precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so
intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are
abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks
through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own
idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste;
perhaps we can make it submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon
books of all sorts – poetry, fiction, history, biography – and has stopped reading and looked
for long spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is
changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective. It will begin to bring us not merely
judgments on particular books, but it will tell us that there is a quality common to certain
books. Listen, it will say, what shall we call this? And it will read us perhaps Lear and then
perhaps Agamemnon in order to bring out that common quality. This, with our taste to guide
us, we shall venture beyond the particular book in search of qualities that group books
together; we shall give them names and thus frame a rule that brings order into our perceptions.
We shall gain a further and a rarer pleasure from that discrimination. But as a rule only lives
when it is perpetually broken by contact with the books themselves – nothing is easier and
more stultifying than to make rules which exist out of touch with facts, in a vacuum – now at
least, in order to steady ourselves in this difficult attempt, it may be well to turn to the very rare
writers who are able to enlighten us upon literature, as an art. Coleridge and Dryden and
Johnson, in their considered criticism, the poets and novelists themselves in their unconsidered
sayings, are often surprisingly relevant; they light up and solidify the vague ideas that have been
tumbling in the misty depths of our minds. But they are only able to help us if we come to them
laden with questions and suggestions won honestly in the course of our own reading. They can
do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the
shade of a hedge. We can only understand their ruling when it comes in conflict with our own
and vanquishes it.
11. If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of
imagination, insight and judgment, you may perhaps, conclude that literature is a very complex
art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any
valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further
glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our
responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments
we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they
work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of
great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the
procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load
and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful sow grazing in a
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further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind
of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally,
and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality
of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied,
that would be an end worth reaching.
12. Yet who reads to bring about an end however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that
we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not
this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and
the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crown,
their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to
Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under
our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved
reading”.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Essay
1. Speak about the author of the essay: her life, her personality, her literary credo and her
contribution to English and world literature.
2. As you know there are different types of essays: descriptive, narrative, expository,
persuasive. To which of these types would you refer this essay? Or does it combine features
of different types? Give evidence to your opinion.
3. Comment on the title of the essay. Why does the author choose to present in the form of a
question? Can we trace the connection between the form of the title and the form of the whole
essay? Does the writer merely state her opinion or does she try to involve the readers into
discussion? What language means does she employ to involve the reader into discussion?
Comment on the tonality of the essay. Is it matter-of-fact or emotional? Pay special attention to
the abundance of interrogative and exclamatory sentences and the choice of words and their
contribution to the tonality.
4. What is the central thesis of the essay? In what form does the writer present her thesis? Is
there only one thesis or are there several, related to the main one? Analyze the structure of the
paragraphs paying special attention to the opening sentences.
5. What, in the writer’s opinion, is the most important quality we should posses to be able to
enjoy a book and form our own judgement? Point out the words and phrases related to the
concept of freedom (in this case freedom of opinion) in the first two paragraphs of the essay.
Pay special attention to the metaphors employed by the author in the representation of this
concept.
6. What is the author’s attitude to books and libraries? Do we get an impression that Virginia
Woolf treats books as human beings? Point out the words and phrases that create this effect.
What facts from her biography help us to trace the roots of this attitude?
7. As the essay develops the writer can’t help giving advice to the reader as to how to better
understand a book. Quote the sentences which express this advice and comment on the ideas
the writer suggests. In paragraph 3 Virginia Woolf often resorts to the form of the Imperative
Mood. Yet do you feel that she imposes her opinion on you? What makes her advice sound
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tentative, not imposing? Point out cases of alliteration in paragraph 3 and comment on its
phonoaesthetic effect. Pay close attention to the syntax of paragraphs 3 and 4, find cases of
parallel constructions and antithesis and comment on their contribution to the style.
8. One of the key metaphors employed by Virginia Woolf in her description of the reading
and writing processes is the metaphor of a house (building). She extends this key metaphor by
adding other images to the central image. Follow the process of extension and point out the
means of metaphorical extension and other metaphors related to the central image. What is the
expressive effect of parallel participial constructions in paragraphs 5 and 7?
9. In paragraphs 5–8 Virginia Woolf describes three main genres of literature: biography,
poetry, and fiction, pointing out the peculiarities of each. Follow the description and point out
the means employed by the author to present the specificity of each genre and its effect upon
the readers. Does the tonality of the essay remain the same or does it change as the author
passes over from the description of one genre to another? What effect does the change of
tonality create? What is the effect of the numerous quotations from poetry?
10. Paragraphs 9–11 are devoted to the description of the post-reading appreciation of a book:
comparison and judgement. Do the writer’s ideas coincide with your own? What does she
warn us against when we act as judges? What is her attitude to critics? Comment on the effect
of the extended simile she resorts to in her description of critics and criticism.
11. Comment on the final paragraph of the essay. How do you interpret the words of her
dream? As the last paragraph of an essay usually contains a conclusion, what kind of
conclusion does she suggest?
12. What is the author’s aesthetic credo as it is presented in the essay?
13. Summarize your answers, add your own observations and get ready for the final analysis of
the essay.
Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book”
A Few Hints on Essay Writing
Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf
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Topics for the Essay Based on “How Should One Read a Book”
1. How and why I read books.
2. “I looked for peace everywhere only to find it in one place – in the corner with a
book” (Thomas Kempis).
3. “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and only some few to be chewed
and digested” (Francis Bacon).
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A Few Hints on Essay Writing
Ask several students or teachers to tell you what an essay is and you are likely to receive
several very different answers. There is no common and precise definition. For some teachers
and students an essay is a five-paragraph formula (introduction, main point, main point, main
point, conclusion). And for some timed-writing or test situations this sort of formula can be
useful. A well-written essay is a careful and considered piece of writing which is personal and
informal. It is a record of the mind in the act of thinking. It does not spring entirely well formed
from your pen. It usually takes a lot of forethought, consideration and time. Yet writing an
essay is always stimulating, inspiring, energizing and challenging. Although the entire process
of writing an essay may seem overwhelming, do not feel disheartened. All those writing an
essay face similar challenges: finding, developing, and organizing ideas; understanding what
they are trying to say and expressing that effectively, getting the message across by making
their point clearly, correctly and with style and personality.
The traditional structure of an essay contains the following parts: an introduction in which you
present your central thesis and invite the readers into your discussion of a narrowed topic; a
body that classifies and explores with full factual data or arguments the major issues of the
thesis; a conclusion that affirms your judgement, offers your solution, or gives a call to action.
Here is a possible structure of a well organized essay, the so called TRIAC pattern, in which
each letter stands for a part of the essay:
T – Theme, topic, thesis: state what the essay is about, the topic the essay addresses, or what
you will argue or claim. This opening may run only a sentence or two, but not longer than a
paragraph.
R – Restatement, restriction, refinement: rephrase the theme or thesis in sharper, slightly more
particular ways. This restatement is often preceded with transition like that is, in other words,
what I mean is. Again, this restatement may run only a sentence or a few sentences.
I – Illustration, example: support your ideas. Give examples. Illustrate your statements.
Sentences that do this are often preceded with the traditional phrases for instance or for
example. These discussions form the heart of an essay or a paragraph; they give the details
that make the writing convincing and interesting.
A – Analysis: analysis means telling readers how to understand examples or illustrations. It
means making logical, commonsense inferences between causes and effect, intentions and
actions. Words like since, therefore, because, however, and nevertheless all work to signal
your logic.
C – Conclusion: anytime you are ready to draw together several threads of your logic, you are
making a conclusion. Such sentences or paragraphs are preceded with in conclusion, thus,
summing it up, though these transitions are not always necessary. Conclusions may appear in
the middle of an essay and more than once.
This structure, however, can vary, too. The steps can go in different orders, such as IATC:
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I – intriguing illustration or an example;
A – analysis of this illustration, how it works, why it works this way;
T – your sense of the theme of the passage, your real topic;
C – your concluding discussion of what now seems true to you and should seem true to the
readers.
Or you could use TITITIAC variant – three pairs of thesis/illustration followed by analysis of
these three add up and a concluding discussion of what now seems accurate or true. TRIAC,
in other words, is a structure that can work in lots of different sequences and combinations.
They are all workable provided your essay is a careful and thought provoking piece of writing
but that is also personal and presents a record of your mind in the act of thinking.
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Lewis Carroll by Virginia Woolf
The complete works of Lewis Carroll have been issued by the Nonesuch Press in a stout
volume of 1293 pages. So there is no excuse – Lewis Carroll ought once and for all to be
complete. We ought to be able to grasp him whole and entire. But we fail – once more we fail.
We think we have caught Lewis Carroll; we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think
we have caught the Rev. C.L. Dodgson – we look again and see a fairy elf. The book breaks in
two in our hands. In order to cement it, we turn to the Life. But the Rev. C.L. Dodgson had no
life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into
Oxford that he is invisible. He accepted every convention; he was prudish, pernickety, pious,
and jocose. If Oxford dons in the nineteenth century had an essence he was that essence. He
was so good that his sisters worshipped him; so pure that his nephew has nothing to say about
him. It is just possible, he hints, that “a shadow of disappointment lay over Lewis Carroll’s
life”. Mr. Dodgson at once denies the shadow. “My life,” he says, “is free from all trial and
trouble.” But this untinted jelly contained within it a perfectly hard crystal. It contained
childhood. And this is very strange, for childhood normally fades slowly. Wisps of childhood
persist when the boy or girl is a grown man or woman. Childhood returns sometimes by day,
more often by night. But it was not so with Lewis Carroll. For some reason, we know not
what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not
disperse it. And therefore as he grew older this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard
block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the
grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls
whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins. But since childhood remained in him entire, he
could do what no one else has ever been able to do – he could return to that world; he could
re-create it, so that we too become children again.
In order to make us into children, he first makes us asleep. “Down, down, down, would the fall
never come to an end?” Down, down, down we fall into that terrifying, wildly inconsequent,
yet perfectly logical world where time races, then stands still; where space stretches, then
contracts. It is the world of sleep; it is also the world of dreams. Without any conscious effort
dreams come; the white rabbit, the walrus, and the carpenter, one after another, turning and
changing one into the other, they come skipping and leaping across the mind. It is for this
reason that the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we
become children. President Wilson, Queen Victoria, The Times leader writer, the late Lord
Salisbury – it does not matter how old, how important, or how insignificant you are, you
become a child again. To become a child is to be very literal; to find everything so strange that
nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a
shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is to be Alice in Wonderland.
It is also to be Alice Through the Looking Glass. It is to see the world upside down. Many
great satirists and moralists have shown us the world upside down, and have made us see it, as
grown-up people see it, savagely. Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down as
a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh, irresponsibly. Down the groves of
pure nonsense we whirl laughing, laughing
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They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope …
And then we wake. None of the transitions in Alice in Wonderland is quite so queer. For we
wake to find – is it the Rev. C.L. Dodgson? Is it Lewis Carroll? Or is it both combined? This
conglomerate object intends to produce an extra-Bowdlerized edition of Shakespeare for the
use of British maidens; implores them to think of death when they go to the play; and always,
always to realize that “the true object of life is the development of character…” Is there, then,
even in 1293 pages, any such thing as “completeness”?
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Essay
1. Read the first paragraph and define the thesis of the essay. Pay attention to the use of the
word “complete” and the noun “completeness”. How are these words related to the main
thesis? How many meanings does the adjective “complete” actualize in the sentence “… Lewis
Carroll ought once and for all to be complete”. Whose voice can you hear in this sentence?
2. Study the second paragraph devoted to the life of the Rev. C.L. Dodgson. What image is
created by the author and by what means is it created? Write out the key words, which are
employed by the author to create this image. Pay special attention to the sentence: “he was
prudish, pernickety, pious, and jocose”. Comment on the adjectives that are used to present
Lewis Carrol’s personality and their arrangement. What are the relations between the adjectives
“prudish”, “pernickety”, “pious” on the one hand and “jocose” on the other and what do these
relations reflect? What, according to Virginia Woolf caused Lewis Carrol to write a book for
children and about children? Comment on her ideas about the role of childhood in our lives.
How much of her own life experience is reflected in her words? What is your opinion of the
role of childhood in a person’s life?
3. In the next two paragraphs Virginia Woolf gives her interpretation of Carrol’s two books.
How does she interpret the essence of his book? Do you agree to this interpretation? Analyze
the manner of her writing. Doesn’t it remind you of Carrol’s manner of writing? How is this
resemblance achieved? In fact this passage presents an example of intertextuality. What is the
function of intertextuality in this case?
4. Analyze the concluding lines of the last paragraph, starting from “And then we wake”.
Comment on the conclusion the author makes and the form of the conclusion. Pay special
attention to the repetition of the word “complete”, here in the form of the noun in the end of
the essay. Comment on the tonality of the sentence: This conglomerate object intends to
produce an extra-Bowdlerized edition of Shakespeare for the use of British maidens; implores
them to think of death when they go to the play; and always, always to realize that “the true
object of life is the development of character…” Here we see another case of intertextuality,
presented by the quotation. What function does intertextuality fulfil in this case?
5. Summarize your answers, add your own observations and get ready for the final analysis of
the essay.
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St. Jean de Crevecoeur (1731–1813)
Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur (December 31,
1735 – November 12, 1813), naturalized in New York as
John Hector St. John, was a French-American writer. He
was born in Caen, Normandy, France, to the Comte and
Comtesse de Crèvecœur (Count and Countess of
Crèvecœur).
In 1755 he immigrated to New France in North America.
There, he served in the French and Indian War as a
surveyor in the French Colonial Militia, rising to the rank
of lieutenant. Following the British defeat of the French
Army in 1759 he moved to New York State, then the
Province of New York, where he took out citizenship,
adopted the English-American name of John Hector St.
John, and in 1770 married an American woman,
Mehitable Tippet. He bought a sizable farm in Orange
County, N.Y., where he prospered as a farmer and took up
writing about life in the American colonies and the emergence of an American society. In
1779, during the American Revolution, the faltering health of his father forced him to travel
to Europe. Accompanied by his son, he crossed British-American lines to enter Britishoccupied New York City, where he was imprisoned as an American spy for three months
without being heard. Eventually, he was able to leave for Britain.
In 1782, in London, he published a volume of narrative essays entitled the Letters from an
American Farmer. The book quickly became the first literary success by an American author
in Europe and turned Crèvecœur into a celebrated figure. He was the first writer to describe
to Europeans – employing many American English terms – the life on the American frontier
and to explore the concept of the American Dream, portraying American society as
characterized by the principles of equal opportunity and self-determination. His work
provided useful information and understanding of the “New World” that helped to create an
American identity in the minds of Europeans by describing an entire country rather than
another regional colony. The writing celebrated American ingenuity and its uncomplicated
lifestyle and spelled out the acceptance of religious diversity in a melting pot being created
from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. His application of the Latin maxim “Ubi
panis ibi patria” to early American settlers also shows an interesting insight. He once
praised the middle colonies for “fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields... decent
houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where an hundred years ago all was
wild, woody, and uncultivated”. From Britain, he sailed to France, where he was briefly
reunited with his father. When the United States had been recognized by Britain following
the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Crèvecœur returned to New York City. He learned that, in his
absence, his wife had died, his farm had been destroyed, and his children were now living
with neighbors. Eventually, he was able to regain custody of his children. For most of the
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1780s, Crèvecœur lived in New York City where he now served as the French consul for New
York, New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1784, he published a two-volume version of his Letters
from an American Farmer, enlarged and completely rewritten in French. A three-volume
version followed in 1787. Both his English and his French books were translated into
several other European languages and widely disseminated throughout Europe. For many
years, Crèvecœur was identified by European readers with his fictional narrator, James, the
“American farmer”, and held in high esteem by readers and fellow-writers across Europe.
When he published another three-volume work in 1801, entitled Voyage dans la HautePensylvanie et dans l’état de New-York, however, his fame had faded, and his book was
ignored. An abbreviated German translation appeared in the following year. An English
translation only appeared in 1964. Much of his best work has only been published
posthumously, most recently as More Letters from the American Farmer: An edition of the
Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecœur, edited by Dennis D. Moore (Athens,
Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
Particularly concerned by the condition of slaves, he was a member of the “Société des Amis
des Noirs”, society of the Friends of the Blacks founded in Paris.
In 1789, during a stay in France, he was trapped by the political upheaval that was quickly
turning into the French Revolution. As an aristocrat, he soon went into hiding, while secretly
attempting to gain passage to the United States. The necessary papers were finally granted
to him by the new American ambassador to France, James Monroe, in 1794. At the end of
his life Crèvecœur settled permanently in France. On November 12, 1813, he died in
Sarcelles, Val d’Oise, France.
What is an American?
I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts, which must agitate the heart and
present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman, when he first lands on this
continent. He must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and
settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride, when he views the chain of settlement
which embellishes these extended shores. When he says to himself, this is the work of my
countrymen, who, when convulsed by factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants,
restless and impatient, took refuge here. They brought along with them their national genius, to
which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy, and what substance they possess. Here he
sees the industry of his native country displayed in a new manner, and traces in their works the
embryos of all the arts, sciences, and ingenuity which flourish in Europe. Here he beholds fair
cities, substantial villages, extensive fields, an immense country filled with decent houses, good
roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where a hundred years ago all was wild, woody, and
uncultivated! What a train of pleasing ideas this fair spectacle must suggest; it is a prospect
which must inspire a good citizen with the most heartfelt pleasure.
The difficulty consists in the manner of viewing so extensive a scene. He is arrived on a new
continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had
hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of
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a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no
bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no
great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the
poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted,
we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. We are a people of cultivation,
scattered over an immense territory, communicating with each other by means of good roads
and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws,
without dreading their power, because they are equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of
an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each person works for himself.
If he travels through our rural districts he views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion,
contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin, where cattle and men help to keep each
other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent
competence appears throughout our habitations. The meanest of our log-houses is a dry and
comfortable habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns afford; that of a
farmer is the only appellation of the rural inhabitants of our country. It must take some time ere
he can reconcile himself to our dictionary, which is but short in words of dignity, and names of
honor. There, on a Sunday, he sees a congregation of respectable farmers and their wives, all
clad in neat homespun, well mounted, or riding in their own humble wagons. There is not
among them an esquire, saving the unlettered magistrate. There he sees a person as simple as
his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labor of others. We have no princes, for whom we
toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is
free as he ought to be, nor is the pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. Many ages
will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown
bounds of North America entirely peopled. Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the
millions of men whom it will feed and contain? For no European foot has as yet travelled half
the extent of this mighty continent!
The next wish of this traveller will be to know whence came all these people? They are a
mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this
promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans has arisen. The eastern provinces must
indeed be excepted, as being the unmixed descendants of Englishmen.
In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in
consequence of various causes, to what purpose should they ask one another what
countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders
about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching
penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no
bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of
the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of
the extensive surface of this planet? No! Urged by a variety of motives, here they came.
Everything has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new social
system. Here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants. Wanting
vegetative mould, and refreshing showers, they withered, and were mowed down by want,
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hunger, and war; but now by the power of transpiration, like all other plants they have taken
root and flourished! Formerly they were not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except
in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible power has this surprising
metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws and that of their industry. The laws, the
indulgent laws, protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption. They
receive ample rewards for their labors; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those
lands confer on them the title of free-men, and to that title every benefit is affixed which men
can possibly require.
What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The
knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords
that tied him: His country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and
consequence. Ubi panis ibi patria (Where bread is, there is a fatherland) is the motto of all
emigrants. What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the
descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other
country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife
was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four
wives of different nations: He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices
and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new
government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received
in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new
race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts,
sciences, vigor, and industry, which began long since in the east; they will finish the great
circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one
of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become
distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought therefore to
love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the
rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labor; his labor is founded
on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who
before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their
farther to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all,
without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here
religion demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitude to God;
can he refuse there? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must
therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile
dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature,
rewarded by ample subsistence. – This is an American.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. Define the type of the essay and support your opinion.
2. What is the central thesis of the essay? In what form is the thesis presented? How is this
thesis supported?
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3. In what tonality is the essay written? Do you not have an impression that it sounds as a
hymn to America and Americans? By what language means is this effect achieved? Pay special
attention to the choice of words, the communicative types of sentences, and the syntax of the
essay.
4. The main principle which underlies the structure of the essay is contrast. Point out the
language means which are used by the author to build this contrast. What things are
contrasted? Point out the main devices that the author employs to describe the life of the
people in Europe and on the new land. Point out the key metaphors that the author exploits and
their expressive effect. Pay special attention to means of expressing negation and the role of
negation in the essay. Comment on the thesis Ubi panis ibi patria, which as the author points
out, was the motto of all immigrants. Do you support this statement?
5. What are the components of the concept “American Dream” as they are presented in this
essay?
6. What predictions did the author make about the future of American society? Have they all
come true? Give facts from contemporary life to support your opinion.
7. What answer does the author give to the question presented in the title?
8. What values of American society can be pointed out from the analysis of the essay?
9. Sum up your observations in the final analysis of the essay.
Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?”
Samples of Student’s Essays
What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes
Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland
What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water
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Topics for the Argumentative Essay Based on “What is an American?”
1. Where bread is there’s a fatherland.
2. What is an American (a Russian, an Italian etc.). The merits and demerits of stereotypes.
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Samples of Student’s Essays
What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes
Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland
What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water
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What Is a Japanese. The Merits and Demerits of Stereotypes
However globalised we are now, stereotypes are still a plague of our society. There has been a
great progress in humanity’s world view in general (and mind that we are still on the move), as
gender, racial and what not restrictions are not as severe as they used to be, yes, but we still
have a long way ahead of us. It appears to me that stereotypes are unavoidable, however hard
we try to deny this. Mass media may be responsible for making them pop up; the first
impression of coming into contact with something alien also has its impact. Yet people
sometimes tend to forget that there may be more behind the first impression, and mass media
is not always the best choice to put your trust into, as in one way or another there is always
this little devil of a wish to make a big stir whatever the cost.
Let us take Japan as an example. If one asks a non-initiate “What is a Japanese?” the most
likely answer may be “Those weird big-eyed cartoons” (meaning anime), “Sushi”, “Robots” or
“Sakura” – at least these were the answers I got when trying to do a little survey. Funny thing,
but most of the time people do not even realize that any other cartoon outside Japan is in fact
anime in the eyes of the Japanese themselves, as this is an abbreviation of an English
borrowing animation. The age brackets and choice of genre are significantly wider in Japanese
animation, yes, but still it does not remove the essence of the phenomenon.
Japanese culture is indeed often misunderstood by the general public, like any other more or
less alien thing. The truth is that Japanese do not really mind their reputation, because as a
matter of fact they have nothing to be ashamed of judging from their own perspective. If the
Germans may be still haunted by the Nazi stereotype and us Russians are expected to be
equipped with a set of balalaikas and draught bears from the cradle (and I am not being
sarcastic about our balalaika and bears stereotypes at all, in fact I find them endearing), it
seems that Japanese simply do not care a fig what the world thinks of their culture and
customs. This reputation is in fact quite a handy shielding for a nation that has always been
continues to be very private. Of course Japan now is not as sternly isolated as it was before yet
it does not welcome just about every person with open arms. One can say that Japan is like a
club where only cool kids hang out (except that they do not try to openly belittle people
around them). If you want to stay in the country, you must have something to offer that will
benefit Japan’s well-being. But having this “something” is one thing – you still have a language
barrier to jump over.
I highly doubt they have abandoned the feeling of being superior, they just buried it deep within
– in our globalised society there is simply no place for it. I am not in any way trying to say that
they are a bunch of secluded egomaniacs who hate each and every foreigner and wish
Amaterasu’s entire wrath upon them (yet they do have an absolutely charming name for us all
– baka-gaijin, literally translated as stupid foreigner – though statistics say mostly Americans
are honoured with this fine title). There are some glimpses of disdain here and there, take the
Japanese syllabaries hiragana and katakana for example: the first is used to write down native
Japanese words, the second is used for borrowings. If hiragana is all round and pretty,
katakana is like “here are some sticks, make them work – baka-gaijinisms do not deserve even
the slightest piece of our mother tongue’s gracefulness”. Yet they still adapt borrowings to
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make them fit into the Japanese sound pattern – if it is fairly easy to figure out what aisukurimu
is, one might want to consult a dictionary to know what wanpatān, or rimokon means (it is
one pattern and remo(te) con(troll) respectively). There are more serious issues of Japan
giving a cold shoulder to anything non-Japanese or even half-Japanese, however. With an
increased number of foreigners living and working in Japan, interracial children appear, and
they are known in Japan as hafu (adaptation of half). The issue is that sometimes these
children will face hostility at school for being “not pure Japanese”. It may be not that widespread in bigger cities and their vicinities, yet more distant areas tend to stick to traditions of
purity – if you think about it, it has not been very long since the isolation period ended, and
some things are hard to uproot. Mixed children also sometimes fall into the category of gaijin,
and whereas for a real foreigner the definition looks more or less factual (from the foreigner’s
perspective, from the Japanese perspective it is still derogatory), for those mixed it is
offensive.
Where did this feeling of superiority come from anyway? The answer is fairly easy if you know
a thing or two about Japanese history – religion. This is also presumably one of the reasons
that drove Japan to joining the Axis during WWII, as traditional Japanese religion – Shinto –
clearly states that Japan is the land created by the gods themselves with the Japanese Emperor
being the descendant of the pantheon’s main deity – Amaterasu. Moreover, according to
Shinto, any Japanese is a potential kami (Japanese word for god as well as the term denoting
numerous deities) – it depends on one’s doings. In actual fact, one can make almost anything a
kami in Shinto – be it a person, a mountain (shout out to Fuji-san), a tree, a stone, a chair –
literally anything. Of course it is not a common practice nowadays, but the grounds are pretty
much so. Do whatever you want with your kami, but live in harmony with nature and everything
that surrounds you in your paper-thin house – no strict codes, just a simple set of rules to keep
the balance.
To put it all together – Japan is indeed a land of contrasts and wonders, with their own quirks,
like any other country or people. I personally find it hard to idolise it, and I am far from hating
it. I do not see any in-between either. I just sit there for five years or so with my check
propped on my fist and thinking “Well, this is some amusing folk indeed”.
Tania Klimova, group 104e
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Where Bread Is There’s A Fatherland
Isn’t it a natural desire to look for a better life? Any activity begins when we realize that we
need or want more than we have. This need is a driving force that stands behind our
motivation. The need can send us to another part of the world and make us take root there. For
some people the fatherland is a country where they and their families were born and they feel
very loyal towards it. However, other people are like migratory birds – when they feel that the
circumstances do not satisfy them anymore, they look for a better place. Though unlike birds,
they may never come back home.
We all come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and walks of life. Some children are
lucky enough to be born into wealthy and prosperous families. “He was born with a silver
spoon in his mouth,” people say about them. When they grow up, their fatherland gives them
an opportunity to preserve and increase their wealth. However, other people come from
families which live on the edge of poverty and hunger. If their country does nothing to improve
their life conditions, should they call it a fatherland? Should they set a high value on it? No
doubt, a lot of poor people would never exchange their fatherland for anything else and would
give away their lives for it. Though some of them would prefer to leave the country that does
not care for its citizens and consider a better place to be their fatherland.
The life conditions for the rich and the poor are drastically different. It is a natural balance,
though one can change their life and achieve success regardless of their background. It is
believed that children from poor families tend to achieve more in life. They have more
motivation and a clear understanding of what they want to get in this life. Moreover, they tend
to be more confident because they are not tied to what they have (as they have practically
nothing), so they are able to risk everything (which in their case is not much) and start a new
life. Most often a new life starts in a new place – a new city, country or even continent. The
opportunities of the rich, however, are limited, as they are too concerned about not losing their
money and privileges. They are not likely to leave what they have inherited from their parents
and start anything from scratch. For them their fatherland is their home country which gave
them this prosperity and they will stay there whatever happens to protect their treasures. Why
go somewhere else if your life is perfect at home?
The poor are different: nothing to lose – no fears. Oppressive legislation, poor working
conditions, a low income and the absence of protection make their basic instincts wake up – if
the conditions are so bad, people look for a way to escape. Sometimes the only way is to leave
the home country and sacrifice the notion of fatherland. It is no wonder that the FrenchAmerican writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur said Ubi panis ibi patria (Where bread is,
there is a fatherland) is the motto of all emigrants. People who were born poor and are not
provided with protection, rights and the opportunity to live a decent life, naturally want to leave
the fatherland for a better country. Can we blame them for it and call traitors? Hardly so.
Fatherland should be a value only when the citizens are taken care of. The motto might sound
too materialistic, though there is a grain of truth in it.
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Need is one of the basic notions of human psychology. Need makes us take actions, look for a
way out and change our lives for the better. Sometimes need drives us to another place which
is better in some respect. If a person feels at home there and realizes (s)he is safe and happy,
does it matter where they were born? Sometimes your fatherland is not where you come into
the world, but where you forget the voice of need.
Vika Kandaurova, group 124e
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What Is An Ossetian Or Blood Is Thicker Than Water
Being an Ossetian is difficult but enjoyable. If you do not believe me you can ask my father
who has been struggling with cold, language and me mother for twenty-four years. He does it
with sweet smile and kind word. To be honest, I have never seen a person as friendly as my
father. Anyway, it is in his blood.
Actually, there is a list of characteristics that any Ossetian should follow to become at home
among strangers in Russia. There are three of them:
• be friendly;
• make random stresses in words;
• launch your own business.
As I have already said, amiability runs before an Ossetian. They will always be the masters of
hospitality. You will always feel like home in their company where wine flows and pies flies.
But be very attentive with women. They are sly as foxes, calculating as Jews and gossiping as
gutter press. A lot of women are like that but the ones I know are the new form of evil.
Anyway, you will never know the truth and may disagree because they will never show or tell it.
The second item in the list is not a surprise for people who have ever communicated with
people from the Greater Caucasus Mountains. But only these people pronounce words and tell
stories with such a pretty charm that it becomes their trademark. For years we have been
collecting the best mistakes of my father and still laugh at them.
One more thing about the Ossetians – they are inborn businessmen. Each of them has his or
her business and if not he or she works on his or her brother or sister. This system is very
unstable and I do not like it at all (maybe it is the voice of a Russian woman talks). I would
rather work for ten thousand rubbles per month than for a million per somewhen. Moreover, a
good man cannot make big money.
The last thing is not in the list but I think it is the most important. Being an Ossetian is to be
proud of where you are from and who you are. They can teach Russian people to love their
country and respect the culture. They can show us how one can miss his or her motherland.
They can explain how we should cherish our families.
As a half-blood Ossetian I can honestly say that I am proud of this blood in my veins. And I
hope that I inherited only best traits. In any case, I am a daughter of my wonderful father and
my beautiful mother who raised me right.
Marina Bestaeva, group 124a
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the most influential
American writers. He articulated many of the
fundamental beliefs of 19th-century.
As the leader of Transcendentalism, Emerson spoke out
against materialism, formal religion and slavery.
Though he ranked as his country’s most piercing critic,
he helped to establish the “American identity”
preaching and exemplifying individualism. In one of his
famous phrases Emerson urges: “Trust thyself”.
Emerson’s philosophic views were often considered
radical at the time. He believed in a spiritual universe
governed by a mystic Over-soul with which each
individual soul should try to harmonize. In other words,
there is a “sixth sense” which Emerson calls the sense
of the Self, that inner inkling that somehow seems to
know what’s best for us, even when we don’t think we know.
Emerson was known first as an orator. He converted many of his orations into written works.
Both his lectures and his published works were filled with wisdom expressed in a startling
and impressive way.
Throughout his life Emerson kept detailed journals of his thoughts and actions, and he
returned to them as a source for many of his essays.
Emerson’s essays are marked by eloquence, effective argumentation and emotionality
achieved through the skillful use of references, imagery, large vocabulary and expressive
syntax. They earned him the name of “American Socrates”.
However, Emerson’s writings offer a way of life, not a system or philosophy. For Emerson,
the values of individualism, self-reliance, nonconformity and reverence for nature were
fundamentally grounded in experience.
The essay “Self-Reliance”, for which Emerson is perhaps best known, contains the most
thorough statement of the need for people to avoid conformity and false consistency, and
instead follow their own instincts and ideas. The essay has three major focuses: the
importance of self-reliance, self-reliance and the individual, and self-reliance and society.
from Self-Reliance
“Ne te quæsiveris extra”
“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
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Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune
Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.
I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not
conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may.
The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your
own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, – that
is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due
time becomes the outmost, – and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of
the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to
Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what
men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which
flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we
recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by
our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of
voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense
precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame
our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is
ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his
portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to
him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The
power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can
do, nor does he know until he has tried.
…Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence
has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men
have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying
their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands,
predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the
same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a
revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay under the Almighty
effort let us advance on Chaos and the Dark.
…These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter
into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its
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members. Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better
securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The
virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and
creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must
not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the
suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make
to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church.
On my saying , What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from
within? my friend suggested, – “But these impulses may be from below, not from above”. I
replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil’s child, I will live then from
the devil”. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names
very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only
wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every
thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to
badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
…What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous
in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and
meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your
duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy
in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
…The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past
act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our
past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. But why should you keep your head over your
shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you
have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It
seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of
pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever
in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the
devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God
with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and
philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as
well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words,
and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every
thing you said to-day. Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Is it so bad, then, to be
misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and
Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To
be great is to be misunderstood.
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…Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but
quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These
roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what
they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is
perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the
fullblown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and
it satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers;
he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until
he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
…Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than
the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The
centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but
physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was,
is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful
apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
…Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Its progress
is only apparent like the workers of a treadmill. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous,
it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For
every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.
What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a
pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a
club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But compare the
health of the two men and you see that his aboriginal strength, the white man has lost. If the
traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite
and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white man
to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on
crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has
lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being
sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky.
The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar
of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory: his libraries
overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a
question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some
energy, by a christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For
every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?
…Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and 13 deceiving people with whom we
converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you
after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that
henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities.
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I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one
wife, – but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your
customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love
me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you
should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will
do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you
are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical
attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will
seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine,
and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh today? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the
truth, it will bring us out safe at last. – But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I
cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their
moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify
me, and do the same thing.
…So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her
wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the
chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance,
and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the
recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises
your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can
bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. What do you know about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the philosophy of
Transcendentalism? How does the idea of self-reliance relate to the concept of “American
identity”?
2. What ideas do the epigraphs contain? Are they expressed directly or implied? Analyse the
imagery. What stylistic devices are employed by the author?
3. How does the author begin his essay? Mark the interconnection of the personal and the
common in the introduction. How is it reflected in the use of pronouns? Find the statement that
captures the essence of what Emerson means by “self-reliance”.
4. Analyse the allusions. Why do Moses, Plato and Milton appear in the same context? Who
are “bards and sages”?
5. Interpret the last sentence of the first paragraph. How does it develop the idea of “rejected
thoughts”? Do you agree that it is shameful to recognize one’s own opinion in the words of “a
stranger”?
6. What metaphor is used to present Emerson’s conviction that it is necessary to depend on
one’s own opinion? How does the author extend the central image of crop growing?
7. Analyse the religious references in the essay. What is the role of “the divine providence” in
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the definition of a person’s place in this world? Trace the influence of Transcendentalism in the
interpretation of the motto: “Trust thyself.”
8. What prevents people from trusting their own mind? Who or what acts “in conspiracy
against the manhood”? What terms does the author use to represent the concept of society?
What is his attitude to social conventions? How does the brevity of the author’s expression
contribute to the emotionality of the text?
9. What is the danger of being a nonconformist according to the opinion of the author’s
friend? Can intuition be evil? How does the author justify the sacredness of human nature?
What are the arguments for the absolute value of individual opinion?
10. What is, according to the author, another barrier to self–reliance? Analyse the imagery
employed to convey the idea of consistency?
11. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” says the author. Does it sound like a paradox? Who
are the people Emerson includes in the good company of the misunderstood? Who can join
this company? What syntactical expressive means accentuates the idea of its open
membership?
12. How does the author relate the concepts of consistency and time? What picture does he
give to underline human inability to live in the present.
13. What illustrations does the author give to argue the idea that “society never advances”? Are
the things he mentions in the examples relevant today? What could be added to the list of
objects and notions defining the life of a modern man? What syntactical expressive means
support Emerson’s argumentation?
14. Do you think the acquisitions of civilization, including religious teachings, improve or
destroy human nature? Why does the author use an indefinite article before the word
“christianity” leaving it uncapitalised? Interpret the question containing the opposition of “a
stoic” and “the Christian”. What implications does the word “Christendom” contain?
15. What is the mood and tone of the final paragraphs of the essay? What expressive means
render the author’s enthusiasm and inspiration? Comment on the repeated use of the pronoun
“I”, parallel constructions, enumeration, and imperative sentences.
16. What is the idea contained in the last lines of the essay? Does it sound comforting or
disturbing? Can a man be happy in his absolute spiritual alienation?
17. Summarise your impressions in the final analysis of the text pointing out the language
means that constitute Emerson’s elegant and poetic style. Pay attention to historical and biblical
references, elaborate wording, imagery, and syntactic patterns.
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Laurie Lee (1914–1997)
Laurence Edward Alan “Laurie” Lee, (June 26 1914 – May
13, 1997) was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter,
raised in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire. His most famous
work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of
Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer
Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). The first
volume recounts his childhood in the idyllic Slad Valley. The
second deals with his leaving home for London and his first
visit to Spain in 1935, and the third with his return to Spain
in December 1937 to join the Republican International
Brigades. Having been born in Stroud, Lee’s family moved to
the village of Slad in 1917, the move with which Cider with
Rosie opens. At twelve, Laurie went to the Central Boys
School in Stroud. In his notebook for 1928, when he was
fourteen he lists ‘Concert and Dance Appointments’, for at
this time he was in demand to play his violin at dances. He
left the Central School at fifteen to become an errand boy at a Chartered Accountants in
Stroud. In 1931 he first found the Whiteway Colony, two miles from Slad, a colony founded
by Tolstoyan Anarchists. It gave him his first smattering of politicization and was where he
met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the ‘Cleo’ who appears in As I Walked Out One
Midsummer Morning. In 1933 he met Sophia Rogers, an “exotically pretty girl with dark
curly hair” who had moved to Slad from Buenos Aires, an influence on Lee who said, later
in life, that he only went to Spain because “a girl in Slad from Buenos Aires taught me a few
words of Spanish”. At twenty he worked as an office clerk and a builder’s labourer, and
lived in London for a year before leaving for Spain in the summer of 1935.
After the outbreak of war in July 1936 Lee was picked up by a British destroyer from
Gibraltar collecting marooned British subjects on the southern Spanish coast. He started to
study for an art degree (during these years he met a woman who helped him financially) but
returned to Spain in 1937 as an International Brigade volunteer. These experiences were
recounted in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), his observations of pre-Civil
War Spain as he walked from Vigo, in Galicia, to Almuñécar, in Granada, and in A Moment
of War (1991), an austere memoir of his experience as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War.
Before devoting himself entirely to writing in 1951, Lee worked as a journalist and as a
scriptwriter. During World War II he made documentary films for the General Post Office
film unit (1939–40) and the Crown Film Unit (1941–43). From 1944 to 1946 he worked as
the Publications Editor for the Ministry of Information.[4] In 1950 Lee married Catherine
Francesca Polge, whose father was Provençal and whose mother was one of the Garman
sisters; they had one daughter, Jessie.
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“Cider with Rosie” continues to be one of the UK’s most popular books, and is sometimes
used as a set English Literature text for schoolchildren. It captured images of village life from
a bygone era of innocence and simplicity.
Lee’s first love was always poetry, though he was only moderately successful as a poet. Lee’s
first poem appeared in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in 1940 and he published his first volume
of poems, The Sun My Monument, in 1944. This was followed by The Bloom of Candles
(1947) and My Many Coated Man (1955). Several poems written in the early 1940s reflect
the atmosphere of the war, but also capture the beauty of the English countryside.
Other works include A Rose for Winter, about a trip he made to Andalusia fifteen years after
the Civil War; Two Women (1983), a story of Lee’s courtship and marriage with Kathy,
daughter of Helen Garman; The Firstborn (1964), about the birth and childhood of their
daughter Jessye; I Can’t Stay Long (1975), a collection of occasional writing; and The
Edge of Day (1960), an autobiography. Lee also wrote travel books, essays, a radio play,
and short stories.
In the 1960s, Laurie Lee and his wife returned to Slad to live near his childhood home,
where they remained until his death in 1997, at age 82. He is buried in the local
churchyard.
Appetite
One of the major pleasures in life is appetite, and one of our major duties should be to preserve
it. Appetite is the keenness of living; it is one of the senses that tells you that you are still
curious to exist, that you still have an edge on your longings and want to bite into the world
and taste its multitudinous flavours and juices.
By appetite, of course, I don’t mean just the lust for food, but any condition of unsatisfied
desire, any burning in the blood that proves you want more than you’ve got, and that you
haven’t yet used up your life. Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart’s
desire, but sorrier still for those who did. I got mine once only, and it nearly killed me, and I’ve
always preferred wanting to having since.
For appetite, to me, is this state of wanting, which keeps one’s expectations alive. I remember
learning this lesson long ago as a child, when treats and orgies were few, and when I
discovered that the greatest pitch of happiness was not in actually eating a toffee but in gazing
at it beforehand. True, the first bite was delicious, but once the toffee was gone one was left
with nothing, neither toffee nor lust. Besides, the whole toffeeness of toffees was imperceptibly
diminished by the gross act of having eaten it. No, the best was in wanting it, in sitting and
looking at it, when one tasted an inexhaustible treasure-house of flavours.
So, for me, one of the keenest pleasures of appetite remains in the wanting, not the satisfaction.
In wanting a peach, or a whisky, or a particular texture or sound, or to be with a particular
friend. For in this condition, of course, I know that the object of desire is always at its most
flawlessly perfect.
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Which is why I would carry the preservation of appetite to the extent of deliberate fasting,
simply because I think that appetite is too good to lose, too precious to be bludgeoned into
insensibility by satiation and overdoing it.
For that matter, I don’t really want three square meals a day – I want one huge, delicious,
orgiastic, table-groaning blow-out, say every four days, and then not be too sure where the
next one is coming from. A day of fasting is not for me just a puritanical device for denying
oneself a pleasure, but rather a way of anticipating a rarer moment of supreme indulgence.
Fasting is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite. So I think we should arrange to give up
our pleasures regularly – our food, our friends, our lovers – in order to preserve their intensity,
and the moment of coming back to them. For this is the moment that renews and refreshes
both oneself and the thing one loves. Sailors and travellers enjoyed this once, and so did
hunters, I suppose. Part of the weariness of modern life may be that we live too much on top
of each other, and are entertained and fed too regularly. Once we were separated by hunger
both from our food and families, and then we learned to value both. The men went off hunting,
and the dogs went with them; the women and children waved goodbye. The cave was empty
of men for days on end; nobody ate, or knew what to do. The women crouched by the fire,
the wet smoke in their eyes; the children wailed; everybody was hungry. Then one night there
were shouts and the barking of dogs from the hills, and the men came back loaded with meat.
This was the great reunion, and everybody gorged themselves silly, and appetite came into its
own; the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred celebration of
life. Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen
peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting.
We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don’t know the pleasure of being
hungry any more.
Too much of anything – too much music, entertainment happy snacks, of time spent with
one’s friends, creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear, or taste,
or see, or love, or remember. Life is short and precious, and appetite is one of its guardians,
and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are to enjoy this short life we should respect
the divinity of appetite, and keep it eager and not too much blunted.
It is a long time now since I knew that acute moment of bliss that comes from putting parched
lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed – all one needs is the
original thirst.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. Speak about Lauree Lee and the peculiarities of his style.
2. What is the tonality of the essay? Does it differ from the essays you have read in this
textbook? What exactly makes it different? Does the fact that Lauree Lee was primarily a poet
find its reflection in the style of the essay? Quote the text to support your opinion.
3. What is the topic addressed by the author? How does he treat it?
4. Comment on the title of the essay. Does the title reflect the problem discussed in the essay?
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5. Comment on the central thesis of the essay and the way it is presented.
6. What does the author mean by appetite?
7. How does the author extend his central thesis? What facts does he resort to support his
thesis? How do the facts of his personal life find reflection in his treatment of the problem?
8. Discussing the problem of appetite the author treats it on a very broad scale addressing the
modern way of life. What does he not like about modern life? How do the facts of his
biography influence his perception of modern life? Do you share the author’s opinion? Express
your own point of view the problem addressed in the essay.
9. What kind of conclusion does the author draw in the closing paragraph and how does he
present it?
10. Comment on the stylistic peculiarities of the essay. Analyze the expressive means
employed by the author and their stylistic effect.
Biography and Autobiography as Nonfiction Genres
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Biography and Autobiography as Non iction Genres
“Biography is: a system in which the contradictions
of a human life are unified” (José Ortega y Gasset)
“Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is
life without theory” (Benjamin Disraeli)
Nonfiction literature encompasses a wide variety of writing. Nonfiction can be defined as any
writing based on true or real-life experiences. There are enough types and styles of nonfiction
to seem overwhelming. One way to help organize the various types is to split nonfiction into
two subcategories: informational nonfiction and literary nonfiction.
Informational nonfiction includes any writing that aims to inform or give facts. Literary
nonfiction includes writing that is based on real world events, but is meant to entertain. Literary
nonfiction reads like fiction, which means it has elements of a story, which includes characters,
setting and plot. However, in nonfiction these elements must be real and not imaginary. The
stories are meant to amuse the reader, as well as inform on true stories.
The two major types of literary nonfiction are biography and autobiography. Let’s look closer
at these two types of literary nonfiction.
Biography
The first type of literary nonfiction is the biography. A biography is a true story of a person’s
life that is written by someone else. This true story has all the elements of fiction: characters,
setting and plot. Those elements all come from a real person’s life, so the characters are real;
the setting is an actual place, and the events truly happened.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a biography is defined as “The process of
recording the events and circumstances of another person’s life, esp. for publication (latterly
in any of various written, recorded, or visual media); the documenting of individual life
histories (and, later, other forms of thematic historical narrative), considered as a genre of
writing or social history”.
The key ingredient in a good biography is integrity – completeness and honesty. A biography
with integrity is not simply hero worship or criticism but rather an effort to tell the truth about a
life.
More than a collection of facts, a biography explains the motives behind actions, the methods
behind achievements, the lessons learned from setbacks. A biographer researches and uses
personal letters, diaries, public documents, and interviews as sources of information.
Many characteristics of good fiction appear also in biography: lively recounting of events:
crisp, authentic dialogue; richness of detail; many-sided characterization. Though rooted in
fact, the biography does not just report a life but makes that life rewarding, entertaining reading.
To present fully the life of an individual, most biographies are book length. Biographical
sketches, however, present only a few events that illustrate important characteristics of the
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subject’s personality. In this way the author of a biographical sketch can capture the essence
of a person’s life in a few carefully selected episodes or even in a single crucial event.
Autobiography
Another type of literary nonfiction is the autobiography. An autobiography is the story of a
person’s life written by that person. The author of an autobiography re-creates personal events
as objectively as possible and tries to see the pattern they form and the meaning they hold. The
OED defines memoir as “autobiographical observations; reminiscences”.
Autobiographies are the same as biographies except for one key difference: the story of a
person’s life is told by that person. This means that in an autobiography, a person tells the
story of his or her own life. Because of this, autobiographies are told in first-person point of
view. This means that the narrator is in the story and uses the pronouns I, me and my. Another
important concept to note about autobiographies is the ability to insert personal thoughts and
opinions. Since the author writes about his own life, autobiographies can often be biased. This
means that the author could present the information in order for him to be seen in a certain
light. Sometimes weaknesses and failures can be excused or even skipped over. Not all
autobiographers will do this, but it is in human nature to try to present oneself in the best light
possible. It is important to be aware of this fact when reading an autobiography.
Autobiographies and memoirs are similar in that they both are written in the first person and
both are personal and talk about the author’s life. The difference is while autobiographies detail
in chronological sequence the author’s life from birth to death, memoirs are concerned with
emotional truths and focus on random aspects of the author’s life such as feelings or attitudes
that stand out because they have had such an impact on the person’s life. The line between
autobiographies and memoirs is fuzzy that they are often used interchangeably.
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Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
Benjamin Franklin is best known as one of the
Founding Fathers who drafted the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
He was an inventor, scientist, printer, politician,
freemason, diplomat and one of the most respected
individuals of his time. His scientific pursuits included
investigations into electricity, mathematics and
mapmaking. He invented bifocal glasses and organized
the first successful American lending library. A writer
known for his wit and wisdom, Benjamin Franklin also
published “Autobiography” and “Poor Richard’s
Almanac” for the enrichment of which he borrowed or
composed the utterances of worldly wisdom which are
the basis of a large part of his reputation. Some of
Franklin’s famous quotes include the following:
• Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed
of it, is.
• Well done is better than well said.
• If Man could have Half his Wishes, he would double his Troubles.
• Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.
• Fools make feasts and wise men eat ’em.
• He that lives upon Hope, dies fasting.
• An empty bag will not stand upright.
• Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
• He that waits upon Fortune, is never sure of a Dinner.
• Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.
• Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.
• No gains without pains.
• Time is money.
• Diligence is the mother of good luck.
• Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
• The poor have little, beggars none, the rich too much, enough not one.
• God helps them that help themselves.
Franklin’s “Autobiography” of is the unfinished record of his own life written from 1771 to
1790. This work has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an
autobiography ever written. Editor Frank Woodworth Pine wrote:
“Franklin is a good type of our American manhood. Although not the wealthiest or the most
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powerful, he is undoubtedly, in the versatility of his genius and achievements, the greatest of
our self-made men. The simple yet graphic story in the Autobiography of his steady rise from
humble boyhood in a tallow-chandler shop, by industry, economy, and perseverance in selfimprovement, to eminence, is the most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our selfmade men. It is in itself a wonderful illustration of the results possible to be attained in a
land of unequaled opportunity by following Franklin’s maxims.”
Benjamin Franklin articulated a belief in the virtue of common sense. In these excerpts from
Franklin’s Autobiography, we see his honest pragmatism, his gentle humor, his humanity,
his optimistic assurance that all men and women may better themselves through hard work
and discipline.
“Autobiography” is an example of the fulfillment of the American Dream. The model set
forth by Franklin in this autobiography demonstrates the possibility to rise from rags to
riches. His own rise from the lower middle class to one of the most admired men in the world
proved that even undistinguished persons can become great figures of importance through
industry and perseverance.
Franklin’s “Autobiography” is also a reflection of the 18th century idealism. The 18th
century was the age of men like John Locke and Isaac Newton. It is called the Age of
Reason. Intellectualism flourished along with scientific and social advances. Many people
optimistically believed that education and progress can help to perfect man and society.
The ideals and forms of literature in Franklin’s age differ from the romantic and postromantic works. In his preference for reason, common sense, and experience over emotion or
speculation, Franklin borrows from the English writers of the early eighteenth century. His
satiric practice, especially his use of irony, reflects Franklin’s familiarity with the great works
of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.
Franklin’s style is primarily didactic because “Autobiography” was intended to be read
partly as a self-help book. However, he uses a great deal of wit and humor, so as not to seem
arrogant. Thus, Franklin’s book is not only a manual of strategies, but a diverting narrative.
The entertaining character increases the utility of the work as an educational tool, and,
perhaps, the educational elements make the narrative more captivating.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
(an extract)
A VEGETABLE DIET
When about 16 years of age I happened to meet with a book, written by one Tryon,
recommending a vegetable diet, I determined to go into it. My brother being yet unmarried, did
not keep house, but boarded himself and his apprentices in another family. My refusing to eat
flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chid for my singularity. I made myself
acquainted with Tryon’s manner of preparing some of his dishes, such as boiling potatoes or
rice, making hasty pudding, and a few others, and then proposed to my brother, that if he
would give me, weekly, half the money he paid for my board, I would board myself. He
instantly agreed to it, and I presently found that I could save half what he paid me. This was an
additional fund for buying books. But I had another advantage in it. My brother and the rest
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going from the printing-house to their meals, I remained there alone, and, despatching presently
my light repast, which often was no more than a bisket or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins
or a tart from the pastry-cook’s, and a glass of water, had the rest of the time till their return for
study, in which I made the greater progress, from that greater clearness of head and quicker
apprehension which usually attend temperance in eating and drinking.
...In my first voyage from Boston, being becalmed off Block Island, our people set about
catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating
animal food, and on this occasion I considered, with my master Tryon, the taking of every fish
as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could, do us any injury that
might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great
lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying- pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanced
some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I
saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “If you eat one another, I don’t
see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with
other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a
thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every
thing one has a mind to do.
MORAL PERFECTION
It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.
I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural
inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was
right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I
soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was
employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another, – habit took the
advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at
length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous,
was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and
good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform
rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method.
In the various enumerations of the moral virtues I had met with in my reading, I found the
catalogue more or less numerous, as different writers included more or fewer ideas under the
same name. Temperance, for example, was by some confined to eating and drinking, while by
others it was extended to mean the moderating every other pleasure, appetite, inclination, or
passion, bodily or mental, even to our avarice and ambition. I proposed to myself, for the sake
of clearness, to use rather more names, with fewer ideas annexed to each, than a few names
with more ideas; and I included under 13 names of virtues all that at that time occurred to me
as necessary or desirable, and annexed to each a short precept, which fully expressed the
extent I gave to its meaning.
These names of virtues, with their precepts, were:
1.
TEMPERANCE.
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
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2.
SILENCE.
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3.
ORDER.
Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4.
RESOLUTION.
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5.
FRUGALITY.
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
6.
INDUSTRY.
Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7.
SINCERITY.
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8.
JUSTICE.
Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9.
MODERATION.
Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS.
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11. TRANQUILITY.
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY.
Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your
own or another’s peace or reputation.
13. HUMILITY.
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to
distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time;
and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till 1 should have
gone thro’ the 13; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of
certain others, I arranged them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it
tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant
vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient
habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquired and established, Silence
would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improved
in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtained rather by the use of the ears than
of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning,
and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second
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place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my
project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, would keep me firm in my
endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues, – Frugality and Industry freeing me from my
remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the
practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc. Conceiving then, that agreeably to the advice of
Pythagoras (1 Greek philosopher, c. 582-c, 507 b.c.) in his Golden Verses, daily examination
would be necessary, I contrived the following method for conducting that examination.
The precept of Order requiring that every part of my business should have its allotted time, one
page in my little book contained the following scheme of employment for the 24 hours of a
natural day.
5
6
7
Rise, wash and address Powerful Goodness(’Franklin s daily prayer).
– Con trivc day’s business, and take the resolution of the day;
prosecute the present study, and breakfast
8
9
10
11
Work
12
1
Read, or overlook my accounts, and dine
2
3
4
5
Work
EVENING. Question. What
good have I done to-day?
6
7
8
9
Put things in their places. Supper. Music or diversion, or conversation.
Examination of the day.
NIGHT
10
11
12
1
2
3
4
Sleep
THE MORNING Question.
What good shall I do this day?
NOON
My list of virtues contained at first but 12; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I
was generally thought proud; that my pride showed itself frequently in conversation; that I was
not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather
insolent, of which he convinced me by mentioning several instances; I determined
endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added
Humility to my list, giving an extensive meaning to the word.
1 cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal
with regard to the appearance of it.
In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our national passions so hard to subdue as Pride.
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Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still
alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in
this history; for, even if I could conceive that 1 had completely overcome it, I should probably
be proud of my humility.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. Find some facts in Benjamin Franklin’s biography that could explain his inclination towards
prudence and pragmatism.
2. What experience does the author describe at the beginning of the text? Does he mean only
to tell about an event from his life or to educate? What is his attitude to the experience? Is he
proud, ashamed, or ironic? Focus on the use of a great deal of detail in Franklin’s writing.
Comment on the choice of words.
3. What event pushed the author to break his “resolution of not eating animal food”? How
does he justify himself? Is his reasoning emotional or rational? Is it good to be “a reasonable
creature”? Analyse the language means that convey the author’s irony.
4. Why does the author call moral perfection a “project”? How do morality and reason
interact in Franklin’s approach? What difficulty did Franklin face trying to “conquer” his bad
habits?
5. How does the author happen to come to number 13 defining the moral virtues? How does
he describe his strategy? What syntactical expressive means contribute to the speaker’s
stepwise logic?
6. What communicative type of sentence does the author use to introduce the virtues? Do
Franklin’s aphoristic maxims sound inspirational? What stylistic devices contribute to the
rhythmical structure of the sentences? What allusions does the author make formulating the last
virtue? Does he do it because this virtue defies a rational explanation?
7. Do we find a lot of imagery in Franklin’s text? What language means help to capture the
reader’s attention and follow the chain of discourse?
8. What is the author’s logic in justifying the priority of some virtues? Analyse the manner in
which his argumentation is given.
9. What expression does the author choose to describe daily routine?
10. What is Daniel Defoe’s novel that presents the similar fixation on detail, order and
scheming? Is the author’s pragmatism encouraging? Do you feel like unhesitantly starting to
develop oneself under Franklin’s guidance?
11. Why does the author call pride a national passion? What virtues, or vices, are among the
Russian national passions? Does the author believe that exercising humility one can overcome
pride?
12. Prepare the final analysis of the text pointing out the main features of Benjamin Franklin’s
style of writing.
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Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (1903–1966)
Born in London, Evelyn Waugh was the second son of
noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh. He was brought
up in upper middle class circumstances, although his
parents’ address in Golders Green embarrassed him. His
only sibling was his older brother Alec, who also became a
writer. Both his father and his brother had been educated
at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been
asked to leave during his final and he had then published
a controversial novel, The Loom of Youth which was
deemed injurious to Sherborne’s reputation. The school
therefore refused to take Evelyn, and his father sent him to
Lancing College, an institution of lesser social prestige
with a strong High Church Anglican character.
After Lancing, he attended Hertford College, Oxford as a
history scholar. There, Waugh neglected academic work
and was known as much for his artwork as for his writing.
His social life at Oxford would provide the background for some of his most characteristic
later writing.
Waugh’s final exam results qualified him only for a third-class degree. He was prevented
from remaining in residence for the extra term that would have been required of him and he
left Oxford in 1924 without taking his degree. In 1925 he taught at a private school in
Wales.
He was briefly apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and afterwards maintained an interest in
marquetry, to which his novels have been compared in their intricate inlaid subplots. Waugh
also provided the artwork for many of his books having been greatly inspired by a chance
meeting with Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí at the Slade School of Fine Art in
Bloomsbury.
Waugh also worked as a journalist before he published his first novel in 1928, Decline and
Fall. The title is from Gibbon, but whereas the Georgian historian charted the bankruptcy
and dissolution of the Roman Empire, Waugh’s was a witty account of quite a different sort
of dissolution, following the career of the harmless Paul Pennyfeather, a student of divinity,
as he is accidentally expelled from Oxford for indecency.
Waugh entered into a brief, unhappy marriage in 1928 to the Hon. Evelyn Florence
Margaret Winifred Gardner, youngest daughter of Lord Burghclere and Lady Winifred
Herbert. Their friends called them “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn”. The marriage ended in
divorce in 1930.
Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage was annulled by the Church, he
married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of Aubrey Herbert, and a cousin of his first
wife. This marriage was successful and lasting the rest of his life, producing seven children,
one of whom, Mary, died in infancy.
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Waugh’s fame continued to grow between the wars, based on his satires of contemporary
upper class English society, written in prose that was seductively simple and elegant. His
style was often inventive. His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930 was a watershed in
his life and his writing. It elevated Catholic themes in his work, and aspects of his deep and
sincere faith, both implicit and explicit, can be found in all of his later work.
Some of Waugh’s best-loved and best-known novels come from this period. Brideshead
Revisited (1945) is an evocation of a vanished pre-war England. It’s an extraordinary work
which in many ways has come to define Waugh and his view of his world. It not only painted
a rich picture of life in England and at Oxford University at a time (before World War II)
which Waugh himself loved and embellished in the novel, but it allowed him to share his
feelings about his Catholic faith, principally through the actions of his characters.
Much of Waugh’s wartime experience is reflected in the Sword of Honour trilogy. It consists
of three novels, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional
Surrender (1961), which loosely parallel his wartime experiences. Critics felt that these were
some of the best books written about the war.
The period after the war saw Waugh living with his family in the West Country, first at Piers
Court, and from 1956 onwards, at Combe Florey, Somerset, where he enjoyed the life of a
country gentleman and continued to write.
Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, on 10 April 1966, after attending a Latin Mass on Easter
Sunday. He suffered a heart attack at his home, Combe Florey. He is buried at Combe
Florey, Somerset.
The American conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. found in Waugh “the
greatest English novelist of the century”, while Buckley’s liberal counterpart Gore Vidal
called him “our time’s first satirist”.
General Conversation: Myself…
A winter evening; a sombre and secluded library; leather bound unread, unreadable books
lining the walls; below the windows, subdued, barely perceptible, like the hum of a mowing
machine in summer on distant lawns’ the sound of London traffic; overhead, in blue and white
plaster, an elegant Adam ceiling; a huge heap of glowing coal in the marble fireplace, a leather
topped, mahogany writing table; the pen poised undecisively above the foolscap – what is
more needed to complete the picture of a leisured litterateur upon his delicate labour?
Alas! Too much. An elderly man has just entered, picked up a French novel and glanced at me
resentfully. This is not my library. Nor, in the words of a French exercise, are these my pens,
ink or paper. I am in my Club, in the room set aside for silence and after-luncheon sleep. It is
three days past the date on which I promised delivery of copy. Leisured literature my foot.
“Eats well, sleeps well, but the moment he sees a job of work he comes over queer.” That is
my trouble, an almost fanatical aversion from pens, ink or paper.
I keep seeing books – though not, I think, as often as I used – about young men who have
literary souls and are thwarted and even made to go into the family business and become mere
money-makers and breeders of children instead of great writers. My plight is the exact
opposite. I was driven into writing because I found it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated
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man could get a decent living. I am not complaining about the wages. They always seem to me
disproportionately high. What I mind so much is the work.
Of course, in my case, writing happens to be the family business; that takes away some of the
glamour. My father is a literary critic and publisher. I think he can claim to have more books
dedicated to him that any living man. They used to stand together on his shelves, among
hundreds of inscribed copies from almost every English writer of eminence, until on one of my
rare, recent visits to my home, I inadvertently set the house on fire, destroying the carefully
garnered fruits of a lifetime of literary friendships.
I remember in childhood the Saturday morning hush over the home, when he was at work on
his weekly article. I remember the numerous, patronising literary elders who frequented our
table.
My brother took to the trade without a moment’s reluctance. He wrote a best seller before he
was eighteen and has been at it uninterruptedly ever since. You can see his fingers twitching for
a pen as he talks to you.
I held out until I was twenty-four, swimming manfully against the tide; then I was sucked under.
I tried everything I could think of first. After an inglorious career at the University I tried to be a
painter, and went daily for some months to an Art School crowded with young women in
pinafores whose highest ambition was to design trademarks for patient medicines. We stood at
easels in a large, hideously overheated studio and drew from the nude from ten until four.
Heavens, how badly I drew! The trouble about my upbringing was that whereas my family
knew very well how badly I wrote, they had rosy illusions about my drawing. They could turn
out a fine graphic picture in paper games, but none of them had drawn from the nude from ten
till four, and they were fatally encouraging about my horrible, charcoal cartoons. It took me
about three months to realise that I should not ever be up to designing a trade-mark. Meanwhile
the annual deficit of expenditure over allowance had reached a formidable total and I looked
for some way of making money – or, at any rate, of avoiding spending it.
There are only two sorts of jobs open under the English social system – domestic service and
education. However abominable one’s record, though one may be fresh from prison or
lunatic asylum, one can always look after the silver or teach the young. I had not the right
presence for a footman, so I chose the latter. For eighteen happy months I taught the young. I
taught them almost everything – classics, history, modern languages, boxing, tennis and Rugby
football – games I had never before played – the elements of religion, shooting and (believe it
or not) drawing. At first the boys despised me, but I bought a motor bicycle and from that
moment was the idol of the school. I bribed them to behave well by letting them take down the
engine. I thought the system was working well, but after the fourth term I got the sack.
My next plan was to be a carpenter, and for a winter I went regularly to classes in a
government polytechnic. Those were delightful days, under the tuition of a brilliant and
completely speechless little cabinet-maker who could explain nothing and demonstrate
everything. To see him cutting concealed dovetails gave me the thrill which, I suppose, others
get from seeing their favourite batsman at the wicket or bullfighter in the ring. It was a charming
class, too. There was one young woman there who, during the whole time I was there, was
engaged in sawing longways an immense log of teak. She worked and worked at it hour by
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hour and had cut about a yard when I left. I often wonder if she is still at it. There were two
Egyptians who did veneering of exquisite skill and the most atrocious designs conceivable. I
never got so far as veneering curved surfaces, but I made an indestructible mahogany bedtable, which I gave to my father, and which survived the fire.
It soon became apparent, however, that it would be many years before I should qualify for a
wage, and then for a few shillings a week. That did not worry me, but I had an inclination to get
married, so I looked for more remunerative work. Some dreary weeks followed during which,
though I cannot claim to have trudged the streets without food, I certainly made a great number
of fruitless and rather humiliating calls upon prospective employers.
Dickens held it against his parents that they tried to force him into a blacking factory instead of
letting him write. The last firm at which I solicited a job was engaged, among other things, in
the manufacture of blacking. If I wasn’t employed there I should be driven to Literature. But
the manager was relentless. It was no use my thinking of blacking. That was not for the likes of
me. I had better make up my mind and settle down to the humble rut which fate had ordained
for me. I must write a book.
The value of writing books is that it gives a market for articles. So here I am, pen poised
undecisively over the foolscap, earning my living.
But I am not utterly enslaved. I still have dreams of shaking off the chains of creative
endeavour. Rimbaud got away from it and became a gunrunner. Vanbrugh gave up writing
plays to build the most lovely houses in England. Disraeli and A.P. Herbert went into politics
and did themselves proud. John Buchan is lording in Quebec. Boulestin took to cooking.
Perhaps there is a chance of freedom.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. Give brief information about the author of the essay. What is the most characteristic feature
of Evelyn Waugh’s manner of writing?
2. What is the subject matter of the essay? Is it reflected in the title? Comment on the
aposiopesis in the title and its effect. What is the central thesis of the essay? How is it
presented?
3. What is the general tone of the essay? How is it sustained throughout the essay? How does
this essay differ from the essay by Virginia Woolf, which is also about books and writers?
What is the effect of the first-person narration?
4. Analyse the first paragraph of the essay. What function does it play in the composition of
the essay? Does it not produce the effect of a piece of classical British painting on you? If your
answer is “yes” how is this effect achieved? How does the author manage to create a
synaesthetic effect? Comment on the syntactic arrangement of the paragraph and the
concluding lines of it.
5. How is the second paragraph connected with the first one? Comment on the word
“litterateur” employed by the writer. What kind of self-portrait does Evelyn Waugh make?
What language means are used to paint this portrait with the help of words?
6. How does the author explain the fact of his becoming a writer? Analyze the paragraphs
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devoted to the description of his family business. What is the writer’s tone in describing it?
How is it created? Does he treat writing as a noble occupation or otherwise? What is the
connotation of the metaphor “garnered fruits of a lifetime of literary friendships”?
7. Analyse the paragraphs devoted to the description of his futile attempts “to swim against
the tide”. What is the point of his satire pointed at? Comment on the means of achieving a
humorous effect in the description of his Odyssey. Pay special attention to the choice of
words and the imagery of the passage. Analyse the metaphors he employs. Are they original
or hackneyed? How can you explain his choice?
8. The last paragraph dealing with the outcome of his futile attempts to avoid the career of a
writer opens with the allusion to Charles Dickens. What is its effect? Is the choice of Dickens
random? Comment on the words: “It was no use my thinking of blacking… I must write a
book”. Whose words are these?
9. Study the closing paragraph of the essay. What is the effect of the numerous allusions in it?
What are the key words of this paragraph and, perhaps, the whole essay? Try and state the
central thesis of the essay.
10. In an introduction to the chapter about biography and autobiography we read: “Since the
author writes about his own life, autobiographies can often be biased. This means that the
author could present the information in order for him to be seen in a certain light. Sometimes
weaknesses and failures can be excused or even skipped over. Not all autobiographers will do
this, but it is in human nature to try to present oneself in the best light possible” Does this
opinion apply to the autobiographic essay we have just read. Does Evelyn Waugh try to
present himself in the best light possible?
11. Sum up your observations of Evelyn Waugh’s manner of writing as it manifests itself in the
essay. In his other essay “Literary style in England and America” Evelyn Waugh wrote:
“Individuality needs little explanation. It is the hand-writing, the tone of voice that makes a
work recognisable as being by a particular artist…” and also: “One thing I hold as certain that a
writer, if he is to develop, must concern himself more and more with Style… He cannot hope
to interest the majority of his readers in his progress. It is his own interest that is at stake. Style
alone can keep him from being bored with his own work. In youth high spirits carry one over
a book or two. The world is full of discoveries that demand expression. Later a writer must
face the choice of becoming an artist or a prophet. He can shut himself up at his desk and
selfishly seek pleasure in the perfection of his own skill or he can pace about, dictating dooms
and exhortations on the topics of the day. The recluse at the desk has a bare chance of giving
abiding pleasure to others; the publicist has none at all.” Judging by this essay, can we say that
Evelyn Waugh acts up to his words? Give facts from the text to support your opinion.
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Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born 1939)
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November
18, 1939) is a Canadian author, poet, critic,
essayist, feminist and social campaigner.
She is among the most-honoured authors of
fiction in recent history; she is a winner of
the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of
Asturias award for Literature, has been
shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times,
winning once, and has been a finalist for
the Governor General’s Award seven times,
winning twice. While she may be best known
for her work as a novelist, she is also an
award winning poet, having published 15
books of poetry to date. Many of her poems
have been inspired by myths, and fairy tales,
which were an interest of hers from an early
age. Atwood has also published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper’s, CBC
Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, Playboy, and many other magazines.
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Atwood is the second of three children of Margaret
Dorothy (née Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an
entomologist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much
of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and back and forth between Ottawa,
Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was 11 years old
in sixth grade. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries,
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She attended Leaside
High School in Leaside, Toronto and graduated in 1957.
Atwood began writing at the age of six and realized she wanted to write professionally when
she was 16. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
In late 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately printed book of poems,
Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard’s Radcliffe College with a
Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master’s degree from Radcliffe in 1962 and
pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University for 2 years, but never finished
because she never completed a dissertation on “The English Metaphysical Romance” in
1967. She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams
University in Montreal (1967–68), the University of Alberta (1969–70), York University in
Toronto (1971–72), and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.
The Handmaid’s Tale received the very first Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science
fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year, in 1987. It was
also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, and the 1987 Prometheus Award, both science
fiction awards.
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Atwood was at one time offended at the suggestion that The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and
Crake were science fiction, insisting to The Guardian that they were speculative fiction
instead: “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really
happen”. She told the Book of the Month Club: “Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction,
not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no
Martians” and on BBC Breakfast explained that science fiction, as opposed to what she
wrote, was “talking squids in outer space”. The latter phrase particularly rankled among
advocates of science fiction, and frequently recurs when her writing is discussed.
Atwood has since said that she does at times write science fiction, and that Handmaid’s Tale
and Oryx and Crake can be designated as such. She clarified her meaning on the difference
between speculative and science fiction, while admitting that others use the terms
interchangeably: “For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them
that we can’t yet do... speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to
hand and that takes place on Planet Earth”, and said that science fictional narratives give
a writer the ability to explore themes in ways that realistic fiction cannot.
Ultimately, according to her theories in works such as Survival and her exploration of
similar themes in her fiction, Atwood considers Canadian literature as the expression of
Canadian identity. According to this literature, Canadian identity has been defined by a fear
of nature, by settler history and by unquestioned adherence to the community.
In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, whom she divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship
with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to Alliston, Ontario, north of
Toronto. In 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. Atwood returned to
Toronto in 1980. She divides her time between Toronto and Pelee Island, Ontario.
Atwood has strong views on environmental issues, such as suggesting that gas-powered leaf
blowers and lawn mowers be banned, and has made her own home more energy efficient by
installing awnings and skylights that open, and by not having air-conditioning
Great Unexpectations
In 1960 I was nineteen years old. I was in third-year college in Toronto, Ontario, which was not
then known as People City or The Paris of the Northeast; but as Hogtown, which was not an
inaccurate description. I had never eaten an avocado or been on an airplane or encountered a
croissant or been south of Vermont. Panty hose had not yet hit the market; neither had the Pill.
We were still doing garter belts and repression. Abortion was not a word you said out loud,
and lesbians might as well have been mythological hybrids, like Sphinxes; in any case I was
quite certain I had never met one. I wanted to be – no, worse–was determined to be, was
convinced I was – a writer. I was scared to death.
I was scared to death for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I was Canadian, and the
prospects for being a Canadian and a writer, both at the same time, in 1960, were dim. The
only writers I had encountered in high school had been dead and English, and in university we
barely studied American writers, much less Canadian ones. Canadian writers, it was assumed –
by my professors, my contemporaries, and myself – were a freak of nature, like duck-billed
platypuses. Logically they ought not to exist, and when they did so anyway, they were just
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pathetic imitations of the real thing. This estimate was borne out by statistics: for those few
who managed, despite the reluctance of publishers, to struggle into print (five novels in English
in 1960), two hundred copies of a book of poetry was considered average to good, and a
thousand made a novel a Canadian best seller. I would have to emigrate, I concluded gloomily.
I faced a future of scrubbing restaurant floors in England – where we colonials could go, then,
much more easily than we could to the United States – writing masterpieces in a freezing cold
garret at night, and getting T.B., like Keats. Such was my operatic view of my own future.
But it was more complicated than that, because, in addition to being a Canadian, I was also a
woman. In some ways this was an advantage. Being a male writer in Canada branded you a
sissy, but writing was not quite so unthinkable for a woman, ranking as it did with flower
painting and making roses out of wool. As one friend of my mother’s put it, trying to take a
cheerful view of my eccentricity, “Well, that’s nice dear, because you can do it at home, can’t
you?” She was right, as it turned out, but at that moment she aroused nothing but loathing in
my adolescent soul. Home, hell. It was garret or nothing. What did she think I was,
inauthentic? However, most people were so appalled by my determination to be a writer that no
one even thought of saying I couldn’t because I was a girl. That sort of thing was not said to
me until later, by male writers, by which time it was too late.
Strangely, no one was pushing early marriage, not in my case. Canada, being a cultural
backwater, had not been swept by the wave of Freudianism that had washed over the United
States in the fifties – Canadian women were not yet expected to be fecund and passive in order
to fulfill themselves – and there were still some bluestockings around in the educational system,
women who warned us not to get silly about boys too soon and throw away our chances.
What my elders had in mind for me was more along academic lines. Something, that is to say,
with a salary.
But, since gender is prior to nationality, the advantages of being a Canadian woman writer were
canceled out by the disadvantages of being a woman writer. I’d read the biographies, which
were not encouraging. Jane Austen never married Mr. Darcy. Emily Bronte died young,
Charlotte in childbirth. George Eliot never had children and was ostracized for living with a
married man. Emily Dickinson flitted; Christina Rossetti looked at life through the wormholes
in a shroud. Some had managed to combine writing with what I considered to be a normal life
– Mrs. Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe – but everyone knew they were second rate. My
choices were between excellence and doom on the one hand, and mediocrity and cosiness on
the other. I gritted my teeth, set my face to the wind, gave up double dating, and wore hornrims and a scowl so I would not be mistaken for a puffball.
It was in this frame of mind that I read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which further
terrified me. Graves did not dismiss women. In fact he placed them right at the center of his
poetic theory; but they were to be inspirations rather than creators, and a funny sort of
inspiration at that. They were to be incarnations of the White Goddess herself, alternately
loving and destructive, and men who got involved with them ran the risk of disembowelment or
worse. A woman just might – might, mind you – have a chance of becoming a decent poet,
but only if she too took on the attributes of the White Goddess and spent her time seducing
men and then doing them in. All this sounded a little strenuous, and appeared to rule out
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domestic bliss. It wasn’t my idea of how men and women should get on together – raking up
leaves in the backyard, like my mom and dad – but who was I to contradict the experts? There
was no one else in view giving me any advice on how to be a writer, though female. Graves
was it.
That would be my life, then. To the garret and the T.B. I added the elements of enigma and
solitude. I would dress in black. I would learn to smoke cigarettes, although they gave me
headaches and made me cough, and drink something romantic and unusually bad for you, such
as absinthe. I would live by myself, in a suitably painted attic (black) and have lovers whom I
would discard in appropriate ways, though I drew the line at bloodshed. (I was, after all, a nice
Canadian girl.) I would never have children. This last bothered me a lot, as before this I had
always intended to have some, and it seemed unfair, but White Goddesses did not have time
for children, being too taken up with cannibalistic sex, and Art came first. I would never, never
own an automatic washer-dryer. Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, and Ionesco, I was sure, did
not have major appliances, and these were the writers I most admired. I had no concrete ideas
about how the laundry would get done, but it would only be my own laundry, I thought
mournfully – no fuzzy sleepers, no tiny T-shirts – and such details could be worked out later.
I tried out the garrets, which were less glamorous than expected; so was England, and so were
the cigarettes, which lasted a mere six months. There wasn’t any absinthe to be had, so I tried
bad wine, which made me sick. It began to occur to me that maybe Robert Graves didn’t have
the last word on women writers, and anyway I wanted to be a novelist as well as a poet, so
perhaps that would let me off the homicide. Even though Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton had
been setting new, high standards in self-destructiveness for female poets, and people had
begun asking me not whether but when I was going to commit suicide (the only authentic
woman poet is a dead woman poet?), I was wondering whether it was really all that necessary
for a woman writer to be doomed, any more than it was necessary for a male writer to be a
drunk. Wasn’t this just some entire sort of postromantic collective delusion? If Shakespeare
could have kids and avoid suicide, then so could I, dammit. When Betty Friedan and Simone
de Beauvoir came my way, like shorebirds heralding land, I read them with much interest. They
got a lot right, for me, but there was one thing they got wrong. They were assuring me that I
didn’t have to get married and have children. But what I wanted was someone to tell me I
could.
And so I did. The marriage and the children came in two lots – marriage with one, child with
another – but they did come. This is the part that will sound smug, I suppose, but I also
suppose it’s not that much smugger than my black-sweatered, garter-belted, black-stockinged,
existential pronouncements at the age of nineteen. I now live a life that is pretty close to the
leaves-in-the-backyard model I thought would have been out of bounds forever. Instead of
rotting my brains with absinthe, I bake (dare I admit it?) chocolate chip cookies, and I find that
doing the laundry with the aid of my washer-dryer is one of the more relaxing parts of my
week. I worry about things like remembering Parents’ Day at my daughter’s school and
running out of cat food, though I can only afford these emotional luxuries with the aid of some
business assistants and a large man who likes kids and cats and food, and has an ego so solid
it isn’t threatened by mine. This state of affairs was not achieved without struggle, some of it
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internal – did an addiction to knitting brand me as an inauthentic writer? – but it was reached.
The White Goddess still turns up in my life, but mainly as a fantasy projection on the part of
certain male book reviewers, who seem to like the idea of my teeth sinking into some cringing
male neck. I think of this as fifties nostalgia.
As for writing, yes. You can do it at home.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. Give the most important facts of Margaret Atwood’s biography which are important for the
interpretation of the essay.
2. Comment on the title of the essay. Is the title suggestive of the central thesis of the essay or
is it rather vague? What is the central thesis of the essay? Does the writer state it directly or do
we have to infer it? How does she support her thesis?
3. In what manner is the essay written? What is the tonality of the essay and how is it created?
4. Comment on the way she presents her self-portarait and the atmosphere in which she lived.
How does she describe the position of Canada in the world? Pay special attention to the role
of various habitual things which serve as the markers of the epoch. How did she estimate her
chances of becoming a writer? What were the two main obstacles on the path to writing? What
is the role of the allusions in the essay?
5. Comment on the issues of gender addressed in the essay and the manner in which Margaret
Atwood discusses the gender issue.
6. What was the effect of Robert Graves’ “White Goddess” on her? Analyze the paragraph in
which she draws her prospect on the way to becoming a writer and the things she would have
to sacrifice. Did these predictions come true?
7. Analyze the final paragraphs of the essay and comment on the message they contain. Is this
message presented directly or indirectly? Comment on the concluding sentence of the essay:
“As for writing, yes. You can do it at home”.
8. Summarize your answers and prepare the final analysis of the essay.
Essays for Self-Guided Analysis
H.G. Wells. Ellis Island
Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface
Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar
Susan Sontag. Beauty
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Essays for Self-Guided Analysis
H.G. Wells. Ellis Island
Carl Sandburg. A Lincoln Preface
Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar
Susan Sontag. Beauty
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H.G. Wells. Ellis Island
Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), the English novelist and journalist, was born in Kent,
the son of a lady’s maid and a small shopkeeper who also played professional cricket. Wells
had a spotty education but was an omnivorous reader and after failing to make a go at
various apprenticeships, won at eighteen a scholarship that enabled him to graduate from
London University in 1888. After teaching science for a few years, Wells turned to
journalism, and in 1895 wrote his first novel, The Time Machine, which was an immediate
success and which was followed by a number of scientific romances, including The Invisible
Man (1897), The War of the World (1898), and Tales of Space and Time (1899).
By 1900 Wells had begun to turn his attention to sociology; he wrote several successful
novels dealing with the aspirations of the lower-middle class: Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay
(1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). He joined the socialist movement in 1903 and
out of that commitment wrote many studies of society from a utopian perspective, a point of
view that was shattered by World War I. After the War, he decided that only popular
education could ensure human progress, so he wrote The Outline of History (1920), The
Science of Life (1931), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932). Wells grew
increasingly pessimistic during World War II and wrote several bleak depictions of mankind’s
prospects. The following selection, however, from The Future in America (1906) shows Wells
writing in his earlier, more optimistic vein.
I visited Ellis Island yesterday. It changed to be a good day for my purpose. For the first time
in its history this filter of immigrant humanity has this week proved inadequate to the demand
upon it. It was choked, and half a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfortably up the
harbor, replete with twenty thousand or so of crude Americans from Ireland and Poland and
Italy and Syria and Finland and Albania; men, women, children, dirt, and bags together.
Of immigration I shall have to write later; what concerns me now is chiefly the wholesale and
multitudinous quality of that place and its work. I made my way with my introduction along
white passages and through traps and a maze of metal lattices that did for a while succeed in
catching and imprisoning me, to Commissioner Wachorn, in his quiet, green-toned office.
There, for a time, I sat judicially and heard him deal methodically, swiftly, sympathetically, with
case after case, a string of appeals against the sentences of deportation pronounced in the busy
little courts below. First would come one dingy and strangely garbed group of wild-eyed
aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies, South Italians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under
the intelligent guidance of a uniformed interpreter, and a case would be started, a report made
to Washington, and they would drop out again, hopeful or sullen or fearful as the evidence
might trend…
Down-stairs we find the courts, and these seen, we traverse long refectories, long aisles of
tables, and close-packed dormitories with banks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and
galleries and passages innumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows systematic with the
Commissioner’s explanations.
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Here is a huge, gray, untidy waiting-room, like a big railway-depot room, full of a sinister
crowd of miserable people, loafing about or sitting dejectedly, whom America refuses, and
here a second and a third such chamber each with its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates
us, and that even ventures to groan and hiss at us a little for our glimpse of its large dirty
spectacle of hopeless failure, and here, squalid enough indeed, but still to some degree
hopeful, are the appeal cases as yet undecided. In one place, at a bank of ranges, works an
army of men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of the Ellis Island laundry, washing
blankets, drying blankets, day in and day out, a big clean steamy space of hurry and rotation.
Then, I recall a neat apartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers, a card-index of the names
and nationalities and significant circumstances of upward of a million and a half of people who
have gone on and who are yet liable to recall.
The central hall is the key of this impression. All day long, through an intricate series of metal
pens, the long procession files, step by step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this
examiner and that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the clerks. At every
point immigrants are being picked out and set aside for further medical examination, for further
questions, for the busy little courts; but the main procession satisfies conditions, passes on. It
is a daily procession that, with a yard of space to each, would stretch over three miles, that any
week in the year would more than equal in numbers that daily procession of the unemployed
that is becoming a regular feature of the London winter, that in a year could put a cordon
round London or New York of close-marching people, could populate a new Boston, that in a
century – What in a century will it all amount to? …
On they go, from this pen to that, pen by pen, toward a desk at a little metal wicket – the gate
of America. Through this metal wicket drips the immigration stream – all day long, every two
or three seconds an immigrant, with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and goes on past
the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully organized separating ways that go
to this railway or that, past the guiding, protecting officials – into a new world. The great
majority are young men and young women, between seventeen and thirty, good, youthful,
hopeful, peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting to go through that wicket, with
bundles, with little tin boxes, with cheap portmanteaus, with odd packages, in pairs, in families,
alone, women with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All day that string
of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; all day and every day, constantly
replenished, constantly dropping the end beads through the wicket, till the units mount to
hundreds and the hundreds to thousands…
Yes, Ellis Island is quietly immense. It gives one a visible image of one aspect at least of this
world-large process of filling and growing and synthesis, which is America.
“Look there!” said the Commissioner, taking me by the arm and pointing, and I saw a monster
steamship far away, and already a big bulk looming up the Narrows. “It’s the Kaiser Wilhelm
der Grosse. She’s got – I forget the exact figures, but let us say – eight hundred and fifty-three
more for us. She’ll have to keep them until Friday at the earliest. And there’s more behind her,
and more strung out all across the Atlantic.”
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In one record day this month 21,000 immigrants came into the port of New York alone; in one
week over 50,000. This year the total will be 1,200,000 souls, pouring in, finding work at once,
producing no fall in wages. They start digging and building and making. Just think of the
dimensions of it!
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Carl Sandburg from A Lincoln Preface
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) gained a knowledge and love of America and its people
through much travel, as well as through a variety of odd jobs such as milk deliverer,
firefighter, truck driver, house painter, and reporter. Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes, one
for Collected Poems and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Sandburg added new dimensions to the world’s understanding of Lincoln, showing him to
be a man of strength as well as compassion, of tears as well as laughter. The following is an
excerpt from the preface to Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, the beginning of a sixvolume work about Lincoln.
In the time of the April lilacs in the year 1865, a man in the city of Washington, D.C., trusted a
guard to watch at a door, and the guard was careless, left the door, and the man was shot,
lingered a night, passed away, was laid in a box, and carried north and west a thousand miles;
bells sobbed; cities wore crepe; people stood with hats off as the railroad burial car came past
at midnight, dawn, or noon.
During the four years of time before he gave up the ghost, this man was clothed with despotic
power, commanding the most powerful armies till then assembled in modern warfare, enforcing
draft of soldiers, abolishing the right of habeas corpus, directing politically and spiritually the
wild, massive forces loosed in civil war.
Four billion dollars’ worth of property was taken from those who had been legal owners of it,
confiscated, wiped out as by fire, at his instigation and executive direction; a class of chattel
property recognized as lawful for two hundred years went to the scrap pile.
When the woman who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to see him in the White House, he
greeted her, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,” and as
they seated themselves at a fireplace, “I do love an open fire; I always had one to home”. As
they were finishing their talk of the days of blood, he said, “I shan’t last long after it’s over”.
An Illinois Congressman looked in on him as he had his face lathered for a shave in the White
House, and remarked, “If anybody had told me that in a great crisis like this the people were
going out to a little one-horse town and pick out a one-horse lawyer for President, I wouldn’t
have believed it”. The answer was, “Neither would I. But it was a time when a man with a
policy would have been fatal to the country. I never had a policy. I have simply tried to do
what seemed best each day, as each day came”.
“I don’t intend precisely to throw the Constitution overboard, but I will stick it in a hole if I
can,” he told a Cabinet officer. The enemy was violating the Constitution to destroy the Union,
he argued, and therefore, “I will violate the Constitution, if necessary, to save the Union”. He
instructed a messenger to the Secretary of the Treasury, “Tell him not to bother himself about
the Constitution, say that I have that sacred instrument here at the White House, and I am
guarding it with great care”.
His life, mind, and heart ran in contrasts. When his white kid gloves broke into tatters while
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shaking hands at a White House reception, he remarked, “This looks like a general
bustification”1. When he talked with an Ohio friend one day during the 1864 campaign, he
mentioned one public man, and murmured, “He’s a thistle! I don’t see why God lets him live.”
Of a devious Senator, he said, “He’s too crooked to lie still!” And of a New York editor, “In
early life in the West, we used to make our shoes last a great while with much mending, and
sometimes, when far gone, we found the leather so rotten the stitches would not hold. Greeley
is so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful; the stitches all tear out”.
While the luck of war wavered and broke and came again, as generals failed and campaigns
were lost, he held enough forces of the Union together to raise new armies and supply them,
until generals were found who made war as victorious war has always been made, with terror,
frightfulness, destruction, and valor and sacrifice past words of man to tell.
His own speeches, letters, telegrams, and official messages during that war form the most
significant and enduring document from any one man on why the war began, why it went on,
and the dangers beyond its end. As the platoons filed before him at a review of an army corps,
he asked, “What is to become of these boys when the war is over?”
He was a chosen spokesman; yet there were times he was silent; nothing but silence could at
those times have fitted a chosen spokesman; in the mixed shame and blame of the immense
wrongs of two crashing civilizations, with nothing to say, he said nothing, slept not at all, and
wept at those times in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic.
His hat was shot off as he rode alone one night in Washington; a son he loved died as he
watched at the bed; his wife was accused of betraying information to the enemy, until denials
from him were necessary; his best companion was a fine-haired and brilliant son with a
deformed palate and an impediment of speech; when a Pennsylvania Congressman told him the
enemy had declared they would break into the city and hang him to a lamppost, he said he had
considered “the violent preliminaries” to such a scene; on his left thumb was a scar where an
ax had nearly chopped the thumb off when he was a boy; over one eye was a scar where he
had been hit with a club in the hands of a man trying to steal the cargo off a Mississippi River
flatboat; he threw a cashiered officer out of his room in the White House , crying, “I can bear
censure, but not insult, I never wish to see your face again”.
He rebuked with anger a woman who got to her knees to thank him for a pardon that saved her
son from being shot at sunrise; and when an Iowa woman said she had journeyed out of her
way to Washington just for a look at him, he grinned, “Well, in the matter of looking at one
another, I have altogether the advantage”.
He sent hundreds of telegrams, “Suspend death sentence” or “Suspend execution” of so-andso, who was to be shot at sunrise. The telegrams varied oddly at times, as in one, “If Thomas
Samplogh, of the first Delaware Regiment, has been sentenced to death, and is not yet
executed, suspend and report the case to me”. And another, “Is it Lieutenant Samuel B. Davis
whose death sentence is commuted? If not done, let it be done”.
1
A. Lincoln coins this word from the verb “ to bust” by analogy with “ justification”.
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While the war drums beat, he liked best, of all the stories told of him, one about two
Quakeresses heard talking in a railway car. “I think that Jefferson will succeed.” “Why does
thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.”
“Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.”
An Indiana man at the White House heard him say, “Voorhees, don’t it seem strange to you
that I, who could never so much as cut off the head of a chicken, should be elected, or
selected, into the midst of all this blood?”
Of men taking too fat profits out of the war, he said, “Where the carcass is there will the eagles
be gathered together”.
An enemy general, Longstreet, after the war, declared him to have been “the one matchless
man in forty millions of people,” while one of his private secretaries, Hay, declared his life to
have been the most perfect in its relationships and adjustments since that of Christ.
Between the days in which he crawled as a baby on the dirt floor of a Kentucky cabin, and the
time when he gave his final breath in Washington, he packed a rich life with work, thought,
laughter, tears, hate, love.
With vast reservoirs of the comic and the droll, and notwithstanding a mastery of mirth and
nonsense, he delivered a volume of addresses and letters of terrible and serious appeal, with
import beyond his own day, shot through here and there with far, thin ironies, with paragraphs
having raillery of the quality of the Book of Job, and echoes as subtle as the whispers of wind
in prairie grass.
Perhaps no human clay pot has held more laughter and tears.
The facts and myths of his life are to be an American possession, shared widely over the
world, for thousands of years, as the traditions of Knute or Alfred, Lao-tse or Diogenes,
Pericles or Caesar, are kept. This because he was not only a genius in this science of
neighborly human relationships and an artist in the personal handling of life from day, but a
Strange Friend and a Friendly Stranger to all forms of life that he met.
He lived fifty-six years, of which fifty-two were lived in the West – the prairie years.
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Wystan Hugh Auden. Postscript: The Almighty Dollar
Political and technological developments are rapidly obliterating all cultural differences and it is
possible that, in a not remote future, it will be impossible to distinguish human beings living on
one area of the earth’s surface from those living on any other, but our different pasts have not
yet been completely erased and cultural differences are still perceptible. The most striking
difference between an American and a European is the difference in their attitudes towards
money. Every European knows, as a matter of historical fact, that, in Europe, wealth could
only be acquired at the expense of other human beings, either by conquering them or by
exploiting their labor in factories. Further, even after the Industrial Revolution began, the
number of persons who could rise from poverty to wealth was small: the vast majority took it
for granted that they should not be much richer nor poorer than their fathers. In consequence,
no European associates wealth with personal merit or poverty with personal failure.
To a European, money means power, the freedom to do as he likes, which also means that,
consciously or unconsciously, he says: “I want to have as much money as possible myself and
others to have as little money as possible.”
In the United States, wealth was also acquired by stealing, but the real exploited victim was not
a human being but poor Mother Earth and her creatures who were ruthlessly plundered. It is
true that the Indians were expropriated, but this was not, as it had always been in Europe, a
matter of the conqueror seizing the wealth of the conquered, for the Indian had never realized
the potential riches of his country. It is also true that, in the Southern states, men lived on the
labor of slaves, but slave labor did not make them fortunes; what made slavery in the South all
the more inexcusable was that, in addition to being morally wicked, it didn’t even pay off
handsomely.
Thanks to the natural resources of the country, every American, until quite recently, could
reasonably look forward to making more money than his father, so that, if he made less, the
fault must be his; he was either lazy or inefficient. What an American values, therefore, is not
the possession of money as such, but his power to make it as a proof of his manhood; once
he has proved himself by making it, it has served its function and can be lost or given away. In
no society in history have rich men given away so large a part of their fortunes. A poor
American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited
wealth but is doing nothing to increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and
psychoanalysis?
In the Fifth Circle on the Mount of Purgatory, I do not think that many Americans will be
found among the Avaricious; but I suspect that the Prodigals may be almost an American
colony. The great vice of Americans is not materialism but a lack of respect for matter.
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Susan Sontag. Beauty
For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: a kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be
what we now have to call – lamely, enviously, – WHOLE persons. If it did occur to the
Greeks to distinguish between a person’s “inside” and “outside”, they still expected that inner
beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Americans who
gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave,
so honourable, so seductive – and so ugly. One of Socrates’ main pedagogical acts was to be
ugly – and teach those innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples of his how full of
paradoxes life really was.
They may have resisted Socrates’ lessons. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are
more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off with the greatest facility – the
“inside” (character, intellect) from the “outside” (looks); but we are actually surprised when
someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.
It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in
classical ideas of human excellence. By limiting excellence (“virtus” in Latin) to moral virtues
only, Christianity set beauty adrift – as an alienated, arbitrary, superficial enchantment. And
beauty has continued to lose prestige. For close to two centuries it has become a convention
to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes: the sex, which, however Fair, is always
Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally.
A beautiful woman, we say in English. But a handsome man. “Handsome” is the masculine
equivalent of – and refusal of – a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning
overtone, by being reserved for women only. That one can call a man “beautiful” in French
and in Italian suggests that Catholic countries – unlike those countries shaped by the Protestant
version of
Christianity – still retain some vestiges of the pagan admiration for beauty. But the difference, if
one exists, is of degree only. In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian,
women ARE the beautiful sex – to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.
To be called beautiful is thought to name something essential to women’s character and
concerns. (In contrast to men whose essence is to be strong, or effective, or competent.) It
does not take someone in the throes of advanced feminist awareness to perceive that the way
women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence
and immaturity. Everybody (women and men) knows that. For it is “everybody”, a whole
society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how one LOOKS. (In contrast to
being masculine-which is identified with caring about what one IS and DOES and only
secondarily, if at all, about how one looks). Given these stereotypes, it is no wonder that
beauty enjoys, at best, a rather mixed reputation.
It is not, of course, the desire to be beautiful that is wrong but the obligation to be – or to try.
What is accepted by most women as a flattering idealisation of their sex is a way of making
women feel inferior to what they actually are- or normally grow to be. For the ideal of beauty is
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administered as a form of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and
to evaluate each part separately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion,
hair, and so on-each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, often despairing scrutiny. Even
if some pass muster, some will always be found wanting. Nothing less than perfection will do.
In men, good looks is a whole, something taken in at a glance. It does not need to be
confirmed by giving measurements of different regions of the body, nobody encourages a man
to dissect his appearance, feature by feature. As for perfection, that is considered trivial –
almost unmanly. Indeed, in the ideally good-looking man a small imperfection or blemish is
considered positively desirable. According to one movie critic (a woman) who is a declared
Robert Redford fan, it is having that cluster of skin-coloured moles on the cheek that saves
Redford from being merely a “pretty face”. Think of the depreciation of women – as well as of
beauty – that is implied in that judgement.
“The privileges of beauty are immense,” said Cocteau. To be sure, beauty is a form of power.
And deservedly so. What is lamentable is that it is the only form of power that most women
are encouraged to seek. This power is always conceived in relation to men; it is not the power
to do but the power to attract. It is a power that negates itself. For this power is not one that
can be chosen freely – at least, not by moment – or renounced without social censure.
To preen, for a woman, can never be just a pleasure. It is also a duty. It is her work. If a
woman does real work – and even if she has clambered up to a leading position in politics,
law, medicine, business, or whatever-she is always under pressure to confess that she still
works as being attractive. But in so far as she is keeping up as one of the Fair Sex, she brings
under suspicion her very capacity to be objective, professional, authoritative, thoughtful.
Damned if they do-women are. And damned if they don’t.
One could hardly ask for more important evidence of the dangers of considering persons as
split between what is “inside” and what is “outside” than that interminable half-comic halftragic tale, the oppression of women. How easy it is to start off by defining women as
caretakers of their surfaces, and then to disparage them (or find them adorable) for being
“superficial”. It is a crude trap, and it has worked for too long. But to get out of the trap
requires that women get some critical distance from that excellence and privilege which is
beauty, enough distance to see how much beauty itself has been abridged in order to prop up
the mythology of the “feminine”. There should be a way of saving beauty FROM women –
and FOR men.
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PART II. THE LANGUAGE OF PUBLIC SPEAKING
The Main Features of Publicistic Style
Analysing Speeches
Analysing Political Speeches
Donald Trump. The Crossroads In Our History
Theodore Roosevelt. The Man with the Muck-rake
Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis
Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech
Donald Trump. Inaugural Address
Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS
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The Main Features of Publicistic Style
Publicistic style is used in public speeches and printed public works which discuss important
social or political events and problems of cultural or moral character. It falls into three varieties.
Unlike other literary styles, the publicistic style has a spoken variety – the oratorical sub-style.
The development of radio and television has brought into being a new spoken variety of the
radio and television commentary. The other two sub-styles are essay (moral, philosophical,
literary) and journalistic articles (political, social, economic) in newspapers, journals and
magazines.
Publicistic style is characterized by brevity of expression. In some varieties of this style it
becomes a leading feature. In essays brevity sometimes becomes epigrammatic.
Syntactical features of the publicistic style include:
• coherent and logical syntactical structure;
• careful paragraphing;
• simple rather than complex sentences;
• expanded system of connectives;
• brevity of expression;
• abundant use of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs).
Lexical features:
• emphasis on accessibility and easy understanding;
• paraphrases rather than special terms, established and generally understood terms;
• words with emotive and evaluative connotations;
• euphemisms;
• traditional metaphors and similes;
• allusions and quotations;
• newspaper clichés;
• numerals, abbreviations, symbols.
The main aim of the publicist style is to influence public opinion. The writer or speaker tries to
convince the reader or the listener that their point of view is the right one. They make the
reader accept the point of view expressed in the speech, or article not merely by logical
argumentation, but by emotional appeal as well.
The combination of logical argumentation and emotional appeal makes the publicistic style
similar to the style of scientific prose or official documents, on the one hand, and that of
emotive prose, on the other. The features which the publicistic style shares with scientific
prose are coherent and logical syntactic structures, an expanded system of connectives and
careful paragraphing. Its emotional appeal is generally achieved by the use of connotative
vocabulary, imagery and stylistic devices as in emotive prose.
Sometimes the publicistic style has elements of colloquial style because the authors do not
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intend to make their speech impersonal (as in scientific or official style), but, on the contrary,
try to approximate the text to lively communication.
The way the speakers attempt to share a sense of themselves with their audience reveals how
they want to be viewed. Humorous anecdotes, for instance, are often used by politicians to
alter the public perception of them. They can reduce the distance between the speaker and their
audience, in order to make them appear less stiff and more human.
Essays and speeches have greater individuality than newspaper and magazine articles where it
is usually limited by the requirements of the style.
Analysing Speeches
Analysing Political Speeches
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Analysing Speeches
The oratorical style is a subdivision of the publicistic style. This style is evident in addresses
on various occasions from public speeches on political and social problems of the day, to
speeches at weddings and jubilees.
Political speeches aim at convincing the listener by arguments, to persuade them on an
emotional level or even manipulate them. Often there is a mixture if these.
Direct contact with the listeners permits the combination of the syntactical, lexical and phonetic
peculiarities of both the written and spoken varieties of language.
Analysing speeches the reader, unlike the listener, has all the benefit of the text and a more
comprehensive impression of the strategies and techniques employed in the speech. To arrange
them into a well–structured presentation one can make use of a few suggestions offered here.
Introduction
Approaching a speech the reader should pay attention to the elements of the rhetorical
pentangle.
Answering the following questions the reader will introduce the context of the speech and
outline the main directions of its analysis.
• What do you know/what can you find out about the writer/speaker as a person?
• What sort of people constitutes the audience?
• On what occasion is the speech made? Under what circumstances?
• What is the speech about? What is the topic?
• What seems to be the speaker’s purpose?
• What language means does the speaker use?
• The study of the form of a text will make up the biggest part of any stylistic analysis. That
is why analyzing the speech one should focus on the linguistic elements that foreground the
meaning contained in it.
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Here are some areas to look at.
Structure
How is the speech structured? This question points toward the strategies used in the main parts
of a speech: introduction – body – conclusion.
A political speech, for example, generally starts with an introduction by which the speaker
intends to attract the audience’s attention making clear the purpose of the speech, mentioning
the topic and emphasizing its importance. The speaker may begin with question or a little story.
In the body of the speech the speaker tries to maintain the audience’s attention developing main
points step by step, backing up main ideas with facts and background information, suggesting
what should be done to improve the situation or presenting solutions to the problem.
At the end the speaker makes a conclusion by appealing again to the audience’s intellect and/or
emotions, for example, summing up the main arguments in one or two sentences, or asking the
audience to support his point of view.
Analysing the structure of a speech the reader can comment on the effectiveness of the
speaker’s argumentation. Consider the following questions:
• Is there a governing idea running through the speech?
• How does the speaker build his argumentation?
• What grounds are given?
• Is the argumentation solid?
The speaker’s strategies in making their arguments more persuasive can include some of these:
• the use of key symbols, slogans, stereotypes;
• the use of opposition;
• abstractions and generalizations vs. the presentation of specific issues or events;
• references and illustrations, etc.
Another element relating to the structure is coherence.
• Do the various parts of the speech relate logically?
• How are the individual parts tied together?
• What connecting words are used?
Language Means
No matter how logically some orators may reason and may order the ideas, without a clever
handling of the language in which they communicate they cannot exert the intended influence
on their listeners. In the speeches intended to instill in the listener conformity to the ideas
proposed by the speaker all rhetorical techniques go hand in hand with stylistic devices.
Further analysis of the persuasive strategies and techniques employed in the speech will require
a closer look at the text, with special attention to the language means. Some of them are:
• key words and phrases;
• stylistically coloured words;
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• the use of the superlative degree of adjectives;
• clusters of words (words related to each other in meaning): synonyms, thematic groups of
words, words with common semantic component;
• antonyms;
• lexical expressive means (metaphors, similes, epithets, allusions, periphrases, irony, etc.);
• syntactical expressive means (repetition, parallel constructions, antithesis, etc.);
• phonetic expressive means (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhyme, rhythm);
• the use of personal pronouns (e.g. “I”, “us”, “we”, “you”, “they” etc.).
Evaluation
At the end the reader is asked to give their commentary on a personal level. Thus, the reader
needs to have some social, cultural and political background knowledge in order to be able to
evaluate the speech properly.
• Is the speech successful?
• Is it a good speech?
• Does it communicate its intended message?
• Does it hit its target audience?
• Does it fit the occasion?
• Is it convincing?
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Analysing Political Speeches
The language of politics is very persuasive and powerful. It aims to inspire and challenge
people to create a better world. Such outstanding politicians as Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill raised their people to defeat Fascism during the 2-nd World War. In his
inaugural address John F. Kennedy energised the nation with his famous words “ask not what
your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. Nelson Mandela
became a symbol of global peace-making inspiring the civil rights activists worldwide.
However, language can be deliberately used by politicians and their speechwriters for many
different purposes. Political rhetoric can mislead, deceive and manipulate. We are fed a daily
diet of political language as presidential campaigns seem to get started earlier each term.
Speeches of national leaders saturate the media becoming more and more elaborate in the
techniques used to influence public opinion.
Classifying the means, or tricks, used in propaganda Donna Woolfolk Cross enumerates the
following devices.
• Name-calling, or labeling people or ideas with words of bad connotation, can be used
against policies, practices, beliefs and ideals, as well as against individuals, groups, races,
nations. Name-calling is at work when we hear a candidate for office described as a “foolish
idealist” or a “two-faced liar” or when an incumbent’s policies are denounced as “reckless”,
“reactionary”, or just plain “stupid.”
• Glittering generalities are really name-calling in reverse. Name-calling uses words with
bad connotations; glittering generalities are “virtue words”. While name-calling tries to get us to
reject and condemn someone or something without examining the evidence, glittering
generalities try to get us to accept and agree without examining the evidence. People believe in
“virtue words” which they feel deeply about: “justice”, “motherhood”, “our Constitutional
rights”.
• “Plain folks” is the device by which a speaker tries to win our confidence and support by
appearing to be a person like everyone else – “just one of the plain folks”.
• Argumentum ad populum means “argument to the people” or “telling the people what
they want to hear”. People like to hear nice things about themselves. So it stands to reason that
the public will respond warmly to a person who tells they are “hard-working taxpayers” or “the
most generous, free-spirited nation in the world”.
• Argumentum ad hominem means “argument to the man” and that’s exactly what it is.
When a propagandist uses argumentum ad hominem, he wants to distract people’s attention
from the issue under consideration with personal attacks on the involved.
• Guilt (or glory) by association. In glory by association, the propagandist tries to transfer
the positive feelings of something we love and respect to the group or idea he wants us to
accept. “This bill for a new dam is in the best tradition of this country, the land of Lincoln,
Jefferson, and Washington,” is glory by association at work. Lincoln, Jefferson, and
Washington were great leaders that most of us revere and respect, but they have no logical
connection to the proposal under consideration – the bill to build a new dam.
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• Bandwagon urges people to support an action or an opinion because it is popular –
because “everyone else is doing it”.
• Faulty cause and effect is the device that sets up a cause-and-effect relationship that may
not be true. People are promised that if they swallow X product the headache will go away, if
they elect Y official unemployment will go down.
• False Analogy. An analogy is a comparison between two ideas, events or things. But
comparisons can be fairly made only when the things being compared are alike in significant
ways. When they are not, false analogy is the result.
• Begging the question occurs when, in discussing a questionable or debatable point, a
person assumes as already established the very point that he is trying to prove. For example,
“No thinking citizen could approve such a completely unacceptable policy as this one”.
• The two-extremes fallacy (false dilemma) is at work, for example, in the slogan,
“America: Love it or leave it”. One should always ask, “Are those really the only two options I
can choose from? Are there other alternatives not mentioned that deserve consideration?”
• Card stacking is a device of propaganda which selects only the facts that support the
propagandist’s point of view, and ignores all the others.
• Testimonial device consists in having some loved or respected person give a statement of
support for a given idea.
When confronting rhetoric, it is important to be able to listen to the nuances, to see what is
being spoken, and what is being unspoken. The name for the language that conceals ideas or
prevents thinking was invented by George Orwell. In his novel 1984 he introduced the notion
of doublespeak. William Lutz, an American linguist, in his famous essay The World of
Doublespeak defines it as “language that pretends to communicate but really doesn’t”, and
“language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear
attractive or at least tolerable”.
Among other devices doublespeak is most evident in euphemism. An inoffensive or positive
word or phrase is often designed to avoid a harsh, unpleasant, or distasteful reality. Thus a tax
increase turns into “revenue enhancement”. Airplanes don’t crash, they just have “uncontrolled
contact with the ground”.
Specific sphere of implementing euphemism is political correctness. This term is used to
describe language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to avoid offence or
disadvantage towards racial, cultural, or other identity groups. Some people believe that
political correctness is a serious movement aiming to change the nature of Western society.
Others think that it is subjective, and corresponds to the sponsored view of the government,
minority, or a special interest group.
The impact of the feminist movement spread into the sphere of language starting with the bias
against English vocabulary and grammar that reflect a male-oriented perspective. In vocabulary,
for example, we observe the replacement of “male” words with a generic meaning by neutral
words (chairman – chairperson, stewardess– flight attendant). In grammar the lack of a
sex-neutral third-person singular pronoun required by sex-neutral nouns (speaker, student,
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teacher) and indefinite pronouns (somebody, anybody) resulted in the use of the third-person
plural pronouns (they, their, them) or the use of the third-person singular pronouns of both
genders (he or she, his or her, him or her). To refer to a singular person with a plural pronoun
is now quite widely accepted.
Which pronoun to choose is up to the speaker; they are all grammatically correct, but they are
not all equally politically correct.
Politicians are known to have been the best manipulators of masses of people. In order to
persuade their audience the speakers have to seduce their audiences with their words. Many
persuasive and manipulative strategies are linguistically realised in political discourse. However,
whether a given instance of the use of language is justifiably treated as strategic is a matter of
social and political judgment. To be able to interpret the speaker’s intention one should not
only master the language but be aware of current affairs. Everything from becoming an
informed voter to donating to a cause is influenced by one’s consciousness of the world
issues.
TASK. On October 13th 2016, Presidential Candidate Donald Trump delivered a stunning
speech The Crossroads In Our History. Part of this speech is given below. Focus on the
rhetorical techniques and stylistic devices visible in Donald Trump’s speech to point out their
manipulative undertones.
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Donald Trump from The Crossroads In Our History
…Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new
government controlled by you, the American People. There is nothing the political
establishment will not do, and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at
your expense.
The Washington establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it, exists for
only one reason: to protect and enrich itself.
The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. As an example, just one single
trade deal they’d like to pass, involves trillions of dollars controlled by many countries,
corporations and lobbyists.
For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests
they partner with, our campaign represents an existential threat.
This is not simply another 4-year election. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization
that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government.
The political establishment that is trying everything to stop us, is the same group responsible
for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies
that have bled this country dry. The political establishment has brought about the destruction
of our factories and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China and other countries throughout the
world. Our just-announced jobs numbers are anemic, and our gross domestic product, or
GDP, is barely above one percent. Workers in the United States, were making less than they
were almost 20 years ago – and yet they are working harder.
It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed
our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a
handful of large corporations and political entities.
Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint,
Michigan – and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and across our country.
They have stripped these towns bare, and raided the wealth for themselves and taken away
their jobs.
The Clinton Machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this firsthand in the
WikiLeaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot
the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.
And, likewise, the emails show that the Clinton Machine is so closely and irrevocably tied to
media organizations that she is given the questions and answers in advance of her debates.
Clinton is also given approval and veto power over quotes written about her in the New York
Times. And the emails show the reporters collaborate and conspire directly with the Clinton
Campaign on helping her win the election.
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With their control over our government at stake, with trillions of dollars on the line, the Clinton
Machine is determined to achieve the destruction of our campaign, which has now become a
movement the likes of which our country has never seen before – and we won’t let them do
that.
The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media. Let’s be clear on
one thing: the corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They are a
political special interest, no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with an agenda.
And their agenda is to elect the Clintons at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives
they destroy.
For them, it is a war – and for them, nothing is out of bounds.
This is a struggle for the survival of our nation. This election will determine whether we are a
free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of Democracy but are in fact controlled by a
small handful of global special interests rigging the system.
This is not just conspiracy but reality, and you and I know it.
The establishment and their media enablers wield control over this nation through means that
are well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe
and morally deformed. They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy
your career and reputation. And they will lie, lie and lie even more.
The Clintons are criminals. This is well-documented, and the establishment that protects them
has engaged in a massive cover-up of widespread criminal activity at the State Department and
Clinton Foundation in order to keep the Clintons in power. Never in history have we seen such
a cover-up as this, one that includes the destruction of 33,000 emails, 13 phones, laptops,
missing boxes of evidence, and on and on.
People who are capable of such crimes against our nation are capable of anything.
…But I take all of these slings and arrows for you. I take them for our movement, so that we
can have our country back. Our great civilization, here in America and across the civilized
world, has come upon a moment of reckoning.
We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global
government and global trade deals and global immigration deals that have destroyed their
sovereignty.
But the central base of world political power is here in America, and it is our corrupt political
establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the
disenfranchisement of working people.
Their financial resources are unlimited. Their political resources are unlimited. Their media
resources are unlimited. And, most importantly, the depths of their immorality is unlimited.
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Our political establishment has no soul. I knew these false attacks would come. I knew this
day would arrive. And I knew the American people would rise above it and vote for the future
they deserve.
The only thing that can stop the Corrupt Clinton Machine is you. The only force strong enough
to save this country is you. The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt
establishment is you, the American People.
They control the Department of Justice, and they even clandestinely meet with the Attorney
General of the United States – in the back of her airplane, while on the runway – for 39 minutes
– to most likely discuss her reappointment in a Clinton Administration just prior to the Attorney
General making a decision over whether or not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
Likewise, they have corrupted the Director of the FBI to the point at which stories are already
saying the great men and women who work for the FBI are embarrassed and ashamed to what
he’s done to one of our great institutions. Hillary Clinton is guilty of all of the things that
Director Comey stated at his press conference and Congressional hearings, and far more – and
yet he let her off the hook, while others lives are being destroyed for far less.
This is a conspiracy against you, the American people.
This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization.
I didn’t need to do this. I built a great company, and I had a wonderful life. I could have
enjoyed the benefits of years of successful business for myself and my family, instead of going
through this absolute horror show of lies, deceptions and malicious attacks. I’m doing it
because this country has given me so much, and I feel strongly it was my turn to give back.
Some people warned me this campaign would be a journey to hell. But they are wrong, it will
be a journey to heaven because we will help so many people.
In my former life, I was an insider as much as anybody else – and I know what’s like to be an
insider. Now I am being punished for leaving their special club and revealing to you their great
scam. Because I used to be part of the club, I’m the only one who can fix it. I’m doing this for
the people, and this movement is just right – and we will take back this country for you and
Make America Great Again.
The corrupt establishment knows that we are an existential threat to their criminal enterprise.
They know, that if we win, their power is gone and returned to you. The clouds hanging over
our government can be lifted, and replaced with a bright future – but it all depends on whether
we let the New York Times decide our future, or whether we let the American people decide
our future.
If this Clinton Campaign of Destruction is allowed to work, then no other highly successful
person – which is what our country needs – will ever again run for this office.
I will not lie to you. These false attacks hurt. To be lied about, to be slandered, to be smeared
so publicly and before your family, is painful.
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What the Clinton Machine is doing to me, and my family, is egregious beyond words. It is
reprehensible beyond description.
But I also know, it’s not about me – it’s about all of you. It’s about all of us, together, as a
country.
It’s about the Veterans who need medical care, the mothers who’ve lost children to terrorism
and crime, it’s about the inner cities and the border towns who desperately need our help, it’s
about the millions of jobless Americans. This election is about the people being crushed by
Obamacare, and it’s about defeating ISIS and appointing Supreme Court Justices who will
defend our Constitution.
This election is also about the African-American and Hispanic communities whose
communities have been plunged into crime, poverty and failing schools by the policies of
Hillary Clinton. They’ve robbed these citizens of their future, and I will give them their hope,
jobs and opportunities back. I will deliver.
This election is about every man, woman and child in our country who deserves to live in
safety, prosperity and peace.
We will rise above the lies, the smears, and the ludicrous slanders from ludicrous reporters.
We will vote for the country we want.
We will vote for the future we want.
We will vote for the politics we want.
We will vote to put this corrupt government cartel out of business. We will remove from our
politics the special interests who have betrayed our workers, our borders, our freedoms, and
our sovereign rights as a nation. We will end the politics of profit, we will end the rule of
special interests, we will put a stop to the raiding of our country – and the disenfranchisement
of our people.
Our Independence Day is at hand, and it arrives, finally, on November 8th. Join me in taking
back our country, and creating a bright and glorious new dawn for our people.
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Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
In September 1901, after the assassination of William
McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, the young and robust
Republican politician, unexpectedly became the 26th
president of the United States. He brought a new energy to
the White House, and won a second term on his own merits
in 1904. He was the first president to win reelection after
gaining the White House due to the death of his
predecessor.
Early in his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt sparked a
scandal when he invited the African-American educator
Booker T. Washington to dine with him and his family; he
was the first president ever to entertain a black man in the
White House.
In domestic policy, Roosevelt was a radical within the
Republican Party. He was a champion of reform.
Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” proclaimed the battle against
large industrial trusts which threatened to restrain trade. In 1902, his government brought a
successful suit under the previously ineffective Sherman Antitrust Act against the Northern
Securities Company, a railroad group formed by James J. Hill, E.H. Harriman and J.P.
Morgan. Roosevelt also halted a prolonged coal strike in Pennsylvania negotiating a
payment increase for the miners. Besides, he set aside almost 200 million acres – almost five
times as much land as all his predecessors combined – for national forests, reserves and
wildlife refuges.
In his foreign policy Roosevelt sought to bring the United States out of its isolation and fulfill
its responsibility as a world power. Theodor Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for his
negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War. In 1903, he helped Panama separate from
Colombia in order to facilitate the beginning of the construction of the Panama Canal,
which he later claimed as his greatest accomplishment as president. To prepare the United
States for its expanded role on the world stage, Roosevelt sought to build up the country’s
defenses, and by the end of his presidency he had transformed the U.S. Navy into a major
international force at sea.
Theodor Roosevelt is said to have ushered in a “rhetorical presidency”. He was an extremely
popular President and the first to use the media to appeal directly to the people. He took
advantage of his popularity to expand the power of the government, supporting policies that
he believed would benefit the nation. His powerful speeches were made headlines and called
for change.
Journalists exemplified progressive ideals as they investigated corruption within business
and government. Muckrakers attacked the robber barons and great industries for the way
they abused workers and public trust.
The term, which referred to the “man with a muck rake” in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
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Progress, was first used by Theodor Roosevelt in his famous speech “Man With the
Muckrake”. This speech epitomizes the ideals of the Progressive Era.
from The Man with the Muck-rake
delivered on the 14th of April 1906
Over a century ago Washington laid the corner stone of the Capitol in what was then little more
than a tract of wooded wilderness here beside the Potomac. We now find it necessary to
provide by great additional buildings for the business of the government.
This growth in the need for the housing of the government is but a proof and example of the
way in which the nation has grown and the sphere of action of the national government has
grown. We now administer the affairs of a nation in which the extraordinary growth of
population has been outstripped by the growth of wealth in complex interests. The material
problems that face us today are not such as they were in Washington’s time, but the underlying
facts of human nature are the same now as they were then. Under altered external form we war
with the same tendencies toward evil that were evident in Washington’s time, and are helped by
the same tendencies for good. It is about some of these that I wish to say a word today.
In Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck
Rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hand; who
was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the
crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.
In “Pilgrim’s Progress” the Man with the Muck Rake is set forth as the example of him whose
vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life
consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on
that which is vile and debasing.
Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing.
There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and there are times
and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But
the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats
with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.
There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent
necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack
upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in
politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who,
on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such
attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is
absolutely truthful.
…One of the chief counts against those who make indiscriminate assault upon men in business
or men in public life is that they invite a reaction which is sure to tell powerfully in favor of the
unscrupulous scoundrel who really ought to be attacked, who ought to be exposed, who
ought, if possible, to be put in the penitentiary. If Aristides is praised overmuch as just, people
get tired of hearing it; and over-censure of the unjust finally and from similar reasons results in
their favor.
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Any excess is almost sure to invite a reaction; and, unfortunately, the reactions instead of
taking the form of punishment of those guilty of the excess, is apt to take the form either of
punishment of the unoffending or of giving immunity, and even strength, to offenders. The
effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in
public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in
newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same
time act as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them
from entering the public service at any price.
…At the risk of repetition let me say again that my plea is not for immunity to, but for the most
unsparing exposure of, the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business man who makes
or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt
every such man out of the position he has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the
criminal; but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and
untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself.
It is because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that
I ask the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. The men with the muck rakes
are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking
the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy
endeavor. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to
feel that the whole world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.
If the whole picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals for
distinction from their fellows. Such painting finally induces a kind of moral color blindness;
and people affected by it come to the conclusion that no man is really black, and no man really
white, but they are all gray.
…The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well
nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing
more distressing to every good patriot, to every good American, than the hard, scoffing spirit
which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such laughter
is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind,
but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition.
There is any amount of good in the world, and there never was a time when loftier and more
disinterested work for the betterment of mankind was being done than now. The forces that
tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty
and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and timid, no
less than a wicked thing, to blink the fact that the forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse
to fail to take into account the strength of the forces that tell for good.
Hysterical sensationalism is the poorest weapon wherewith to fight for lasting righteousness.
The men who with stern sobriety and truth assail the many evils of our time, whether in the
public press, or in magazines, or in books, are the leaders and allies of all engaged in the work
for social and political betterment. But if they give good reason for distrust of what they say, if
they chill the ardor of those who demand truth as a primary virtue, they thereby betray the
good cause and play into the hands of the very men against whom they are nominally at war.
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…At this moment we are passing through a period of great unrest – social, political, and
industrial unrest. It is of the utmost importance for our future that this should prove to be not
the unrest of mere rebelliousness against life, of mere dissatisfaction with the inevitable
inequality of conditions, but the unrest of a resolute and eager ambition to secure the
betterment of the individual and the nation.
So far as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form of a fierce
discontent with evil, of a determination to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or
politics, the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of healthy life.
If, on the other hand, it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against appetite, of a contest
between the brutal greed of the “have nots” and the brutal greed of the “haves,” then it has no
significance for good, but only for evil. If it seeks to establish a line of cleavage, not along the
line which divides good men from bad, but along that other line, running at right angles thereto,
which divides those who are well off from those who are less well off, then it will be fraught
with immeasurable harm to the body politic.
…The first requisite in the public servants who are to deal in this shape with corporations,
whether as legislators or as executives, is honesty. This honesty can be no respecter of
persons. There can be no such thing as unilateral honesty. The danger is not really from
corrupt corporations; it springs from the corruption itself, whether exercised for or against
corporations.
The eighth commandment reads, “Thou shalt not steal”. It does not read, “Thou shalt not steal
from the rich man”. It does not read, “Thou shalt not steal from the poor man”. It reads simply
and plainly, “Thou shalt not steal”.
No good whatever will come from that warped and mock morality which denounces the
misdeeds of men of wealth and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their expense; which
denounces bribery, but blinds itself to blackmail; which foams with rage if a corporation
secures favors by improper methods, and merely leers with hideous mirth if the corporation is
itself wronged.
The only public servant who can be trusted honestly to protect the rights of the public against
the misdeeds of a corporation is that public man who will just as surely protect the corporation
itself from wrongful aggression.
If a public man is willing to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to the men of wealth or to
rich corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity comes he will secretly
and furtively do wrong to the public in the interest of a corporation.
But in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No honesty will make a public man useful if that
man is timid or foolish, if he is a hot-headed zealot or an impracticable visionary. As we strive
for reform we find that it is not at all merely the case of a long uphill pull. On the contrary,
there is almost as much of breeching work as of collar work. To depend only on traces means
that there will soon be a runaway and an upset.
The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business
in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my
judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find
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that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately
provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by
steady and natural growth.
On the other hand, the wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the
entire existing order, the men who act crookedly, whether because of sinister design or from
mere puzzle headedness, the men who preach destruction without proposing any substitute for
what they intend to destroy, or who propose a substitute which would be far worse than the
existing evils-all these men are the most dangerous opponents of real reform. If they get their
way they will lead the people into a deeper pit than any into which they could fall under the
present system. If they fail to get their way they will still do incalculable harm by provoking the
kind of reaction which in its revolt against the senseless evil of their teaching would enthrone
more securely than ever the evils which their misguided followers believe they are attacking.
More important than aught else is the development of the broadest sympathy of man for man.
The welfare of the wage worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, upon these depend the
welfare of the entire country; their good is not to be sought in pulling down others; but their
good must be the prime object of all our statesmanship.
Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all men, so that each
shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which he is made. Spiritually and ethically we
must strive to bring about clean living and right thinking. We appreciate that the things of the
body are important; but we appreciate also that the things of the soul are immeasurably more
important.
The foundation stone of national life is, and ever must be, the high individual character of the
average citizen.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. What is Theodore Roosevelt’s political reputation? What do you know about American
Progressive Era?
2. The speech was delivered at the laying of the foundation of the office building of the House
of Representatives. How does Roosevelt use this event at the beginning of his speech to argue
the expansion of the government influence?
3. Opening the speech, Roosevelt suggests an image of George Washington. What aspect of
Americanism does this image call for? Does it give more authenticity to Roosevelt’s message?
4. What is the central topic of Roosevelt’s speech? How does he formulate it? What does the
phrase “the underlying facts of human nature” stand for?
5. Analyse the allusion to John Bunyan’s book. How does the speaker interpret the episode
from Pilgrim’s Progress? What feature is accentuated in the image of the man with the muck
rake? What is allegorically represented by “the filth of the floor” and “a celestial crown”?
Comment on the choice of words. What is the role of repetition in the speaker’s
argumentation?
6. What is the danger in being fixed on the “filth”? Can muckraking help or harm society? Is it
possible to reach the balance between the two sides of sensational writing: exposure of
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wrongdoing and excessive dramatization? What illustrations does the speaker give to criticise
the negative influence of any excess in journalism? What language means foreground the
enthusiastic tone and emotionality of the text?
7. Theodore Roosevelt has been labeled a “trust-buster”. Do you see evidence of trustbusting in this speech? What can you conclude about his perspective of big business? Analyse
the imagery employed to convey the necessity of radical measures against corruption. Pay
attention to the use of modal verbs and superlative adjectives.
8. How does the speaker develop the image of the man with the muck rake? What is the
purpose of referring to it again?
9. Analyse the concept of “moral color blindness”. What can be worse than that according to
the speaker’s words?
10. How can one justify the gradual transition from the specific issue of sensational journalism
to the general remarks concerning American patriotism, and then the goodness of mankind in
the text? What language means partake in the lofty rhetoric of the passage?
11. Does the speaker defend the poor or the rich in his attempt to promote social and political
betterment? How does he manage to reconcile the “have not” and “haves”, “those who are
well off” and “those who are less well off”? Where does the ambiguity of his arguments lie?
12. What is Roosevelt’s definition of a good public servant? What are his best qualities?
13. How does the speaker project his views on sensational journalism upon the reform policy
of the government?
14. Analyse the last paragraphs of Roosevelt’s speech. What ideas contained in them tie the
whole text together? What is the speaker’s main message? Is it stated directly or implied?
15. Analyse the language of the speech. What language means and stylistic devices used in the
text are typically employed in the publicistic style?
16. Theodore Roosevelt’s speech is most remembered today for the coinage of the term
“muckraker”, brilliantly used by the speaker to create a compelling symbol for his message.
What are the metaphoric connotations associated with the term “muck-rake?” Does this
metaphor still apply to modern-day journalism? Are there any updated metaphors that apply
better to today’s investigative reporting?
17. Prepare the final analysis of the speech.
Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis
Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech
Donald Trump. Inaugural Address
Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS
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Speeches for Self-Guided Analysis
Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech
Donald Trump. Inaugural Address
Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS
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Margaret Thatcher. Iron Lady Speech
I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and
my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western world. A cold war warrior, an amazon
philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of these things? Well yes, if that’s how they…
Yes I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke, yes if that’s how they
wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.
And by they, I mean that somewhat strange alliance between the comrades of the Russian
Defence Ministry – and our Defence Minister.
They’re welcome to call me what they like if they believe that we should ignore the build-up of
Russian military strength, and that we should not disturb their dreams of detente by worrying
over the communist presence in Angola.
But I happen to believe that what is at stake is important and is crucial to our future both in this
country and in the world as a whole.
We’re waging a battle on many fronts.
We must not forget the guns and missiles aimed at us – but equally we must not let them blind
us to the insidious war on words which is going on.
It is not just a matter of hurling insults – where he who hurls loudest, hurls last – that is the final
resort of the man who has already lost the argument,
No, this is not such a war.
The war is a true war of words, where meanings get lost in a mist of revolutionary fantasy;
where accuracy is slipped quietly under the carpet; and where truth is twisted and bent to suit
the latest propagandist line.
That is what we are up against.
And we have to fight it if only because we find it totally alien to our notions of freedom and
truth.
To illustrate what I mean, let us take that last sentence.
It contains in it two words which, together, are among the most abused in the language of the
struggle.
Freedom and Fight.
The Marxist has applied the description of freedom fighter to one who helps to bring about
Marxism, a system which denies basic freedoms.
In other words, that so-called freedom fighter is a man who helps to destroy freedom.
Such is the corruption of the language they use.
Necessary in their eyes because they know freedom is an appealing word.
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The men of the Khmer Rouge whose first act on “liberating” – as they put it – Cambodia last
year, was brutally to drive a large part of the population out of the capital Phnom Penh. Yet
they were called “freedom fighters”.
The men who tried to reverse the clear wishes of the people of Portugal – as expressed
through the ballot box – in Marxist vocabulary they were “freedom fighters” too.
This surely must have been one of the most blatant attempts at subversion we have seen in
recent times.
So do not let us be misled by their abuse of these words.
But the fallacies of the present propaganda war come nearer to home than this.
Let us look at another word being just a subtly corrupted in the litany of the left.
The word is “Public”. We use it many times a day.
It is with us all the time – because we are the public.
All of us.
Yet the word has become distorted. Take for example “Public Ownership”.
In theory: We own the mines. We own the railways. We own the Post Office.
But in practice we don’t really own anything.
“Public ownership” should mean that you and I own something, that we have some say in how
it is run, that it is accountable to us.
But the fact is that the words “public ownership” have come to mean the very, very private
world of decisions taken behind closed doors, and of accountability to no-one.
How good for us all public ownership is presented as being.
What a glimpse of socialist heaven it offers.
The Socialists tell us that there are massive profits in a particular industry and they should not
go to the shareholders – but that the public should reap the benefits.
Benefits?
What benefits?
When you take into public ownership a profitable industry, the profits soon disappear.
The goose that laid the golden eggs goes broody.
State geese are not great layers.
The steel industry was nationalised some years ago in the public interest – yet the only interest
now left to the public is in witnessing the depressing spectacle of their money going down the
drain at a rate of a million pounds a day.
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Socialists then shift the ground for taking industries into “public ownership”.
They then tell us that some industries cannot survive any longer unless they are taken into
public ownership, allegedly to protect the public from the effects of their collapse.
It all sounds so cosy, and so democratic.
But is it true?
No, of course it isn’t.
The moment ownership passes into the name of the public is the moment the public ceases to
have any ownership or accountability, and often the moment when it ceases to get what it
wants.
But it is invariably the moment when the public starts to pay.
Pays to take the industry over.
Pays the losses by higher taxes.
Pays for inefficiencies in higher prices.
Outside many pits in the country is a notice which says:
“Managed on behalf of the people.”
But will the people ever get to know who was responsible for the massive losses sustained
since the mining industry was nationalised in 1947?
If these are public industries, then surely the public has a right to know?
The more so, because they are monopoly industries.
In fact, publicly owned authorities are usually the most private imaginable.
We need to revise our vocabulary and call something public only when ordinary members of
the public are in actual control.
The fact is that the British public more truly own firms like Marks & Spencer and others, than
they do any of our nationalised industries.
Some of them directly own shares in M&S.
This gives them the right to ask questions about its management – its successes, its failures,
and if they are not satisfied, they can sell their shares and invest their money elsewhere.
Many more have an indirect share in it through pension funds at their own work.
The managers of those funds are paid to ask the very questions which keep the company on its
toes.
And millions of us use the option every year of voting with our feet on the success of St.
Michael.
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We can choose whether to buy there or somewhere else.
That is real public ownership – and if the public ceased to benefit, then M&S would cease to
exist.
What is it, then, that keeps them going?
It is their incentive to satisfy their customers – you and me – the public.
Despite what the Socialists would have you think, theirs is not an unusual story.
It is reflected in thousands of firms throughout the land.
Successful firms, proving by their results that today’s crisis is not one of free enterprise, but
one caused by Socialism.
Despite the handicaps imposed upon them, the taxation, the restrictions – they are still
managing to give the public what it wants.
These are the fallacies in the use of the word “public”.
We must not let them get away with the deceptions and the half – truths which swarm around
their dogma.
Whenever we see the word “public” we must question it.
How do the public benefit?
What choice does the public have?
Choice is crucial in this.
When a man moves his family into a Council house, we must make sure he has the chance of
buying it.
The ambition to own the roof over your head is a totally natural one – and judging by the way
the present Cabinet indulges in it – a pretty strong instinct it is, too.
Why, then, do these so-called socialists work so actively to prevent home ownership in the
Council estates?
The answer is that if you give the ambitious man in the Council house the chance to buy it, you
lose control over him.
A socialist system which has penetrated so far in its control over people that it can dictate the
colour of their front doors is a system which will never let go control of the whole house.
People might paint their doors a different colour, for a start.
We have always been the party of home ownership.
Home ownership not only means security for the individual, it also means security and
continuity for society as well.
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Security because people who work hard to buy their own homes have learned the
responsibility of property and have a respect for other people’s property as well.
Continuity because the ownership of a house is not just for one generation – its value is in
more ways than one passed on to the next, and the next.
The only way for the majority of people to have any real say in where they live and how they
live is by extending home ownership.
When we came to power in 1951, home ownership was only 29 per cent. In 1964 it was 45 per
cent. By the time we had left Office in 1974 it was 52 per cent. And with our policies the figure
will go even higher. Housing policy shows that the Conservative way really does work for the
public in the true sense of the word.
When parents send their children to school, and I am talking about local authority schools –
not fee paying schools – we must also see that some choice is available.
In no field has the exclusion of the public been so severe as in the schools they nominally own,
in whose name they are nominally run.
I do not wish to get embroiled here in the controversy currently raging about the running of
William Tyndale School.
It would be quite wrong for me to comment while the inquiry is still sitting.
But there is one observation of fact about it, which can be made.
That is that matters came to a head when the numbers of ordinary parents withdrawing their
children from the school reached alarming proportions.
That was the only way they could make their views felt.
They voted with their feet – just as surely as people would vote with their feet if Marks and
Spencers ceased to provide value for money.
Nobody wants to see a school shut down – no more than they want to see a firm put out of
business.
That is why from the start we must make them more responsive to parents’ wishes.
That is why there must be choice of the type of education our children are given.
It is true that some children flower quickly in the atmosphere of what is called the
“progressive” classroom.
Others need the more organised structure of the traditional system.
But parents should not be told which their children are going to get, and denied any choice at
all.
We believe people are not mere cyphers to be ordered this way and that, into this job or that,
into this house or that, their children sent to this school or that.
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Socialists believe people are not to be trusted with choice.
I suppose because we might learn to use it.
And enjoy it.
And then where would it all end?
Socialism is the denial of choice, the denial of choice for ordinary people in their everyday
lives.
There is a will in Britain to work and build up the future for our children.
But Socialists don’t trust the people.
Churchill did.
We do.
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Donald Trump. Inaugural Address
Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, fellow Americans
and people of the world – thank you.
We the citizens of America have now joined a great national effort to rebuild our county and
restore its promise for all our people.
Together we will determine the course of America for many, many years to come.
Together we will face challenges. We will confront hardships. But we will get the job done.
Every four years we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of
power.
And we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid
throughout this transition. They have been magnificent, thank you.
Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today we are not merely
transferring power from one administration to another – but transferring it from Washington
DC and giving it back to you the people.
For too long a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while
the people have borne the cost.
Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered but the
jobs left and the factories closed.
The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country.
Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.
While they have celebrated there has been little to celebrate for struggling families all across our
land.
That all changes starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment. It
belongs to you. It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across
America today.
This is your day.
This is your celebration.
And this – the United States of America – is your country.
What truly matters is not what party controls our government but that this government is
controlled by the people.
Today, January 20 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this
nation again.
The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening
to you now.
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You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement – the likes of which
the world has never seen before.
At the centre of this movement is a crucial conviction – that a nation exists to serve its citizens.
Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighbourhoods for their families and
good jobs for themselves.
These are just and reasonable demands
Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like
tombstones across the landscape of our nation.
An education system flushed with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students
deprived of all knowledge. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs which deprive people of
so much unrealised potential.
We are one nation, and their pain is our pain, their dreams are our dreams, we share one nation,
one home and one glorious destiny.
Today I take an oath of allegiance to all Americans. For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign
industry at the expense of American industry, subsidised the armies of other countries, while
allowing the sad depletion of our own military.
We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own.
And spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into
disrepair and decay.
We have made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country
has dissipated over the horizon.
One by one, shutters have closed on our factories without even a thought about the millions
and millions of those who have been left behind.
But that is the past and now we are looking only to the future.
We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign
capital, in every hall of power – from this day on a new vision will govern our land – from this
day onwards it is only going to be America first – America first!
Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit
American workers and American families.
Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every bone in my
body and I will never ever let you down.
America will start winning again. America will start winning like never before.
We will bring back our jobs, we will bring back our borders, we will bring back our wealth, we
will bring back our dreams.
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We will bring new roads and high roads and bridges and tunnels and railways all across our
wonderful nation.
We will get our people off welfare and back to work – rebuilding our country with American
hands and American labour.
We will follow two simple rules – buy American and hire American.
We see good will with the nations of the world but we do so with the understanding that it is
the right of all nations to put their nations first.
We will shine for everyone to follow.
We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones, and untie the world against radical Islamic
terrorism which we will eradicate from the face of the earth.
At the bed rock of our politics will be an allegiance to the United States.
And we will discover new allegiance to each other. There is no room for prejudice.
The bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when god’s people live together in unity.
When America is united, America is totally unstoppable.
There is no fear, we are protected and will always be protected by the great men and women of
our military and most importantly we will be protected by god.
Finally, we must think big and dream even bigger. As Americans, we know we live as a nation
only when it is striving.
We will no longer accept politicians who are always complaining but never doing anything
about it.
The time for empty talk is over, now arrives the hour of action.
Do not allow anyone to tell you it cannot be done. No challenge can match the heart and fight
and spirit of America. We will not fail, our country will thrive and prosper again.
We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the
earth from the miseries of disease, to harvest the energies, industries and technologies of
tomorrow.
A new national pride will stir ourselves, lift our sights and heal our divisions. It’s time to
remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget, that whether we are black or brown
or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots.
We all enjoy the same glorious freedoms and we all salute the same great American flag and
whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska,
they look at the same night sky, and dream the same dreams, and they are infused with the
breath by the same almighty creator.
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So to all Americans in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain,
from ocean to ocean – hear these words – you will never be ignored again.
Your voice, your hopes and dreams will define your American destiny.
Your courage, goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.
Together we will make America strong again, we will make America wealthy again, we will make
America safe again and yes – together we will make America great again.
Thank you.
God bless you.
And god bless America.
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Sheryl Sandberg. Address to the Class of 2012 at HBS
Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, graduated from the Harvard
Business School in 1995. The charismatic alumna and one of Silicon Valley’s newest
billionaires returned to campus to deliver the Class Day keynote address to graduating
students.
The event is part of a student-led ceremony traditionally held the day before Harvard
University’s Commencement exercises and the HBS diploma ceremony.
Sandberg, who graduated in the top 5% of her HBS class, gave an inspiring, often
humorous and sometimes provocative speech. She dispensed plenty of career advice,
disclosed details of how she paved her own way to success in Silicon Valley, and addressed
gender issues at work. And she noted that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was all of 11
years old when she graduated with her MBA degree in 1995.
It’s an honor to be here today to address HBS’s distinguished faculty, proud parents, patient
guests, and most importantly, the class of 2012.
Today was supposed to be a day of unbridled celebration and I know that’s no longer true. I
join all of you in grieving for your classmate Nate. There are no words which can make this
better.
Though laden with sadness, today still marks a distinct and impressive achievement for this
class. So please join me in giving our warmest congratulations to this class.
When Dean Nohria asked me to speak here today, I thought, come talk to a group of people
way younger and cooler than I am? I can do that. I do that every day at Facebook. I like being
surrounded by young people, except when they say to me, “What was it like being in college
without the internet?” or worse, “Sheryl, can you come here? We need to see what old people
think of this feature”.
When I was a student here 17 years ago, I studied social marketing with Professor Kash
Rangan. One of the many examples Kash used to explain the concept of social marketing was
the lack of organ donors in this country, which kills 18 people every single day. Earlier this
month, Facebook launched a tool to support organ donations, something that stems directly
from Kash’s work. Kash, we are all grateful for your dedication.
It wasn’t really that long ago when I was sitting where you are, but the world has changed an
awful lot. My section, section B, tried to have HBS’s first online class. We had to use an
AOL chat room and dial up service. (Your parents can explain to you later what dial-up
service is.) We had to pass out a list of screen names because it was unthinkable to put your
real name on the internet. And it never worked. It kept crashing. The world just wasn’t set up
for 90 people to communicate at once online. But for a few brief moments, we glimpsed the
future – a future where technology would power who we are and connect us to our real
colleagues, our real family, our real friends.
It used to be that in order to reach more people than you could talk to in a day, you had to be
rich and famous and powerful. You had to be a celebrity, a politician, a CEO. But that’s not
true today. Now ordinary people have voice, not just those of us lucky to go to HBS, but
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anyone with access to Facebook, Twitter, a mobile phone. This is disrupting traditional power
structures and leveling traditional hierarchy. Control and power are shifting from institutions to
individuals, from the historically powerful to the historically powerless. And all of this is
happening so much faster than I could have imagined when I was sitting where you are today –
and Mark Zuckerberg was 11 years old.
As the world becomes more connected and less hierarchical, traditional career paths are
shifting as well. In 2001, after working in the government, I moved out to Silicon Valley to try
to find a job. My timing wasn’t really that good. The bubble had crashed. Small companies
were closing. Big companies were laying people off. One CEO looked at me and said, “we
wouldn’t even think about hiring someone like you”.
After a while I had a few offers and I had to make a decision, so what did I do? I am MBA
trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and my criteria in the rows.
One of the jobs on that sheet was to become Google’s first Business Unit general manager,
which sounds good now, but at the time no one thought consumer internet companies could
ever make money. I was not sure there was actually a job there at all; Google had no business
units, so what was there to generally manage? And the job was several levels lower than jobs I
was being offered at other companies.
So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO, and I showed him the
spreadsheet and I said, this job meets none of my criteria. He put his hand on my spreadsheet
and he looked at me and said, “Don’t be an idiot”.
Excellent career advice. And then he said, “Get on a rocket ship. When companies are
growing quickly and having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when
companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when
stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat.
Just get on.”
About six and one-half years later, when I was leaving Google, I took that advice to heart. I
was offered CEO jobs at a bunch of companies, but I went to Facebook as COO. At the time
people said, why are you going to work for a 23-year-old?
The traditional metaphor for careers is a ladder, but I no longer think that metaphor holds. It
just doesn’t make sense in a less hierarchical world. When I was first at Facebook, a woman
named Lori Goler, a 1997 graduate of HBS, was working in marketing at eBay and I knew her
a bit socially. She called me and said, “I want to talk with you about coming to work with you
at Facebook. So I thought about calling you and telling you all the things I’m good at and all
the things I like to do. But I figured that everyone is doing that. So instead I want to know
what’s your biggest problem and how can I solve it?”
My jaw hit the floor. I’d hired thousands of people up to that point in my career, but no one
had ever said anything like that. I had never said anything like that. Job searches are always
about the job searcher, but not in Lori’s case. I said, “You’re hired. My biggest problem is
recruiting and you can solve it”. So Lori changed fields into something she never thought she’d
do, went down a level to start in a new field. She has since been promoted and runs all of
People Operations at Facebook and is doing an extraordinary job.
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Lori has a great metaphor for careers. She says they’re not a ladder, they’re a jungle gym.
As you start your post-HBS career, look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact,
look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not
your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they’re going to give you. Do real work.
Take a sales quota, a line role, an ops job. Don’t plan too much, and don’t expect a direct
climb. If I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed
my career.
You are entering a different business world than I entered. Mine was just starting to get
connected. Yours is hyper-connected. Mine was competitive. Yours is way more competitive.
Mine moved quickly, yours moves even more quickly.
As traditional structures are breaking down, leadership has to evolve as well – from hierarchy
to shared responsibility, from command and control to listening and guiding. You’ve been
trained by this great institution not just to be part of these trends, but to lead.
As you lead in this new world, you will not be able to rely on who you are or the degree you
hold. You’ll have to rely on what you know. Your strength will not come from your place on
some org chart, but from building trust and earning respect. You’re going to need talent, skill,
and imagination and vision. But more than anything else, you’re going to need the ability to
communicate authentically, to speak so that you inspire the people around you and to listen so
that you continue to learn each and every day on the job.
If you watch young children, you’ll immediately notice how honest they are. My friend Betsy
from my section a few years after business school was pregnant with her second child. Her
first child was about five and said, “Mommy, where is the baby?” She said, “The baby is in
my tummy”. He said, “Aren’t the baby’s arms in your arms?” She said, “No, the baby’s in my
tummy”. “Are the baby’s legs in your legs?” “No, the whole baby is in my tummy.” Then he
said, “Then Mommy, what is growing in your butt?”
As adults, we are never this honest. And that’s not a bad thing. I have borne two children
and the last thing I needed were those comments. But it’s not always a good thing either.
Because all of us, and especially leaders, need to speak and hear the truth.
The workplace is an especially difficult place for anyone to tell the truth, because no matter
how flat we want our organizations to be, all organizations have some form of hierarchy. This
means that one person’s performance is assessed by someone else’s perception.
This is not a setup for honesty. Think about how people speak in a typical workforce. Rather
than say, “I disagree with our expansion strategy” or better yet, “this seems truly stupid”. They
say, “I think there are many good reasons why we’re entering this new line of business, and
I’m certain the management team has done a thorough ROI analysis, but I’m not sure we have
fully considered the downstream effects of taking this step forward at this time”. As we would
say at Facebook, three letters: WTF.
Truth is better used by using simple language. Last year, Mark decided to learn Chinese and as
part of studying, he would spend an hour or so each week with some of our employees who
were native Chinese speakers. One day, one of them was trying to tell him something about
her manager. She said this long sentence and he said, “simpler please”. And then she said it
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again and he said, “no, I still don’t understand, simpler please”…and so on and so on.
Finally, in sheer exasperation, she burst out, “my manager is bad”. Simple and clear and very
important for him to know.
People rarely speak this clearly in the workforce or in life. And as you get more senior, not
only will people speak less clearly to you but they will overreact to the small things you say.
When I joined Facebook, one of the things I had to do was build the business side of the
company and put some systems into place. But I wanted to do it without destroying the
culture that made Facebook great. So one of the things I tried to do was encourage people not
to do formal PowerPoint presentations for meetings with me. I would say things like, “Don’t
do PowerPoint presentations for meetings with me. Instead, come in with a list of what you
want to discuss”. But everyone ignored me and they kept doing their presentations meeting
after meeting, month after month. So about two years in, I said, “OK, I hate rules but I have a
rule: no more PowerPoint in my meetings”.
About a month later I was about to speak to our global sales team on a big stage and someone
came up to me and said, “Before you get on that stage, you really should know everyone’s
pretty upset about the no PowerPoint with clients thing”. So I got on the stage and said, “one,
I meant no PowerPoint with me. But two, more importantly, next time you hear something
that’s really stupid, don’t adhere to it. Fight it or ignore it, even if it’s coming from me or
Mark”.
A good leader recognizes that most people won’t feel comfortable challenging authority, so it
falls upon authority to encourage them to question. It’s easy to say that you’re going to
encourage feedback but it’s hard to do, because unfortunately it doesn’t always come in a
format we want to hear.
When I first started at Google, I had a team of four people and it was really important to me
that I interview everyone. For me, being part of my team meant I had to know you. When the
team had grown to about 100 people, I realized it was taking longer to schedule my interviews.
So one day at my meeting of just my direct reports, I said “maybe I should stop interviewing,”
fully expecting them to jump in and say “no, your interviews are a critical part of the process.”
They applauded. Then they fell over themselves explaining that I was the bottleneck of all
time. I was embarrassed. Then I was angry and I spent a few hours just quietly fuming. Why
didn’t they tell me I was a bottleneck? Why did they let me go on slowing them down? Then I
realized that if they hadn’t told me, it was my fault. I hadn’t convinced them that I wanted that
feedback and I would have to change that going forward.
When you’re the leader, it is really hard to get good and honest feedback, no many how many
times you ask for it. One trick I’ve discovered is that I try to speak really openly about the
things I’m bad at, because that gives people permission to agree with me, which is a lot easier
than pointing it out in the first place. To take one of many possible examples, when things are
unresolved I can get a tad anxious. Really, when anything’s unresolved, I get anxious. I’m
quite certain no one has accused me of being too calm. So I speak about it openly and that
gives people permission to tell me when it’s happening. But if I never said anything, would
anyone who works at Facebook walk up to me and say, “Hey Sheryl, calm down. You’re
driving us all nuts!” I don’t think so.
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As you graduate today, ask yourself, how will you lead. Will you use simple and clear
language? Will you seek out honesty? When you get honesty back, will you react with anger or
with gratitude?
As we strive to be more authentic in our communication, we should also strive to be more
authentic in a broader sense. I talk a lot about bringing your whole self to work – something I
believe in deeply.
Motivation comes from working on things we care about. But it also comes from working with
people we care about. And in order to care about someone, you have to know them. You have
to know what they love and hate, what they feel, not just what they think. If you want to win
hearts and minds, you have to lead with your heart as well as your mind. I don’t believe we
have a professional self from Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time.
That kind of division probably never worked, but in today’s world, with real and authentic
voice, it makes even less sense.
I’ve cried at work. I’ve told people I’ve cried at work. And it’s been reported in the press that
“Sheryl Sandberg cried on Mark Zuckerberg’s shoulder”, which is not exactly what happened.
I talk about my hopes and fears and ask people about theirs. I try to be myself – honest
about my strengths and weaknesses – and I encourage others to do the same. It is all
professional and it is all personal, all at the very same time.
I recently started speaking up about the challenges women face in the workforce, something I
only had the courage to do in the last few years. Before this, I did my career like everyone else
does it. I never told anyone I was a girl. Don’t tell. I left the lights on when I went home to do
something for my kids. I locked my office door and pumped milk for my babies while I was
on conference calls. People would ask, “what’s that sound?” I would say, “What sound?” “I
hear a beep.” “Oh, there’s a fire truck outside my office.”
But the lack of progress over the past decade has convinced me we need to start talking about
this. I graduated from HBS in 1995 and I thought it was completely clear that by the time
someone from my year was invited to speak at this podium, we would have achieved equality
in the workforce. But women at the top – C-level jobs – are stuck at 15–16 percent and have
not moved in a decade. Not even close to 50 % and no longer growing. We need to
acknowledge openly that gender remains an issue at the highest levels of leadership. The
promise of equality is not equality. We need to start talking about this.
We need to start talking about how women underestimate their abilities compared to men and
how for women, but not men, success and likeability are negatively correlated. That means that
as a woman is more successful in your workplaces, she will be less liked. This means that
women need a different form of management and mentorship, a different form of sponsorship
and encouragement than men.
There aren’t enough senior women out there to do it, so it falls upon the men who are
graduating today just as much or more as the women, not just to talk about gender but to help
these women succeed. When they hear a woman is really great at her job but not liked, take a
deep breath and ask why.
We need to start talking openly about the flexibility all of us need to have both a job and a life.
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A couple of weeks ago in an interview I said that I leave the office at 5:30 p.m. to have dinner
with my children. I was shocked at the press coverage. One of my friends said I couldn’t get
more headlines if I had murdered someone with an ax. This showed me this is an unresolved
issue for all of us, men and women alike. Otherwise, everyone would not write so much about
it.
And maybe, most importantly, we need to start talking about how fewer women than men,
even from places like HBS, even likely in this class, aspire to the very top jobs. We will not
close the leadership gap until we close the professional ambition gap. We need more women
not just to sit at the table, but as President Obama said a few weeks ago at Barnard, to take
their rightful seats at the head of the table.
One of the reasons I was so excited to be here today is that this is the 50th anniversary of
letting women into this school. Dean Noria, who is so passionate about getting more women
into leadership positions, told me that he wanted me to speak this year for that reason.
I met a woman from that first class once. She told me that when they first came in, they took a
men’s room and converted it to a woman’s room. But they left the urinals in. She thought the
message was clear – “we are not sure this whole woman thing is going to work out and if not,
we don’t want to have to reinstall the urinals”. The urinals are long gone. Let’s make sure that
no one ever misses them.
As you and your classmates spread out across the globe and walk across this stage tomorrow,
I wish for you four things
First, keep in touch via Facebook. This is critical to your future success! And since we’re
public now, why you are there, click on an ad or two.
Two, that you make the effort to speak as well as seek the truth.
Three, that you remain true to and open about your authentic self.
And four, that your generation accomplishes what mine has failed to do. Give us a world
where half our homes are run by men and half our institutions are run by women. I’m pretty
sure that would be a better world.
I join everyone here in offering my most sincere congratulations to the HBS Class of 2012.
Give yourselves a huge round of applause.
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PART III. THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE
The Main Features of Scientific Style
Anna Wierzbicka. English: Meaning and Culture. English as a Cultural Universe
Steven Arthur Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language
Scientific Texts for Self-Guided Analysis
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language
Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning
Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say
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The Main Features of Scienti ic Style
The language of science is governed by the aim of the functional style of scientific prose,
which is to prove a hypothesis, to create new concepts, to disclose the internal laws of
existence, development, relations between different phenomena, etc. The anguage means used,
therefore, tend to be objective, precise, unemotional, devoid of any individuality; there is a
striving for the most generalized form of expression.
1. The first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of utterances with
clear indication of their interrelations and interdependence. It will not be an exaggeration to say
that in no other functional style we find such a developed and varied system of connectives as
in scientific prose.
2. The second equally important feature of this style is the use of terms specific to each given
branch of science. Due to the rapid dissemination of scientific and technical ideas, we may
observe the process of “de-terminization”, that is, some scientific and technical terms begin to
circulate outside the narrow field they belong to and eventually begin to develop new meanings.
But the overwhelming majority of terms do not undergo this process and remain the property
of scientific prose. There they are born, may develop new terminological meanings, and there
they die. No other field of human activity is so prolific in coining new words as science is. The
necessity to penetrate deeper into the essence of things and phenomena gives rise to new
concepts, which require new words to name them. Further, the general vocabulary employed in
scientific prose bears its direct referential meaning, that is, words used in scientific prose will
always tend to be used in their primary logical meaning. Nor will there be any words with
contextual meaning. Even the possibility of ambiguity is avoided. Furthermore, terms are
coined so as to be self-explanatory to the greatest possible degree. But neutral and common
literary words used in scientific prose will be explained, even if their meaning is only slightly
modified. In modern scientific prose an interesting phenomenon arises – the exchange of terms
between various branches of science. Self-sufficiency in any branch of science is now a thing
of the past. The exchange of terminology may be regarded as a neutral outcome of
collaboration of specialists. Mathematics has priority in this respect. Mathematical terms have
left their own domain and travel freely in other sciences, including linguistics.
3. A third characteristic feature of scientific style is sentence patterns. They are of 3 types:
postulatory, argumentative and formulative. A hypothesis must be based on facts already
known. Therefore, every piece of scientific prose will begin with postulatory pronouncements
which are taken as self-evident and needing no proof. The writer’s own ideas are shaped in
formulae, arguments, etc., that is, in sentences giving reasons for further conclusions.
4. A fourth observable feature of the style of modern scientific prose is the use of quotations
and references. They sometimes occupy as much as half a page. They also have a definite
compositional pattern, namely, the name of the writer referred to, the title of the work quoted,
the publishing house, the place and year it was published, and the page of the excerpt quoted
or referred to.
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5. A fifth feature of the style under discussion is the frequent use of foot-notes, not of the
reference kind, but digressive in character. This is in full accord with the requirement of the
style, which is logical coherence of ideas expressed.
6. The impersonality of scientific writings can also be considered a typical feature of this
style. It is mainly revealed in the frequent use of passive constructions and impersonal
scientific “we” followed by the verbs suppose, assume, conclude, infer, point out, etc.
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Anna Wierzbicka (born 1938)
Professor Anna Wierzbicka is a Professor in the
Linguistics Program, School of Language Studies, Arts.
In her 1972 book “Semantic Primitives” she launched
a theory now known under the acronym
“NSM” (Natural Semantic Metalanguage), which is
now internationally recognized as one of the world’s
leading theories of language and meaning. This
approach has been used in hundreads of semantic
studies across many languages and cultures.
She has published over twenty books and edited or coedited several others. Her work spans a number of
disciplines, including anthropology, psychology,
cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as
well as linguistics, and has been published in many
journals across all these disciplines (e.g., Language,
American Anthropologist, Man, Anthropological
Linguistics, Cognition and Emotion, Culture and Psychology, Ethos, Philosophica, Brain
and Behaviourial Sciences, The Journal of Cognition and Culture etc.). Professor
Wierzbicka is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian
Academy of Social Sciences, and of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Polish
Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has two Honorary Doctorates, one from Marie CurieSklodowska University, Poland (2004) and one from Warsaw University, Poland (2006).
She is the winner of the Dobrushin Prize for 2010 (established in Russia in honour of the
Russian mathematician Roland Lvovich Dobrushin) and of the Polish Science Foundation’s
2010 prize for the humanities and social sciences.
English: Meaning and Culture
Chapter 1
English as a Cultural Universe
1.1. English – the Most Widely Used Language in the World
Few would now disagree with the view expressed in Quirk et al.’s (1985, 2) Comprehensive
Grammar of the English Language that “English is the world’s most important language”. It is
certainly the world’s most widely used language. As David Crystal noted more than a decade
ago in his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages (1992, 121), it is spoken “by a
large and ever-increasing number of people – 800,000,000 by a conservative estimate,
1,500,000,000 by a liberal estimate... It has official status in over 60 countries. Estimates also
suggest that at least 150 million people use English fluently as a foreign language, and three or
four times this number with some degree of competence... English is also the language of
international air traffic control, and the chief language of world publishing, science and
technology”. Crystal’s more recent estimates are even higher (Crystal 2001, 2003a, 2003b). In
the words of the Indian American linguist Braj Kachru (1997, 69), “the hunger for learning the
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language – with whatever degree of competence – is simply insatiable”.
Given the rapidly expanding role of English in the contemporary world, it is hardly surprising
that numerous books concerned with different aspects of English, both scholarly and
pedagogical, are published every year. And yet there is one striking gap in this literature:
although many books have been and are being published that link the Japanese language with
Japanese culture or Chinese language with Chinese culture, hardly any recent books explore the
links between the English language and Anglo culture.
There are, no doubt, many reasons for this weakness within the huge literature dealing with
English. I believe one of them is that in recent times considerable opposition has developed in
the English-speaking world to the notion of “a culture”, that is, “culture in the singular”, an
opposition linked with fears of “essentialism” and “stereotyping”.
Although the notion of “Japanese culture’ may be frowned on, it does not usually evoke a
reaction as suspicious, or even hostile, as the notion of “Anglo culture”. No doubt this is partly
because the Japanese language is spoken mostly in one region, whereas English is widely
spoken in many different parts of the world. The question “to whom does this language
belong?” posed recently (with respect to German) by the German Arab writer of Moroccan
origin, Abdellatif Belfellah (1996), raises more problems in the case of English than, for
example, in the case of Japanese (or indeed German), and it reverberates throughout the
literature on English and “Englishes” (e.g., Hayhow and Parker 1994; Widdowson 1994). The
very fact that the use of English is so widespread, and that its role in the modern world is so
all-embracing, means that trying to link it with any particular culture or way of living, thinking,
or feeling seems all the more problematic.
From the point of view of people in the postcolonial world, for whom the local variety of
English is often their native language or the main language used outside the domestic sphere,
discussions of the links between English and Anglo culture may even seem offensive or at least
insensitive. From the point of view of “Anglo Celtic” speakers of English – in Britain, the
United States, and elsewhere – discussions of possible links between English and Anglo
culture may also seem to be best avoided.
Quirk et al. (1985, 16), for example, emphasize the “cultural neutrality” of English:
English, which we have referred to as a lingua franca, is pre-eminently the most international of
languages. Though the mention of the language may at once remind us of England, on the one
hand, or cause association with the might of the United States on the other, it carries less
implication of political or cultural specificity than any other living tongue.
The authors do not deny the English language any cultural underpinning altogether:
But the cultural neutrality of English must not be pressed too far. The literal or metaphorical
use of such expressions as case law throughout the English-speaking world reflects a common
heritage in our legal system; and allusions to or quotations from Shakespeare, the Authorized
Version, Gray’s Elegy, Mark Twain, a sea shanty, a Negro spiritual or a Beatles song –
wittingly or not – testify similarly to a shared culture. The Continent means “continental
Europe” as readily in America and even Australia and New Zealand as it does in Britain. At
other times, English equally reflects the independent and distinct culture of one or the other of
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the English-speaking communities. (Quirk et al. 1985, 16)
If English, which “may remind us of England”, nonetheless “equally reflects” the culture of
numerous other communities, then the notion of a “shared culture” would seem to require
some further discussion. But the subject is not mentioned again in that book. Crystal’s (2003b)
influential recent books on the subject do not dwell on the issue of language and culture either.
For example, his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2003a), after noting that
“English is now the dominant or official language in over 75 territories” (rather than 60, as in
Crystal 1992), goes on to comment: “With over 60 political and cultural histories to consider, it
is difficult to find safe generalizations about the range of social functions with which English
has come to be identified. General statements about the structure of the language are somewhat
easier to make”. (Crystal 2003a, 106)
Clearly, if it is difficult to find “safe generalizations” about the social functions of English, the
same applies to its cultural underpinnings, which are not discussed in the Cambridge
Encyclopedia of the English Language any further.
It is understandable that more than sixty cultural histories can’t be all discussed at length in a
one-volume encyclopedia. But the question still suggests itself: what about the “shared culture”
mentioned, for example, by Quirk et al.’s A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language
(1985)? The founder of modern general linguistics, Wilhelm von Humboldt, affirmed that
“there resides in every language a characteristic world-view... every language contains the
whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind” (1988, 60).
Although Humboldt’s language may now seem dated, twentieth-century “language-and-culture”
studies have not undermined this view – quite the contrary. Should we now modify Humboldt
to say “every language but English”? Because English, unlike other languages, is “neutral” – a
purely functional international language free from the baggage of any particular history and
tradition? Or perhaps because English is so diversified that while sixty or more different
traditions may be reflected in it there isn’t any one tradition that provides some sort of shared
“conceptual fabric” (in Humboldt’s sense)?
With the growing importance of English in the contemporary world, there is an increasing
urgency to the question of whether there is an irreconcilable conflict between, on the one hand,
the view that English is shared by people belonging to many different cultural traditions and, on
the other, the notion that English itself – like any other language – is likely to have certain
cultural assumptions and values embedded in it.
The position taken in this book is that while there are many “Englishes” around the world (all
of them worthy of recognition, appreciation, and study), there is also an “Anglo” English – an
English of the “inner circle” (Kachru 1985, 1992), including “the traditional bases of English,
where it is the primary language: ... the USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand”
(Crystal 2003b, 60) and that this Anglo English is not a cultural tabula rasa.
1.2. English and Englishes
As the provocative title of Tom McArthur’s The English Languages (1998) indicates, the word
English (in the singular) and the phrase the English language have for many commentators
become problematic. With the expansion of English worldwide came its diversification, and so
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many different varieties of English are now used in the world that the propriety of the term
English itself is increasingly called into question.
For millions of “ordinary people”, however, especially those who have their hearts set on
learning “English” or having their children learn “English”, the news that according to some
language professionals “English” does not exist any more is unlikely to be of much interest. On
the other hand, the notion that there are many varieties of English and that in some contexts it
may be appropriate to use the term
“English” with a modifier can be relevant outside academic circles. The distinction between,
for example, “British English” and “American English” is widely accepted as useful.
It is also recognized that some other language varieties are sufficiently close to British English
and American English to be perceived as “varieties of English” and yet are more different from
British English and American English than these two are from one another – for example,
Indian English, Nigerian English, and Singapore English.
Braj Kachru’s (1985) proposed distinction between the “inner circle” and the “outer circle” of
English has been widely accepted in the literature as pertinent and helpful. In accordance with
this distinction, we can say that, for example, Australian English – different as it is in many
ways from both British and American English – belongs nonetheless to the inner circle,
whereas, for example, Singapore English belongs to the outer one.
Differences between different “varieties of English” have often been adduced in the literature as
an argument against linking the concept of “English” with that “culture”: how can English be an
expression of culture (so the argument goes) if it is used in so many different societies and if
there are so many different “Englishes”?
As I have argued for decades, however, the fact that there are many varieties of English, linked
with different societies and different cultural traditions, supports rather than undermines the
Humboldtian view of language as an expression of culture.
For example, the unique character of Australian English, consistent with the unique aspects of
Australian culture, illustrates the closeness of the links that exist between the language spoken
by a given community and its distinctive way of living and thinking (i.e., its culture). At the
same time, the fact that Australian English shares a great deal with British English – more so
than it does, for example, with Singapore English – reflects the common cultural heritage of
Britain and Australia.
I have been studying Australian English as an expression of Australian culture for more than
two decades (Wierzbicka 1984, 1986a, 1991, 1992, 1997, 2002a, 2003a, 2003b). I have also
studied (on a much more modest scale) Singapore English as an expression of Singapore
culture (Wierzbicka 2003c; Besemeres and Wierzbicka 2003; for a much more extensive study,
see Wong 2004a, 2004b, 2005). In both cases, a contrastive perspective is of paramount
importance: it is illuminating to compare Australian English with British English and to compare
Singapore English with Anglo English.
Kachru’s concept of the inner circle reflects his interest in distinguishing the “new
Englishes” (such as Indian English and Singapore English) from the older varieties. My own
interest in identifying aspects of the shared cultural core of the older varieties makes the term
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“Anglo English” more appropriate than the contrastive term “English(es) of the inner
circle” (not to mention cryptonyms like ENL, from “English as a native language”, which are
problematic for a variety of reasons, as well as technical and cryptic).
In essence, however, “Anglo English” studied in this book corresponds to Kachru’s “English
of the inner circle”. Although Anglo English, too, is an abstraction, it is in my view a concept
that captures an important historical and cultural reality. It goes without saying that Anglo
English is neither homogeneous nor unchanging, and the fact that, for example, Australian
English differs in many ways from British English makes this abundantly clear. At the same
time, to adequately characterize Englishes of the outer circle such as Singapore English and to
fully understand them as expressions of local cultures, it is eminently useful to be able to
compare and contrast them with Anglo English.
In a sense, this book is, primarily, about Anglo English, both as an expression and as a vital
aspect of Anglo culture. The phrase “Anglo culture” is even more controversial these days than
“the English language” (not to mention “Anglo English”, which is hardly used at all): to speak
of Anglo culture is to run the risk of being accused of essentialism, imperialism, even racism.
But the attacks on the notion of culture in general, and Anglo culture in particular, are little more
than academic Schongeisterei. As I wrote a decade ago, arguing against anthropologists Wolf
and Wallerstein, “while cultures are not immutable essences, with clearly drawn boundaries, to
reduce us all as cultural beings to members of myriad groups – crosscutting, overlapping, and
ever evolving, means to overlook the central reality... no one is more acutely aware of this
reality than a bilingual who lives his or her life in two languages and cultures” (Wierzbicka 1997,
18; see also 2005a, 2005b).
The concept of Anglo culture is potentially particularly useful to millions of immigrants to
Anglophone countries like Britain, the United States, and Australia.
To deny the validity of this concept means to deny the immigrants culture training, which is
essential to their social advancement. The same applies to Anglo English, which is an essential
part of Anglo culture.
Western scholars who are more focused on ideology than on the realities of the immigrant
condition have sometimes claimed that immigrants to English-speaking countries do not need
(Anglo) English and are not interested in acquiring it. For example, Claire Kramsch (1998, 26)
asserts that “immigrant language learners are increasingly disinclined to ... buy into the values
and beliefs that underpin native speaker language use in their respective communities”.
Kramsch supports her view on this point with a quote from the French semiotician Julia
Kristeva (1988, 10): “The absorption of foreignness proposed by our societies turns out to be
inacceptable [sic] for modern day individuals, who cherish their national and ethnic identity and
their intrinsically subjective, irreducible difference.”
As an immigrant myself, I can testify that such high-minded theoretical views do not match the
reality of my own life. Much as I cherish my national and ethnic identity (not to mention my
personal “irreducible difference”), during my thirty odd years of living in Australia I have had
to absorb a good deal of “foreignness” (that is, in my case, “Angloness” and also “AngloAustralianness”) into my ways of speaking, thinking, and acting. In particular, I have had to
learn to use words like fair, reasonable, and presumably (not to mention privacy) – and not just
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words, but the ideas and the cultural scripts associated with them. Autobiographical
testimonies by other immigrants to English-speaking countries are more consistent with my
experience than with Kristeva’s theorizing (e.g., Chow 1999; Danquah 2000; Besemeres and
Wierzbicka, to appear).
1.3. An Illustration: Words, Scripts, and Human Lives
I will illustrate both the shared cultural content of Anglo English and its heterogeneity with two
examples from Australian English. In a book-length essay entitled “Made in England:
Australia’s British Inheritance”, the eminent Australian writer David Malouf (2003) emphasizes
distinct features of Australian English such as “boldness and colour”, which “arise for the
most part from a strong sense of humour and larrikin sense of play, qualities we might trace
back to the cockney and criminal world of the convicts” (p. 49). At the same time, Malouf
(who is himself of part-English, part-Lebanese background) stresses “ ‘kindred’ ties and
feelings” linking Australians with all those who share the same habits of mind fostered and
transmitted by the English language and often alien to people “outside the magic circle of
Anglo-Saxon thinking” (p. 61). It is a circle characterized by “an ethos in which terms like ‘fair
play’, ‘sportsmanship’, ‘team spirit’ are meant to be translated out of the narrow world of
schoolboy rivalry and endeavour into the world of action and affairs; not as metaphors but as
practical forms of behaviour” (p. 60). It is fascinating to see how often the untranslatable
English word fair (see chapter 5) recurs in Malouf’s discussions of “Australia’s British
inheritance” (as when he talks, for example, about Australia’s bonds “with people with whom
we have a special relationship in which we are trusted to ‘play fair’, and to speak fair too”, p.
61).
The concept of “fairness”, “made in England” but elaborated in Australia and given a special
role in expressions like fair dinkum and a fair go (see OED 1989; AND 1988), is a good
example of both the cultural continuity and cultural change evidenced by Australian English.
A concept that illustrates innovation rather than continuity in Australian English and culture is
that of “dobbing”. Dob, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) as “to betray, to
inform against”, is described by it as “Australian slang”, but as I argued in earlier work, this
description is misleading: “in Australia, dob in is not slang …, it is simply part of common
everyday language, a word which is (still) in general use and which is clearly one of the key
words in Australian English” (Wierzbicka 1997, 212).
I have examined the meaning and the cultural significance of the verb dob and the noun dobber
in a number of earlier publications (see Wierzbicka 1984, 1986a, 1991, 1992, 1997). Here, I will
restrict myself to pointing out that the salient presence of these words in Australian English is
linked with a powerful “cultural script”: “it is bad to dob, it is bad to be a dobber” (i.e., to
“dob” on one’s “mates”) – a script that probably has its roots, at least partly, in the solidarity
of convicts vis-a-vis the authorities in the early period of Australia’s history.
The value of the traditional taboo against dobbing is now contested in public discussion in
Australia, but the concept remains salient in everyday thinking and continues to influence
people’s behavior, as the following recent quotes illustrate:
A lot of kids who are bullied to say that “you just don’t dob”. (Queensland Government 2002)
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The Australian attitude of “don’t dob in a mate” prevails within the adolescent subculture thus
reducing the possibility that older teens will disclose those that bully. (Betlem 2001)
Dob in a dumper. (Butler 2003)
The continued relevance of the concept of “dobbing” in people’s (including immigrants’) lives
is illustrated by the following testimony of a Chinese immigrant in Australia:
The other day at the dinner table, I asked my 6 year-old boy, who is attending kindergarten,
what he had learned in school. He happily told me that they learned how to deal with bullies.
My son used his five fingers of his right hand and said: “First, talk friendly, second, talk firmly,
third, ignore, fourth, walk away, and ...” Before he finished, my nephew, who is a 18 year-old
Chinese boy, said: “Report to the teacher”. My son burst into tears and said: “No, not report
to the teacher. I don’t like the word ‘report’. It doesn’t sound nice.” From my son’s reaction
to the word “report” I can see that the concept of “report” is different from my Chinese
nephew to my half-Chinese half-Australian Australian-born son. For a Chinese the word
“report” is just to tell something to somebody, but “report” to an Australian kid in this context
is not just to tell somebody something. It is “dobbing in”, which is a big offence, not at all
encouraged in Australian culture.
This incident reminds me of another situation in China. If you ask a primary school student the
question “What do you do if someone in school bullies you or does a bad thing to you?” 90 %
of the answers will be “Go to report to the teacher”. “Talk friendly, but firmly, ignore and walk
away” are not part of the main attitude in dealing with bullies in China. “Dobbing in” in China is
not as offensive as in Australia. (Wang 2005)
Neither language nor culture stands still, but in every period there are certain shared
understandings and shared cultural norms that find their expression in a community’s ways of
speaking. Words, with their meanings, provide evidence of the reality of such shared
understandings. Anglo English words like fair and fairness are constitutive of Anglo culture,
and distinctively Australian words like dob and dobber, of Australian culture. Neither
expressions like English, Anglo English, and Australian English nor those like Anglo culture and
Australian culture stand for any unchanging monolithic realities with sharp boundaries. They
stand for certain constructs, but these constructs are not fictions, and they have an impact on
people’s lives.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. Give a short summary of the text. What are the problems addressed in the chapter? How
topical are they? What accounts for their topicality?
2. What means of argumentation does the author employ to support her statements? E.g., how
does she support her thesis about the dominant place of the English language in the world?
How does the author explain the fact that the notion of the Japanese language and culture is
never frowned upon whereas the notion of the English language and culture is? How do you
understand the term “cultural neutrality of English”? What stands behind this term?
3. Does she support the idea of the “cultural neutrality” of English or does she argue against
the idea of cultural neutrality? What arguments does the author use to support her opinion that
“Anglo English is not a cultural tabula rasa”? How does the fact of the author being an
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immigrant help her in her argumentation? Whose opinion seems more plausible to you? Is
English culture-specific like all languages or should it be treated as an exception?
4. What is the essence of the “inner” and “outer circle division” of Englishes? How does this
idea help in solving the problem of cultural specificity of English?
5. What does her example of a Chinese immigrant in Australia illustrate? Can you give similar
examples from your own experience.
6. The first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of utterances with
clear indication of their interrelations and interdependence As we read in the short characteristic
of scientific style, the first and most noticeable feature of this style is the logical sequence of
utterances with clear indication of their interrelations and interdependence. How is the logical
sequence of the sentences in the text achieved? Analyze the connectives used by the author
and comment on their role in achieving the semantic and structural cohesion of the text.
7. Another characteristic feature of scientific style is the abundant use of terms. Point out the
linguistic terms used in the text. Scientific language is also characterized by the use of the
words in their direct, context independent meanings. Yet it does not absolutely exclude the
use of metaphors, does it? Try to find cases of metaphors in the text and define their type (trite
or original).
8. Still another characteristic feature of scientific style is the use of special sentence –
patterns. The most frequent of them are: postulatory, argumentative and formulative. Find
examples of these types in the text and comment on their functions.
9. Scientific texts are also characterized by the abundant use of quotations and references,
which the authors use to argue for or against the points under discussion. Comments on the
quotations Anna Wierzbicka uses and their function in the text.
10. The morphology of the scientific texts is characterized by the frequent use of passive
constructions. Find the cases of passive constructions and account for their use.
11. Describing scientific texts some authors consider impersonality as a typical feature of this
style. The effect of impersonality is achieved by the use of passive constructions and the use
of the impersonal scientific “we”. Does Anna Wierzbicka follow the norms of scientific style
very strictly or can we trace personal notes in her style? Give examples to support your
opinion.
12. Summarize your observations for the final analysis of the text.
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Steven Arthur Pinker (born 1954)
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a
Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist,
linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone
Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of
evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of
mind.
Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and
psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include
mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention,
children’s language development, regular and irregular
phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and
grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and
communication,
including
euphemism,
innuendo,
emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has
written two technical books that proposed a general theory
of language acquisition and applied it to children’s learning of verbs. In particular, his work
with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children
acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such
as adding “-ed” to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn
irregular forms one by one.
In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an
innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is
the author of seven books for a general audience. Five of these, The Language Instinct
(1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002),
and The Stuff of Thought (2007), describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics and
cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research. In the sixth book, The Better
Angels of Our Nature (2011), Pinker makes the case that violence in human societies has, in
general, steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. His
seventh book, The Sense of Style (2014), is intended as a general style guide that is informed
by modern science and psychology, offering advice on how to produce more comprehensible
and unambiguous writing in nonfiction contexts and explaining why so much of today’s
academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand.
The Language Instinct (1994) is one of his most widely read books. As the title suggests,
Pinker’s The Language Instinct supports the theory that language is innate and that humans
have a common “universal grammar”. This is the major theme of his book. He also
considers the relationship between language and thought, arguing against claims for a
strong dependence of the latter on language. One of the most important concepts introduced
in the book is one of “mentalese”. Mentalese is a universal, underlying language of the
mind, related to, but different from, all natural spoken languages. It is used for thinking and
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it is from mentalese that the thoughts get translated into the words and phrases of natural
languages. Pinker uses this concept to put to rest the hypothesis of linguistic determinism:
language shaping the thought along the lines of “what cannot be said cannot be thought
about”. As critics say, in this book Steven Pinker explains everything you always wanted to
know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain
computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven
Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a
human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the
William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public
Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. Noam Chomsky characterized it as
“an extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written”.
Pinker has been named as one of the world’s most influential intellectuals by various
magazines. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National
Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the
American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of
Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on
the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public debates
on science and society and is a regular contributor to the online science and culture digest
from The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language
Chapter 3. Mentalese
The year 1984 has come and gone, and it is losing its connotation of the totalitarian nightmare
of George Orwell’s 1949 novel. But relief may be premature. In an appendix to “Nineteen
Eighty-four”, Orwell wrote of an even more ominous date. In 1984, the infidel Winston Smith
had to be converted with imprisonment, degradation, drugs, and torture; by 2050, there would
be no Winston Smiths. For in that year the ultimate technology for thought control would be in
place: the language Newspeak.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view
and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other
modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once
and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the
principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on
words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to
every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other
meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly
by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping
such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary
meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it
could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free
from weeds”. It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free”,
since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore
of necessity nameless.
A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had
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once had the secondary meaning of “politically equal”, or that free had once meant
“intellectually free”, than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware
of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and
errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and
therefore unimaginable.
But there is a straw of hope for human freedom: Orwell’s caveat “at least so far as thought is
dependent on words”. Note his equivocation: at the end of the first paragraph, a concept is
unimaginable and therefore nameless; at the end of the second, a concept is nameless and
therefore unimaginable. Is thought dependent on words? Do people literally think in English,
Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak? Or are our thoughts couched in some silent
medium of the brain – a language of thought, or “mentalese” – and merely clothed in words
whenever we need to communicate them to a listener? No question could be more central to
understanding the language instinct.
In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine
thoughts. Inspired by Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”, pundits accuse
governments of manipulating our minds with euphemisms like pacification (bombing), revenue
enhancement (taxes), and nonretention (firing). Philosophers argue that since animals lack
language, they must also lack consciousness – Wittgenstein wrote, “A dog could not have the
thought ‘perhaps it will rain tomorrow’ ” – and therefore they do not possess the rights of
conscious beings. Some feminists blame sexist thinking on sexist language, like the use of he to
refer to a generic person. Inevitably, reform movements have sprung up <…>.
And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people’s thoughts are determined by the
categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating
that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. People
who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages
that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundamentally different Hopi
concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the
foundational categories of reality are not “in” the world but are imposed by one’s culture (and
hence can be challenged, perhaps accounting for the perennial appeal of the hypothesis to
undergraduate sensibilities).
But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of
what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense
but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it
is so pregnant with implications. (The “fact” that we use only five percent of our brains, that
lemmings commit mass suicide, that the Boy Scout Manual annually outsells all other books,
and that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages are other examples.) Think
about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and
realizing that it wasn’t exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a
“what we meant to say” that is different from what we said.
Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or
read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a
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gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words, how could
a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a word to begin with? How could
translation from one language to another be possible? <…>
As we shall see in this chapter, there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape
their speakers’ ways of thinking. But I want to do more than review the unintentionally comical
history of attempts to prove that they do. The idea that language shapes thinking seemed
plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it.
Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to
equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts. By understanding
why linguistic determinism is wrong, we will be in a better position to understand how language
itself works when we turn to it in the next chapters.
The linguistic determinism hypothesis is closely linked to the names Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir, a brilliant linguist, was a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas.
Boas and his students (who also include Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead) were important
intellectual figures in this century, because they argued that nonindustrial peoples were not
primitive savages but had systems of language, knowledge, and culture as complex and valid in
their world view as our own. In his study of Native American languages Sapir noted that
speakers of different languages have to pay attention to different aspects of reality simply to
put words together into grammatical sentences. For example, when English speakers decide
whether or not to put -ed onto the end of a verb, they must pay attention to tense, the relative
time of occurrence of the event they are referring to and the moment of speaking. Wintu
speakers need not bother with tense, but when they decide which suffix to put on their verbs,
they must pay attention to whether the knowledge they are conveying was learned through
direct observation or by hearsay.
Sapir’s interesting observation was soon taken much farther. Whorf was an inspector for the
Hartford Fire Insurance Company and an amateur scholar of Native American languages,
which led him to take courses from Sapir at Yale. In a much-quoted passage, he wrote:
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types
that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every
observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of
impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic
systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as
we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement
that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely
obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of
data which the agreement decrees”.
What led Whorf to this radical position? He wrote that the idea first occurred to him in his
work as a fire prevention engineer when he was struck by how language led workers to
misconstrue dangerous situations. For example, one worker caused a serious explosion by
tossing a cigarette into an “empty” drum that in fact was full of gasoline vapor. Another lit a
blowtorch near a “pool of water” that was really a basin of decomposing tannery waste, which,
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far from being “watery”, was releasing inflammable gases. Whorf s studies of American
languages strengthened his conviction. For example, in Apache, It is a dripping spring must be
expressed “As water, or springs, whiteness moves downward”. “How utterly unlike our way
of thinking!” he wrote.
But the more you examine Whorf’s arguments, the less sense they make. Take the story about
the worker and the “empty” drum. The seeds of disaster supposedly lay in the semantics of
empty, which, Whorf claimed, means both “without its usual contents” and “null and void,
empty, inert”. The hapless worker, his conception of reality molded by his linguistic categories,
did not distinguish between the “drained” and “inert” senses, hence, flick ... boom! But wait.
Gasoline vapor is invisible. A drum with nothing but vapor in it looks just like a drum with
nothing in it at all. Surely this walking catastrophe was fooled by his eyes, not by the English
language.
The example of whiteness moving downward is supposed to show that the Apache mind does
not cut up events into distinct objects and actions. Whorf presented many such examples from
Native American languages. The Apache equivalent of The boat is grounded on the beach is “It
is on the beach pointwise as an event of canoe motion”. He invites people to a feast becomes
“He, or somebody, goes for eaters of cooked food”. He cleans a gun with a ramrod is
translated as “He directs a hollow moving dry spot by movement of tool”. All this, to be sure,
is utterly unlike our way of talking. But do we know that it is utterly unlike our way of thinking?
As soon as Whorf s articles appeared, the psycholinguists Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown
pointed out two non sequiturs in his argument. First, Whorf did not actually study any
Apaches; it is not clear that he ever met one. His assertions about Apache psychology are
based entirely on Apache grammar – making his argument circular. Apaches speak differently,
so they must think differently. How do we know that they think differently? Just listen to the
way they speak!
<…>
The fundamentally different Hopi concept of time is one of the more startling claims about how
minds can vary. Whorf wrote that the Hopi language contains “no words, grammatical forms,
constructions, or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time / or to past, or future, or
to enduring or lasting/’ ” He suggested, too, that the Hopi had “no general notion or intuition of
time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal
rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past”. According to Whorf, they did not
conceptualize events as being like points, or lengths of time like days as countable things.
Rather, they seemed to focus on change and process itself, and on psychological distinctions
between presently known, mythical, and conjecturally distant. The Hopi also had little interest
in “exact sequences, dating, calendars, chronology.”
What, then, are we to make of the following sentence translated from Hopi?
Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the
sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again.
Perhaps the Hopi are not as oblivious to time as Whorf made them out to be. In his extensive
study of the Hopi, the anthropologist Ekkehart Malotki, who reported this sentence, also
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showed that Hopi speech contains tense, metaphors for time, units of time (including days,
numbers of days, parts of the day, yesterday and tomorrow, days of the week, weeks, months,
lunar phases, seasons, and the year), ways to quantify units of time, and words like “ancient”,
“quick”, “long time”, and “finished”. Their culture keeps records with sophisticated methods
of dating, including a horizon-based sun calendar, exact ceremonial day sequences, knotted
calendar strings, notched calendar sticks, and several devices for timekeeping using the
principle of the sundial. No one is really sure how Whorf came up with his outlandish claims,
but his limited, badly analyzed sample of Hopi speech and his long-time leanings toward
mysticism must have contributed.
<…>
People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise, or sit on a page, for all to
hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else
is thinking, or to talk to each other about the nature of thinking, we have to use – what else,
words! It is no wonder that many commentators have trouble even conceiving of thought
without words – or is it that they just don’t have the language to talk about it?
As a cognitive scientist I can afford to be smug about common sense being true (thought is
different from language) and linguistic determinism being a conventional absurdity. For two
sets of tools now make it easier to think clearly about the whole problem. One is a body of
experimental studies that break the word barrier and assess many kinds of nonverbal thought.
The other is a theory of how thinking might work that formulates the questions in a satisfyingly
precise way.
We have already seen an example of thinking without language: Mr. Ford, the fully intelligent
aphasic discussed in Chapter 2. (One could, however, argue that his thinking abilities had been
constructed before his stroke on the scaffolding of the language he then possessed.) We have
also met deaf children who lack a language and soon invent one. Even more pertinent are the
deaf adults occasionally discovered who lack any form of language whatsoever – no sign
language, no writing, no lip reading, no speech. In her recent book A Man Without Words,
Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a
small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los
Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and
Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full
grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble
understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers. In an epiphany reminiscent of the
story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach
him the sign for “cat”. A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the signs for all the objects
he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a
child he had begged his desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops he
had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities. He led Schaller to other
languageless adults in forgotten corners of society. Despite their isolation from the verbal
world, they displayed many abstract forms of thinking, like rebuilding broken locks, handling
money, playing card games, and entertaining each other with long pantomimed narratives.
Our knowledge of the mental life of Ildefonso and other languageless adults must remain
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impressionistic for ethical reasons: when they surface, the first priority is to teach them
language, not to study how they manage without it. But there are other languageless beings who
have been studied experimentally, and volumes have been written about how they reason about
space, time, objects, number, rate, causality, and categories. Let me recount three ingenious
examples. One involves babies, who cannot think in words because they have not yet learned
any. One involves monkeys, who cannot think in words because they are incapable of learning
them. The third involves human adults, who, whether or not they think in words, claim their
best thinking is done without them.
The developmental psychologist Karen Wynn has recently shown that five-month-old babies
can do a simple form of mental arithmetic. She used a technique common in infant perception
research. Show a baby a bunch of objects long enough, and the baby gets bored and looks
away; change the scene, and if the baby notices the difference, he or she will regain interest.
The methodology has shown that babies as young as five days old are sensitive to number. In
one experiment, an experimenter bores a baby with an object, then occludes the object with an
opaque screen. When the screen is removed, if the same object is present, the babies look for
a little while, then get bored again. But if, through invisible subterfuge, two or three objects
have ended up there, the surprised babies stare longer.
In Wynn’s experiment, the babies were shown a rubber Mickey Mouse doll on a stage until
their little eyes wandered. Then a screen came up, and a prancing hand visibly reached out
from behind a curtain and placed a second Mickey Mouse behind the screen. When the screen
was removed, if there were two Mickey Mouses visible (something the babies had never
actually seen), the babies looked for only a few moments. But if there was only one doll, the
babies were captivated – even though this was exactly the scene that had bored them before
the screen was put in place. Wynn also tested a second group of babies, and this time, after the
screen came up to obscure a pair of dolls, a hand visibly reached behind the screen and
removed one of them. If the screen fell to reveal a single Mickey, the babies looked briefly; if it
revealed the old scene with two, the babies had more trouble tearing themselves away. The
babies must have been keeping track of how many dolls were behind the screen, updating their
counts as dolls were added or subtracted. If the number inexplicably departed from what they
expected, they scrutinized the scene, as if searching for some explanation.
Vervet monkeys live in stable groups of adult males and females and their offspring. The
primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have noticed that extended families form
alliances like the Montagues and Capulets. In a typical interaction they observed in Kenya, one
juvenile monkey wrestled another to the ground screaming. Twenty minutes later the victim’s
sister approached the perpetrator’s sister and without provocation bit her on the tail. For the
retaliator to have identified the proper target, she would have had to solve the following
analogy problem: A (victim) is to B (myself) as C (perpetrator) is to X, using the correct
relationship “sister of” (or perhaps merely “relative of”; there were not enough vervets in the
park for Cheney and Seyfarth to tell).
But do monkeys really know how their groupmates are related to each other, and, more
impressively, do they realize that different pairs of individuals like brothers and sisters can be
related in the same way? Cheney and Seyfarth hid a loudspeaker behind a bush and played
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tapes of a two-year-old monkey screaming. The females in the area reacted by looking at the
mother of the infant who had been recorded – showing that they not only recognized the infant
by its scream but recalled who its mother was. Similar abilities have been shown in the
longtailed macaques that Verena Dasser coaxed into a laboratory adjoining a large outdoor
enclosure. Three slides were projected: a mother at the center, one of her offspring on one
side, and an unrelated juvenile of the same age and sex on the other. Each screen had a button
under it. After the monkey had been trained to press a button under the offspring slide, it was
tested on pictures of other mothers in the group, each one flanked by a picture of that
mother’s offspring and a picture of another juvenile. More than ninety percent of the time the
monkey picked the offspring. In another test, the monkey was shown two slides, each showing
a pair of monkeys, and was trained to press a button beneath the slide showing a particular
mother and her juvenile daughter. When presented with slides of new monkeys in the group,
the subject monkey always picked the mother-and-offspring pair, whether the offspring was
male, female, infant, juvenile, or adult. Moreover, the monkeys appeared to be relying not only
on physical resemblance between a given pair of monkeys, or on the sheer number of hours
they had previously spent together, as the basis for recognizing they were kin, but on
something more subtle in the history of their interaction. Cheney and Seyfarth, who work hard
at keeping track of who is related to whom in what way in the groups of animals they study,
note that monkeys would make excellent primatologists.
Many creative people insist that in their most inspired moments they think not in words but in
mental images. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that visual images of scenes and words once
appeared involuntarily before him in a dreamlike state (perhaps opium-induced). He managed
to copy the first forty lines onto paper, resulting in the poem we know as “Kubla Khan”,
before a knock on the door shattered the images and obliterated forever what would have been
the rest of the poem. Many contemporary novelists, like Joan Didion, report that their acts of
creation begin not with any notion of a character or a plot but with vivid mental pictures that
dictate their choice of words. The modern sculptor James Surls plans his projects lying on a
couch listening to music; he manipulates the sculptures in his mind’s eye, he says, putting an
arm on, taking an arm off, watching the images roll and tumble.
Physical scientists are even more adamant that their thinking is geometrical, not verbal. Michael
Faraday, the originator of our modern conception of electric and magnetic fields, had no
training in mathematics but arrived at his insights by visualizing lines of force as narrow tubes
curving through space. James Clerk Maxwell formalized the concepts of electromagnetic fields
in a set of mathematical equations and is considered the prime example of an abstract
theoretician, but he set down the equations only after mentally playing with elaborate imaginary
models of sheets and fluids. Nikola Tesla’s idea for the electrical motor and generator,
Friedrich Kekule’s discovery of the benzene ring that kicked off modern organic chemistry,
Ernest Lawrence’s conception of the cyclotron, James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery
of the DNA double helix – all came to them in images. The most famous self-described visual
thinker is Albert Einstein, who arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding a
beam of light and looking back at a clock, or dropping a coin while standing in a plummeting
elevator. He wrote:
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“The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more
or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined. ... This combinatory
play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought – before there is any connection
with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to
others. The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type.
Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary state,
when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.”
<…>
What sense, then, can we make of the suggestion that images, numbers, kinship relations, or
logic can be represented in the brain without being couched in words? In the first half of this
century, philosophers had an answer: none. Reifying thoughts as things in the head was a
logical error, they said. A picture or family tree or number in the head would require a little
man, a homunculus, to look at it. And what would be inside his head – even smaller pictures,
with an even smaller man looking at them? But the argument was unsound. It took Alan Turing,
the brilliant British mathematician and philosopher, to make the idea of a mental representation
scientifically respectable. Turing described a hypothetical machine that could be said to engage
in reasoning. In fact this simple device, named a Turing Machine in his honor, is powerful
enough to solve any problem that any computer, past, present, or future, can solve. And it
clearly uses an internal symbolic representation – a kind of mentalese – without requiring a little
man or any occult processes. By looking at how a Turing machine works, we can get a grasp
of what it would mean for a human mind to think in mentalese as opposed to English. <…>
We end up with the following picture. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache;
they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these
languages; presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols that
correspond to who did what to whom, as in the paint-spraying representation shown above.
But compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in
others. It must be richer, for example, in that several concept symbols must correspond to a
given English word like stool or stud. There must be extra paraphernalia that differentiate
logically distinct kinds of concepts, like Ralph’s tusks versus tusks in general, and that link
different symbols that refer to the same thing, like the tall blond man with one black shoe and
the man. On the other hand, mentalese must be simpler than spoken languages; conversationspecific words and constructions (like a and the) are absent, and information about
pronouncing words, or even ordering them, is unnecessary. Now, it could be that English
speakers think in some kind of simplified and annotated quasi-English, with the design I have
just described, and that Apache speakers think in a simplified and annotated quasi- Apache.
But to get these languages of thought to subserve reasoning properly, they would have to look
much more like each other than either one does to its spoken counterpart, and it is likely that
they are the same: a universal mentalese.
Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice
versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman
animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to
translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what
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learning English would mean.
So where does all this leave Newspeak? Here are my predictions for the year 2050. First, since
mental life goes on independently of particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality
will be thinkable even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more concepts than
there are words, and listeners must always charitably fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid,
existing words will quickly gain new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third,
since children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but create a complex
grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize Newspeak into a natural language, possibly
in a single generation. The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith’s revenge.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Text
1. Give a short summary of the chapter under analysis. What is the main idea discussed in the
chapter? Comment on the title of the chapter. How is it related to the topic under discussion?
How topical are the ideas discussed in the chapter?
2. Steven Pinker opens the chapter by a reference to the Newspeak introduced by George
Orwell in his famous novel “1984”. And he returns to this reference in the end of the chapter
which suggests that it carries out an important function in the text. What role does this
reference play in the text? How is the concept NEWSPEAK related to the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis of linguistic determinism? What is the essence of this hypothesis? In discussing the
hypothesis of linguistic determinism Steven Pinker resorts to the much-quoted passage from
Benjamin Whorf. Does he quote Whorf to support his idea or to argue against it? What facts
does Steven Pinker use to prove his point of view? How convincing do they sound? Comment
on the manner of his argumentation. Does it sound emotion-free which is typical of scientific
style or do you find it rather emotional? Prove your opinion by quoting the text. Find examples
of language means that contribute to the tonality of the text (epithets, metaphors, intensifiers,
rhetorical questions etc.).
3. Comment on the way he presents the central idea of the chapter – the existence of
mentalese. What facts does he resort to make his idea very convincing and very
understandable at the same time? Do you share his opinion or do you differ from the author?
Give facts from your own linguistic experience to support your opinion.
4. Compare the style of Steven Pinker with that of Anna Wierzbicka. Do you find them similar
or different? If you find them different point out the main points of difference. Many critics
consider Steven Pinker’s books as examples of popular science. Though science and society
are considered as two worlds lying far from each other, in order to bridge the gap, scientists
write popular articles which strive to inform non-specialists about new scientific insights and
discoveries. As Steven Pinker writes in the preface to his book his book is intended for a very
wide audience: for language lovers, for readers of popular science, for students unaware of the
science of language and mind and for professional colleagues scattered across many
disciplines. Numerous manual for popular science writings give the following tips for the
writers: a) structure your article well; b) use a catchy title; c) simplify the content; d) use the
active voice; e) make sure that the contents and language of the popular article are suited to a
wider circle of readers; f) use as few special terms as possible, and avoid excessively long
sentences. Analyze the chapter from this angle to see if the characterization of Pinker’s writing
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as popular science is true.
5. Summarize your observations for the final analysis of the text.
Scientific Texts for Self-Guided Analysis
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language
Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning
Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say
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Scienti ic Texts for Self-Guided Analysis
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language
Geoffrey Leech. Semantics. The Study of Meaning
Robin Lakoff. You Are What You Say
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Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates language
Chapter 5. Words, Words, Words (abridged)
The word glamour comes from the word grammar, and since the Chomskyan revolution the
etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental
grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules? There
has been a book on mind and matter called Grammatical Man, and a Nobel Prize lecture
comparing the machinery of life to a generative grammar. Chomsky has been interviewed in
Rolling Stone and alluded to on Saturday Night Live. In Woody Allen’s story “The Whore of
Mensa,” the patron asks, “Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”
“It’d cost you,” she replies.
Unlike the mental grammar, the mental dictionary has had no cachet. It seems like nothing more
than a humdrum list of words, each transcribed into the head by dull-witted rote memorization.
In the preface to his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson wrote:
“It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the
fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of
praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have
been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the
writer of dictionaries. Johnson’s own dictionary defines lexicographer as “a harmless drudge,
that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words”.
In this chapter we will see that the stereotype is unfair. The world of words is just as wondrous
as the world of syntax, or even more so. For not only are people as infinitely creative with
words as they are with phrases and sentences, but memorizing individual words demands its
own special virtuosity.
Recall the uwg-test, passed by any preschooler: “Here is a wug. Now there are two of them.
There are two”. Before being sochallenged, the child has neither heard anyone say, nor been
rewarded for saying, the word wugs. Therefore words are not simply retrieved from a mental
archive. People must have a mental rule for generating new words from old ones, something
like “To form the plural of a noun, add the suffix -s” The engineering trick behind human
language – its being a discrete combinatorial system – is used in at least two different places:
sentences and phrases are built out of words by the rules of syntax, and the words themselves
are built out of smaller bits by another set of rules, the rules of “morphology”.
The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other
languages. The English noun comes in exactly two forms (duck and ducks), the verb in four
(quack, quacks, quacked, quacking). In modern Italian and Spanish every verb has about fifty
forms; in classical Greek, three hundred and fifty; in Turkish, two million! Many of the
languages I have brought up, such as Eskimo, Apache, Hopi, Kivunjo, and American Sign
Language, are known for this prodigious ability. How do they do it? Here is an example from
Kivunjo, the Bantu language that was said to make English look like checkers compared to
chess. The verb “Naiklmlyiia”, meaning “He is eating it for her”, is composed of eight parts:
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• N-: A marker indicating that the word is the “focus” of that point in the conversation.
• -a-: A subject agreement marker. It identifies the eater as falling into Class 1 of the sixteen
gender classes, “human singular”. (Remember that to a linguist “gender” means kind, not sex.)
Other genders embrace nouns that pertain to several humans, thin or extended objects, objects
that come in pairs or clusters, the pairs or clusters themselves, instruments, animals, body
parts, diminutives (small or cute versions of things), abstract qualities, precise locations, and
general locales.
• Present tense. Other tenses in Bantu can refer to today, earlier today, yesterday, no earlier
than yesterday, yesterday or earlier, in the remote past, habitually, ongoing, consecutively,
hypothetically, in the future, at an indeterminate time, not yet, and sometimes.
• -ki-: An object agreement marker, in this case indicating that the thing eaten falls into gender
Class 7.
• -m-: A benefactive marker, indicating for whose benefit the action is taking place, in this
case a member of gender Class 1.
• -lyi-: The verb, “to eat”.
• -1-: An “applicative” marker, indicating that the verb’s cast of players has been augmented
by one additional role, in this case the benefactive. (As an analogy, imagine that in English we
had to add a suffix to the verb bake when it is used in 1 baked her a cake as opposed to the
usual I baked a cake.)
• -a : A final vowel, which can indicate indicative versus subjunctive mood.
If you multiply out the number of possible combinations of the seven prefixes and suffixes, the
product is about half a million, and that is the number of possible forms per verb in the
language. In effect, Kivunjo and languages like it are building an entire sentence inside a single
complex word, the verb.
But I have been a bit unfair to English. English is genuinely crude in its “inflectional”
morphology, where one modifies a word to fit the sentence, like marking a noun for the plural
with -s or a verb for past tense with -ed. But English holds its own in “derivational”
morphology, where one creates a new word out of an old one. For example, the suffix -able,
as in learnable, teachable, and huggable, converts a verb meaning “to do X” into an adjective
meaning “capable of having X done to it”. Most people are surprised to learn how many
derivational suffixes there are in English. Here are the more common ones:
-able
-ate
-ify
-ize
-age
-ed
-ion
-ly
-al
-en
-ish
-ment
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In addition, English is free and easy with “compounding”, which glues two words together to
form a new one, like toothbrush and mouse-eater. Thanks to these processes, the number of
possible words, even in morphologically impoverished English, is immense. The computational
linguist Richard Sproat compiled all the distinct words used in the forty-four million words of
text from Associated Press news stories beginning in mid-February 1988. Up through
December 30, the list contained three hundred thousand distinct word forms, about as many as
in a good unabridged dictionary. You might guess that this would exhaust the English words
that would ever appear in such stories. But when Sproat looked at what came over the wire on
December 31, he found no fewer than thirty-five new forms, including instrumenting,
counterprograms, armhole, part-Vul- can, fuzzier, groveled, houlderlike, mega-lizard,
traumatological, and ex-critters.
Even more impressive, the output of one morphological rule can be the input to another, or to
itself: one can talk about the unmicro-waveability of some French fries or a toothbrush-holder
fastener box in which to keep one’s toothbrush-holder fasteners. This makes the number of
possible words in a language bigger than immense; like the number of sentences, it is infinite.
Putting aside fanciful coinages concocted for immortality in Guinness, a candidate for the
longest word to date in English might be floccinaucinihilipilification, defined in the Oxford
English Dictionary as “the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial”. But that is a
record meant to be broken:floccinaucinihilipilificational. pertaining to the categorizing of
something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalize: to cause something to pertain
to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalization: the
act of causing something to pertain to the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial
-an
-er
-ism
-ness
-ant
-ful
-ist
-ory
-ance -hood
-ity
-ous
-ary
-ive
-y
-ic
floccinaucinihilipilificationalizationah pertaining to the act of causing something to pertain to the
categorizing of something as worthless or trivial floccinaucinihilipilificationalizationalize\ to
cause something to pertain to the act of causing something to pertain ...
Or, if you suffer from sesquipedaliaphobia, you can think of your great-grandmother, your
great-great-grandmother, your great-great- great-grandmother, and so on, limited only in
practice by the number of generations since Eve.
What’s more, words, like sentences, are too delicately layered to be generated by a chaining
device (a system that selects an item from one list, then moves on to some other list, then to
another). When Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as
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Star Wars, he imagined a future in which an incoming Soviet missile would be shot down by an
anti-missile missile. But critics pointed out that the Soviet Union could counterattack with an
anti-anti-missile-missile missile. No problem, said his MIT-educated engineers; we’ll just build
an anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile missile. These high-tech weapons need a high-tech
grammar – something that can keep track of all the anti’s at the beginning of the word so that it
can complete the word with an equal number of missile’s, plus one, at the end. A word
structure grammar (a phrase structure grammar for words) that can embed a word in between
an anti- and its missile can achieve these objectives; a chaining device cannot, because it has
forgotten the pieces that it laid down at the beginning of the long word by the time it gets to the
end.
(TSsssS)
Like syntax, morphology is a cleverly designed system, and many of the seeming oddities of
words are predictable products of its internal logic. Words have a delicate anatomy consisting
of pieces, called morphemes, that fit together in certain ways. The word structure system is an
extension of the X-bar phase structure system, in which big nounish things are built out of
smaller nounish things, smaller nounish things are built out of still smaller nounish things, and
so on. The biggest phrase involving nouns is the noun phrase; a noun phrase contains an Nbar; an N-bar contains a noun – the word. Jumping from syntax to morphology, we simply
continue the dissection, analyzing the word into smaller and smaller nounish pieces. <…>
Our ability to appreciate a pattern inside a word, while knowing that the pattern is not the
product of some potent rule, is the inspiration for a whole genre of wordplay. Self-conscious
writers and speakers often extend Latinate root suffixes to new forms by analogy, such as
religiosity, criticality, systematicity, randomicity, insipidify, calumniate, conciliate, stereotypy,
disaffiliate, gallonage, and Shavian. The words have an air of heaviosity and seriosity about
them, making the style an easy target for parody. A 1982 editorial cartoon by Jeff MacNelly put
the following resignation speech into the mouth of Alexander Haig, the malaprop-prone
Secretary of State:
I decisioned the necessifaction of the resignatory action/option due to the dangerosity of the
trendflowing of foreign policy away from our originatious careful coursing towards
consistensivity, purposity, steadfastnitude, and above all, clarity.
<…>
A word, in a word, is complicated. But then what in the world is a word? We have just seen
that “words” can be built out of parts by morphological rules. But then what makes them
different from phrases or sentences? Shouldn’t we reserve the word “word” for a thing that
has to be rote-memorized, the arbitrary Saussurean sign that exemplifies the first of the two
principles of how language works (the other being the discrete combinatorial system)? The
puzzlement comes from the fact that the everyday word “word” is not scientifically precise. It
can refer to two things.
The concept of a word that I have used so far in this chapter is a linguistic object that, even if
built out of parts by the rules of morphology, behaves as the indivisible, smallest unit with
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respect to the rules of syntax – a “syntactic atom”, in atom s original sense of something that
cannot be split. The rules of syntax can look inside a sentence or phrase and cut and paste the
smaller phrases inside it. For example, the rule for producing questions can look inside the
sentence This monster eats mice and move the phrase corresponding to mice to the front,
yielding What did this monster eat? But the rules of syntax halt at the boundary between a
phrase and a word; even if the word is built out of parts, the rules cannot look “inside” the
word and fiddle with those parts. For example, the question rule cannot look inside the word
mice-eater in the sentence This monster is a mice-eater and move the morpheme corresponding
to mice to the front; the resulting question is virtually unintelligible: What is this monster an eater? (Answer: mice.) Similarly, the rules of syntax can stick an adverb inside a phrase, as in
This monster eats mice quickly. But they cannot stick an adverb inside a word, as in This
monster is a mice-quickly- eater. For these reasons, we say that words, even if they are
generated out of parts by one set of rules, are not the same thing as phrases, which are
generated out of parts by a different set of rules. Thus one precise sense of our everyday term
“word” refers to the units of language that are the products of morphological rules, and which
are unsplittable by syntactic rules.
The second, very different sense of “word” refers to a rote-memorized chunk: a string of
linguistic stuff that is arbitrarily associated with a particular meaning, one item from the long list
we call the mental dictionary. The grammarians Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin Williams
coined the term “listeme”, the unit of a memorized list, to refer to this sense of “word” (their
term is a play on “morpheme”, the unit of morphology, and “phoneme”, the unit of sound).
Note that a listeme need not coincide with the first precise sense of “word”, a syntactic atom.
A listeme can be a tree branch of any size, as long as it cannot be produced mechanically by
rules and therefore has to be memorized. Take idioms. There is no way to predict the meaning
of kick the bucket, buy the farm, spill the beans, bite the bullet, screw the pooch, give up the
ghost, hit the fan, or go bananas from the meanings of their components using the usual rules
of heads and role- players. Kicking the bucket is not a kind of kicking, and buckets have
nothing to do with it. The meanings of these phrase-sized units have to be memorized as
listemes, just as if they were simple word-sized units, and so they are really “words” in this
second sense. Di Sciullo and Williams, speaking as grammatical chauvinists, describe the
mental dictionary (lexicon) as follows: “If conceived of as the set of listemes, the lexicon is
incredibly boring by its very nature. ... The lexicon is like a prison – it contains only the
lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in common is their lawlessness”.
In the rest of this chapter I turn to the second sense of “word”, the listeme. It will be a kind of
prison reform: I want to show that the lexicon, though a repository of lawless listemes, is
deserving of respect and appreciation. What seems to a grammarian like an act of brute force
incarceration – a child hears a parent use a word and thenceforth retains that word in memory
– is actually an inspiring feat.
One extraordinary feature of the lexicon is the sheer capacity for memorization that goes into
building it. How many words do you think an average person knows? If you are like most
writers who have offered an opinion based on the number of words they hear or read, you
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might guess a few hundred for the uneducated, a few thousand for the literate, and as many as
15,000 for gifted wordsmiths like Shakespeare (that is how many distinct words are found in
his collected plays and sonnets).
The real answer is very different. People can recognize vastly more words than they have
occasion to use in some fixed period of time or space. To estimate the size of a person’s
vocabulary – in the sense of memorized listemes, not morphological products, of course,
because the latter are infinite – psychologists use the following method. Start with the largest
unabridged dictionary available; the smaller the dictionary, the more words a person might
know but not get credit for. Funk & Wagnal’s New Standard Unabridged Dictionary, to take
an example, has 450,000 entries, a healthy number, but too many to test exhaustively. (At thirty
seconds a word, eight hours a day, it would take more than a year to test a single person.)
Instead, draw a sample – say, the third entry from the top of the first column on every eighth
left-hand page. Entries often have many meanings, such as “hard: (1) firm; (2) difficult; (3)
harsh; (4) toilsome ...” and so on, but counting them would require making arbitrary decisions
about how to lump or split the meanings. Thus it is practical only to estimate how many words
a person has learned at least one meaning for, not how many meanings a person has learned
altogether. The testee is presented with each word in the sample, and asked to choose the
closest synonym from a set of alternatives. After a correction for guessing, the proportion
correct is multiplied by the size of the dictionary, and that is an estimate of the person’s
vocabulary size.
Actually, another correction must be applied first. Dictionaries are consumer products, not
scientific instruments, and for advertising purposes their editors often inflate the number of
entries. (“Authoritative. Comprehensive. Over 1.7 million words of text and 160,000
definitions. Includes a 16-page full-color atlas.”) They do it by including compounds and
affixed forms whose meanings are predictable from the meanings of their roots and the rules of
morphology, and thus are not true listemes. For example, my desk dictionary includes,
together with sail, the derivatives sailplane, sailer, sailless, sailing-boat, and sailcloth, whose
meanings I could deduce even if I had never heard them before.
The most sophisticated estimate comes from the psychologists William Nagy and Richard
Anderson. They began with a list of 227,553 different words. Of these, 45,453 were simple
roots and stems. Of the remaining 182,100 derivatives and compounds, they estimated that all
but 42,080 could be understood in context by someone who knew their components. Thus
there were a total of 44,453 + 42,080 = 88,533 listeme words. By sampling from this list and
testing the sample, Nagy and Anderson estimated that an average American high school
graduate knows 45,000 words – three times as many as Shakespeare managed to use! Actually,
this is an underestimate, because proper names, numbers, foreign words, acronyms, and many
common undecomposable compounds were excluded. There is no need to follow the rules of
Scrabble in estimating vocabulary size; these forms are all listemes, and a person should be
given credit for them. If they had been included, the average high school graduate would
probably be credited with something like 60,000 words (a tetrabard?), and superior students,
because they read more, would probably merit a figure twice as high, an octobard.
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Is 60,000 words a lot or a little? It helps to think of how quickly they must have been learned.
Word learning generally begins around the age of twelve months. Therefore, high school
graduates, who have been at it for about seventeen years, must have been learning an average
of ten new words a day continuously since their first birthdays, or about a new word every
ninety waking minutes. Using similar techniques, we can estimate that an average six-year-old
commands about 13,000 words (notwithstanding those dull, dull Dick and Jane reading
primers, which were based on ridiculously lowball estimates). A bit of arithmetic shows that
preliterate children, who are limited to ambient speech, must be lexical vacuum cleaners,
inhaling a new word every two waking hours, day in, day out. Remember that we are talking
about listemes, each involving an arbitrary pairing. Think about having to memorize a new
batting average or treaty date or phone number every ninety minutes of your waking life since
you took your first steps. The brain seems to be reserving an especially capacious storage
space and an especially rapid transcribing mechanism for the mental dictionary. Indeed,
naturalistic studies by the psychologist Susan Carey have shown that if you casually slip a new
color word like olive into a conversation with a three-year-old, the child will probably
remember something about it five weeks later.
Now think of what goes into each act of memorization. A word is the quintessential symbol. Its
power comes from the fact that every member of a linguistic community uses it
interchangeably in speaking and understanding. If you use a word, then as long as it is not too
obscure I can take it for granted that if I later utter it to a third party, he will understand my use
of it the same way I understood yours. I do not have to try the word back on you to see how
you react, or test it out on every third party and see how they react, or wait for you to use it
with third parties. This sounds more obvious than it is. After all, if I observe that a bear snarls
before it attacks, I cannot expect to scare a mosquito by snarling at it; if I bang a pot and the
bear flees, I cannot expect the bear to bang a pot to scare hunters. Even within our species,
learning a word from another person is not just a case of imitating that person’s behavior.
Actions are tied to particular kinds of actors and targets of the action in ways that words are
not. If a girl learns to flirt by watching her older sister, she does not flirt with the sister or with
their parents but only with the kind of person that she observes to be directly affected by the
sister’s behavior. Words, in contrast, are a universal currency within a community. In order to
learn to use a word upon merely hearing it used by others, babies must tacitly assume that a
word is not merely a person’s characteristic behavior in affecting the behavior of others, but a
shared bidirectional symbol, available to convert meaning to sound by any person when the
person speaks, and sound to meaning by any person when the person listens, according to the
same code.
Since a word is a pure symbol, the relation between its sound and its meaning is utterly
arbitrary. As Shakespeare (using a mere tenth of a percent of his written lexicon and a far tinier
fraction of his mental one) put it,
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Because of that arbitrariness, there is no hope that mnemonic tricks might lighten the
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memorization burden, at least for words that are not built out of other words. Babies should
not, and apparently do not, expect cattle to mean something similar to battle, or singing to be
like stinging, or coats to resemble goats. Onomatopoeia, where it is found, is of no help,
because it is almost as conventional as any other word sound. In English, pigs go “oink”; in
Japanese, they go “boo-boo”. Even in sign languages the mimetic abilities of the hands are put
aside and their configurations are treated as arbitrary symbols. Residues of resemblance
between a sign and its referent can occasionally be discerned, but like onomatopoeia they are
so much in the eye or ear of the beholder that they are of little use in learning. In American Sign
Language the sign for “tree” is a motion of a hand as if it was a branch waving in the wind; in
Chinese Sign Language “tree” is indicated by the motion of sketching a tree trunk.
The psychologist Laura Ann Petitto has a startling demonstration that the arbitrariness of the
relation between a symbol and its meaning is deeply entrenched in the child’s mind. Shortly
before they turn two, English-speaking children learn the pronouns you and me. Often they
reverse them, using you to refer to themselves. The error is forgivable. You and me are
“deictic” pronouns, whose referent shifts with the speaker: you refers to you when I use it but
to me when you use it. So children may need some time to get that down. After all, Jessica
hears her mother refer to her, Jessica, using you why should she not think that you means
“Jessica”?
Now, in ASL the sign for “me” is a point to one’s chest; the sign for “you” is a point to one’s
partner. What could be more transparent? One would expect that using “you” and “me” in
ASL would be as foolproof as knowing how to point, which all babies, deaf and hearing, do
before their first birthday. But for the deaf children Petitto studied, pointing is not pointing.
The children used the sign of pointing to their conversational partners to mean “me” at exactly
the age at which hearing children use the spoken sound you to mean “me”. The children were
treating the gesture as a pure linguistic symbol; the fact that it pointed somewhere did not
register as being relevant. This attitude is appropriate in learning sign languages; in ASL, the
pointing hand-shape is like a meaningless consonant or vowel, found as a component of many
other signs, like “candy” and “ugly”.
There is one more reason we should stand in awe of the simple act of learning a word. The
logician W.V.O. Quine asks us to imagine a linguist studying a newly discovered tribe. A rabbit
scurries by, and a native shouts, “Gavagai!” What does gavagai mean? Logically speaking, it
needn’t be “rabbit”. It could refer to that particular rabbit (Flopsy, for example). It could mean
any furry thing, any mammal, or any member of that species of rabbit (say, Oryctolagus
cuniculus), or any member of that variety of that species (say, chinchilla rabbit). It could mean
scurrying rabbit, scurrying thing, rabbit plus the ground it scurries upon, or scurrying in
general. It could mean footprint-maker, or habitat for rabbit-fleas. It could mean the top half of
a rabbit, or rabbit-meat-on-the-hoof, or possessor of at least one rabbit’s foot. It could mean
anything that is either a rabbit or a Buick. It could mean collection of undetached rabbit parts,
or “Lo! Rabbithood again!,” or “It rabbiteth”, analogous to “It raineth”.
The problem is the same when the child is the linguist and the parents are the natives.
Somehow a baby must intuit the correct meaning of a word and avoid the mind-boggling
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number of logically impeccable alternatives. It is an example of a more general problem that
Quine calls “the scandal of induction,” which applies .to scientists and children alike: how can
they be so successful at observing a finite set of events and making some correct generalization
about all future events of that sort, rejecting an infinite number of false generalizations that are
also consistent with the original observations?
We all get away with induction because we are not open-minded logicians but happily blinkered
humans, innately constrained to make only certain kinds of guesses – the probably correct
kinds – about how the world and its occupants work. Let’s say the word-learning baby has a
brain that carves the world into discrete, bounded, cohesive objects and into the actions they
undergo, and that the baby forms mental categories that lump together objects that are of the
same kind. Let’s also say that babies are designed to expect a language to contain words for
kinds of objects and words for kinds of actions – nouns and verbs, more or less. Then the
undetached rabbit parts, rabbit-trod ground, intermittent rabbiting, and other accurate
descriptions of the scene will, fortunately, not occur to them as possible meanings of gavagai.
But could there really be a preordained harmony between the child’s mind and the parent’s?
Many thinkers, from the woolliest mystics to the sharpest logicians, united only in their assault
on common sense, have claimed that the distinction between an object and an action is not in
the world or even in our minds, initially, but is imposed on us by our language’s distinction
between nouns and verbs. And if it is the word that delineates the thing and the act, it cannot
be the concepts of thing and act that allow for the learning of the word.
I think common sense wins this one. In an important sense, there really are things and kinds of
things and actions out there in the world, and our mind is designed to find them and to label
them with words. That important sense is Darwin’s. It’s a jungle out there, and the organism
designed to make successful predictions about what is going to happen next will leave behind
more babies designed just like it. Slicing space-time into objects and actions is an eminently
sensible way to make predictions given the way the world is put together. Conceiving of an
extent of solid matter as a thing – that is, giving a single mentalese name to all of its parts –
invites the prediction that those parts will continue to occupy some region of space and will
move as a unit. And for many portions of the world, that prediction is correct. Look away, and
the rabbit still exists; lift the rabbit by the scruff of the neck, and the rabbit’s foot and the
rabbit ears come along for the ride.
What about kinds of things, or categories? Isn’t it true that no two individuals are exactly alike?
Yes, but they are not arbitrary collections of properties, either. Things that have long furry ears
and tails like pom-poms also tend to eat carrots, scurry into burrows, and breed like, well,
rabbits. Lumping objects into categories – giving them a category label in mentalese – allows
one, when viewing an entity, to infer some of the properties one cannot directly observe, using
the properties one can observe. If Flopsy has long furry ears, he is a “rabbit”; if he is a rabbit,
he might scurry into a burrow and quickly make more rabbits.
Moreover, it pays to give objects several labels in mentalese, designating different-sized
categories like “cottontail rabbit”, “rabbit”, “mammal”, “animal”, and “living thing”. There is a
tradeoff involved in choosing one category over another. It takes less effort to determine that
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Peter Cottontail is an animal than that he is a cottontail (for example, an animallike motion will
suffice for us to recognize that he is an animal, leaving it open whether or not he is a cottontail).
But we can predict more new things about Peter if we know he is a cottontail than if we merely
know he is an animal. If he is a cottontail, he likes carrots and inhabits open country or
woodland clearings; if he is merely an animal, he could eat anything and live anywhere, for all
one knows. The middle-sized or “basic-level” category “rabbit” represents a compromise
between how easy it is to label something and how much good the label does you.
Finally, why separate the rabbit from the scurry? Presumably because there are predictable
consequences of rabbithood that cut across whether it is scurrying, eating, or sleeping: make a
loud sound, and in all cases it will be down a hole lickety-split. The consequences of making a
loud noise in the presence of lionhood, whether eating or sleeping, are predictably different,
and that is a difference that makes a difference. Likewise, scurrying has certain consequences
regardless of who is doing it; whether it be rabbit or lion, a scurrier does not remain in the
same place for long. With sleeping, a silent approach will generally work to keep a sleeper –
rabbit or lion – motionless. Therefore a powerful prognosticator should have separate sets of
mental labels for kinds of objects and kinds of actions. That way, it does not have to learn
separately what happens when a rabbit scurries, what happens when a lion scurries, what
happens when a rabbit sleeps, what happens when a lion sleeps, what happens when a gazelle
scurries, what happens when a gazelle sleeps, and on and on; knowing about rabbits and lions
and gazelles in general, and scurrying and sleeping in general, will suffice. With m objects and n
actions, a knower needn’t go through m x n learning experiences; it can get away with m + n of
them.
So even a wordless thinker does well to chop continuously flowing experience into things,
kinds of things, and actions (not to mention places, paths, events, states, kinds of stuff,
properties, and other types of concepts). Indeed, experimental studies of baby cognition have
shown that infants have the concept of an object before they learn any words for objects, just
as we would expect. Well before their first birthday, when first words appear, babies seem to
keep track of the bits of stuff that we would call objects: they show surprise if the parts of an
object suddenly go their own ways, of if the object magically appears or disappears, passes
through another solid object, or hovers in the air without visible means of support.
Attaching words to these concepts, of course, allows one to share one’s hard-won discoveries
and insights about the world with the less experienced or the less observant. Figuring out
which word to attach to which concept is the gavagai problem, and if infants start out with
concepts corresponding to the kinds of meanings that languages use, the problem is partly
solved. Laboratory studies confirm that young children assume that certain kinds of concepts
get certain types of words, and other kinds of concepts cannot be the meaning of a word at all.
The developmental psychologists Ellen Markman and Jeanne Hutchinson gave two- and threeyear-old children a set of pictures, and for each picture asked them to “find another one that is
the same as this”. Children are intrigued by objects that interact, and when faced with these
instructions they tend to select pictures that make groups of role-players like a blue jay and a
nest or a dog and a bone. But when Markman and Hutchinson told them to “find another dax
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that is the same as this dax” the children’s criterion shifted. A word must label a kind of thing,
they seemed to be reasoning, so they put together a bird with another type of bird, a dog with
another type of dog. For a child, a dax simply cannot mean “a dog or its bone”, interesting
though the combination may be.
Of course, more than one word can be applied to a thing: Peter Cottontail is not only a rabbit
but an animal and a cottontail. Children have a bias to interpret nouns as middle-level kinds of
objects like “rabbit”, but they also must overcome that bias, to learn other types of words like
animal. Children seem to manage this by being in sync with a striking feature of language.
Though most common words have many meanings, few meanings have more than one word.
That is, homonyms are plentiful, synonyms rare. (Virtually all supposed synonyms have some
difference in meaning, however small. For example, skinny and slim differ in their connotation
of desirability; policeman and cop differ in formality.) No one really knows why languages are
so stingy with words and profligate with meanings, but children seem to expect it (or perhaps it
is this expectation that causes it!), and that helps them further with the gavagai problem. If a
child already knows a word for a kind of thing, then when another word is used for it, he or
she does not take the easy but wrong way and treat it as a synonym. Instead, the child tries out
some other possible concept. For example, Markman found that if you show a child a pair of
pewter tongs and call it biff, the child interprets biff as meaning tongs in general, showing the
usual bias for middle-level objects, so when asked for “more biffs,” the child picks out a pair
of plastic tongs. But if you show the child a pewter cup and call it biff\ the child does not
interpret biff as meaning “cup,” because most children already know a word that means “cup,”
namely, cup. Loathing synonyms, the children guess that biff must mean something else, and
the stuff the cup is made of is the next most readily available concept. When asked for more
biffs, the child chooses a pewter spoon or pewter tongs.
Many other ingenious studies have shown how children home in on the correct meanings for
different kinds of words. Once children know some syntax, they can use it to sort out different
kinds of meaning. For example, the psychologist Roger Brown showed children a picture of
hands kneading a mass of little squares in a bowl. If he asked them, “Can you see any sibbing?
,” the children pointed to the hands. If instead he asked them, “Can you see a sib?,” they point
to the bowl. And if he asked, “Can you see any sib?,” they point to the stuff inside the bowl.
Other experiments have uncovered great sophistication in children’s understanding of how
classes of words fit into sentence structures and how they relate to concepts and kinds.
So what’s in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a
morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules
and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of
a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the
mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.
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Geoffrey Leech
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English
language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author or editor of over 30 books and over
120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus
linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and semantics.
from Semantics. The Study of Meaning
(first published 1974)
Chapter1. Meanings of Meaning
Ogden and Richards and After
The word “meaning” and its corresponding verb “to mean” are among the most eminently
discussable terms in the English language, and sem- anticists have often seemed to spend an
immoderate amount of time puzzling out the “meanings of meaning” as a supposedly necessary
preliminary to the study of their subject. Perhaps the best-known book ever written on
semantics, that which C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards published in 1923, had the very title The
Meaning of Meaning, and contained, on pp. 186-7, a list of as many as twenty-two definitions
of the word, taking different non-theoretical or theoretical starting points. Here, for interest’s
sake, is a selection of the meanings given:
an intrinsic property
the other words annexed to a word in the dictionary
the connotation of a word
the place of anything in a system
the practical consequences of a thing in our future experience
that to which the user of a symbol actually refers
that to which the user of a symbol ought to be referring
that to which the user of a symbol believes himself to be referring
that to which the interpreter of a symbol
(a)
refers
(b)
believes himself to be referring
(c)
believes the user to be referring.
Ogden and Richards, presenting this list, tried to show how confusion and misunderstanding
come about because of lack of agreement about such basic terms as meaning. But they lodiked
forward to a day when (as a result of the education of the public through their book and by
other channels) “the Influence of Language upon Thought is understood, and the Phantoms
due to linguistic misconception have been removed”; from here, the way would be open, they
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felt, “to more fruitful methods of Interpretation and to an Art of Conversation by which the
communicants can enjoy something more than the customary stones and scorpions”.
The fascinating glimpse of a utopia of pure, polite conversation given us by Ogden and
Richards is in part their own peculiar view of things, but other semanticists (notably those of
the General Semantics movement inaugurated by Korzybski’s Science and Sanity in 1933) have
also seen the solution of problems of meaning, thought, and communication as a potential
cure-all for the ills of modern society. Other investigators have also, like Ogden and Richards,
looked towards science for the clarification of semantic concepts. Ogden and Richards, in
1923, felt confident enough in the progress of science to assert:
During the last few years advances in biology, and the psychological investigation of memory
and heredity, have placed the “meaning” of signs in general beyond doubt, and it is here shown
that thought and language are to be treated in the same manner, (p. 249)
Ten years later, Bloomfield, in Language (1933), the most influential book on language to be
published between the wars, similarly hitched semantics to the onward march of science, but
with a slightly different emphasis. It was not the scientific study of mental phenomena (thought
and symbolization) that he saw as providing the semanticist’s answers, but the scientific
definition of everything to which language may refer:
We can define the meaning of a speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do with
some matter of which we possess scientific knowledge. We can define the names of minerals,
for example, in terms of chemistry and mineralogy, as when we say that the ordinary meaning
of the English word salt is “sodium chloride (NaCl)”, and we can define the names of plants or
animals by means of the technical terms of botany or zoology, but we have no precise way of
defining words like love or hate, which concern situations that have not been accurately
classified – and these latter are in the great majority. (Language, p. 139)
Bloomfield, then, was less sanguine about the wonders of science than Ogden and Richards.
His conclusion, not surprisingly, sounded a pessimistic note, which turned out to be the virtual
death-knell of semantics in the U.S.A. for the next twenty years: “The statement of meanings is
therefore the weak point in language-study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances
very far beyond its present state.” (p. 140).
Taken to its logical terminus, Bloomfield’s argument implies a vision of an eventual period
when everything would be capable of authoritative scientific definition, or in simpler words,
when everything there was to be known would be known about everything – something even
more illusory than Ogden’s and Richards’s idyll of a conversational paradise. Bloomfield was
writing at a time when there was interest in the concept of “unified science” – that is, in the idea
that all sciences, from physics to psychology, could be cemented together into one vast
monolith of knowledge - but even allowing for this, his picture of the semanticist waiting
patiently for the accumulation and solidification of the totality of human knowledge relies on
what in hindsight is a naive view of the nature of science. Three flaws were latent in
Bloomfield’s approach.
Firstly, at any given time, there are usually competing scientific accounts of the same
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phenomenon. Which of them do we choose for our definition?
In the second place, science does not progress in the manner of a tub filling up with water – it
progresses by a continuing process of revision and clarification, leading to greater clarity and
depth of understanding. Since scientific statements are by nature provisional, it is difficult to
foresee a time when everyone would be sufficiently confident that no further significant
reformulations would be forthcoming to be able to start safely defining words like love and
hate.
Thirdly, a definition in terms of a scientific formula, such as salt = NaCl, simply exchanges one
set of linguistic symbols for another, and so postpones the task of semantic explication one
step further. Assuming that scientific language, like everyday language, has meaning, we are
faced with the problem of defining the meaning of NaCP; and if we could replace this with a
more precise or informative scientific formula, the same problem would arise with that, and so
on ad infinitum. In other words, Bloomfield’s recipe for discovering meaning leads into a path
of infinite regression; it turns out to be a dead end not only on practical but on logical grounds.
The problems of Ogden’s and Richards’s and Bloomfield’s approaches to meaning arise
mainly from the determination to explain semantics in terms of other scientific disciplines. One
may argue that much of the apparent ambiguity of the term meaning, which bothered Ogden
and Richards, has the same source. Certainly most of the twenty-two definitions given by them
(as the examples on p. 1 above show) are the authors’ wording of technical definitions of
philosophers, psychologists, philologists, literary critics, and other specialists; and much of the
conflict between these definitions is explicable in terms of each specialist’s need or desire to
tailor the study of meaning to the requirements of his own field. So a philosopher may define
meaning, for his purposes, in terms of truth and falsehood; a behaviourist psychologist in
terms of stimulus and response; a literary critic in terms of the reader’s response; and so on.
Naturally enough, their definitions, springing from diverse frames of reference, will have little in
common.
While admitting that study in related fields could provide insight for the student of semantics,
many people will wonder why semantics need be considered dependent, in this way, on
extrinsic considerations. In fact, as soon as we start to treat semantics as deserving its own
frame of reference instead of having to borrow one from elsewhere, we dispel many of the
difficulties that have beset its development in the past fifty years. An autonomous discipline
begins not with answers, but with questions. We might say that the whole point of setting up a
theory of semantics is to provide a “definition” of meaning – that is, a systematic account of
the nature of meaning. To demand a definition of meaning before we started discussing the
subject would simply be to insist on treating certain other concepts, e.g. stimulus and
response, as in some sense more basic and more important. A physicist does not have to
define notions like “time”, “heat”, “colour”, “atom” before he starts investigating their
properties. Rather, definitions, if they are needed, emerge from the study itself.
Once this commonplace is accepted, the question of how to define meaning, which so
preoccupied Ogden and Richards, is seen in its true colour as a red herring.
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A Linguistic Starting Point for Semantics
So far I have been trying to clear the ground, by arguing that the study of meaning should be
free from subservience to other disciplines. This leads naturally to the challenge: “How then
should meaning be studied? What sort of questions should we be trying to answer in setting up
a theory of meaning? What principles should form its foundations?”
One of the keynotes of a modern linguistic approach to semantics is that there is no escape
from language: an equation such as cent – hundredth of a dollar or salt = NaCl is not a
matching of a linguistic sign with something outside language; it is a correspondence between
two linguistic expressions, supposedly having “the same meaning”. The search for an
explanation of linguistic phenomena in terms of what is not language is as vain as the search for
an exit from a room which has no doors or windows, for the word “explanation” itself implies
a statement in language. Our remedy, then, is to be content with exploring what we have inside
the room: to study relations within language, such as paraphrase or synonymy (both terms
meaning roughly “sameness of meaning”). Paraphrase, and some other relations of meaning
capable of systematic study, are illustrated below. Entailment and presupposition are types of
meaning-dependence holding between one utterance and another; logical inconsistency is a
type of semantic contrastiveness between utterances.
1. X: The defects of the plan were obvious
is a paraphrase OF Y: The demerits of the scheme were evident.
2. X: The earth goes round the sun
entails Y: The earth moves.
3. X: John’s son is called Marcus
presupposes Y: John has a son.
4. X: The earth goes round the sun
is inconsistent with Y: The earth is stationary.
These are some of the relations of meaning between two utterances X and Y that a semantic
theory may profitably try to explain; we shall look at these, and other, relations of meaning
more carefully later on (pp. 73–82).
A second principle underlying many present-day linguistic approaches to semantics is seeing
the task of language study as the explication of the linguistic competence of the native speaker
of a language; that is, the provision of rules and structures which specify the mental apparatus
a person must possess if he is to “know” a given language. Applied to the semantic end of
language, this leads to the question “What is it to know the meaning of a word, a sentence,
etc.?” rather than just “What is meaning?”. And among the evidence for such knowledge one
may include recognizing semantic relations such as 1–4 above.
Another type of evidence that a person knows the semantics of a language is his recognition
that certain utterances or expressions, although they obey the grammatical rules of the language
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concerned, are “unsemantic” in the sense that they are aberrant or odd from the point of view
of meaning. One such oddity isa tautology, ora statement which has to be true by virtue of its
meaning alone, such as:
Monday came before the day which followed it.
We rarely have occasion to make such statements, because (except where we are explaining an
unfamiliar linguistic usage) they tell a listener nothing that he did not know before, and so are
communicatively empty. At the opposite side of acceptability are contradictions, or statements
which are, by virtue of meaning, necessarily false:
Everything I like I dislike.
My brother had the toothache in his toe.
These are more decidedly deviant than tautologies: they are not just informationally vacuous,
but are downright nonsensical. Modern linguistics has concentrated, in defining what a given
language is, on specifying which sentences are acceptable within that language, and which are
not – that is, on marking the boundaries between what is possible and impossible within the
rules of the language. This has naturally brought into focus the native speaker’s ability to
discriminate between “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” sentences, and it is this ability in the
area of meaning that we appeal to if we say that an ability to distinguish semantically odd
sentences from meaningful sentences is a manifestation of his knowledge of rules of meaning in
his language.
Semantically odd or deviant sentences are not restricted to contradictions and tautologies.
There are, for example, questions which logically permit only one answer (yes or no), and so
do not need to be asked: Has your mother any sons or daughters? There are also sentences
which are unanswerable, because they have absurd presuppositions: Do you know how the
man who killed his widow was punished? This sort of whimsicality is a reminder of the “tangletalk” or nonsense rigmaroles which children indulge in*as a kind of verbal sport:
I went to the pictures tomorrow I took a front seat at the back 1 fell from the pit to the gallery
And broke a front bone in my back.
A lady she gave me some chocolate,
I ate it and gave it her back;
I phoned for a taxi and walked it,
And that’s why I never came back.
(Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, p. 25)
The natural fascination children find in beating the bounds otmeaning- fulness might be
counted among the symptoms of that “intuitive grasp” of meaning, or semantic competence as
the linguist would call it, shared by the speakers of a language.
Language and the “Real World”
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But for the linguist, as for the philosopher, a crucial difficulty lies in drawing a boundary not
simply between sense and nonsense, but between the kind of nonsense which arises from
contradipting what we know about language and meaning, and the kind of nonsense which
comes from contradicting what we know about the ‘real world’. If a speaker of English is
asked to comment on the utterance
(1) My uncle always sleeps standing on one toe he might exclaim: “But that can’t be true! No
one can sleep like that!” His response would be similar to what he might say if faced with the
contradiction
(2) My uncle always sleeps awake.
But on reflection, he would probably explain the two absurdities differently. Sentence (1)
would be unbelievable because of what he knows about the world we live in, more specifically
about the posture in which sleep is possible. Sentence (2) would be more than unbelievable – it
would point to the unimaginable, because of the contradiction between the two meanings of
sleep and awake. But both statements would strike him as absurd in the same way, to the
extent that they would both be necessarily false.
An analogy can be drawn here between the rules of a language and the rules of a game. Events
within a football match, for instance, may be impossible (a) because they are against the rules
of the game, or (b) because they violate natural laws regarding physical strength of human
beings, the inability of footballs to defy ordinary laws of motion (e.g. by moving in the air like
boomerangs), etc. Thus a football report that The centre-forward scored a goal by heading a
ball from his own goal-line’ would be disbelieved as physically impossible, while The centreforward scored a goal by punching the ball into the goal-mouth’ would be disbelieved on the
grounds that if such a thing happened, the game could not have been football.
The difference felt between (1) and (2) above is brought out in the different strategies we adopt
in trying to make sense of them. It seems to be an incontrovertible principle of semantics that
the human mind abhors a vafcuum of sense; so a speaker of English faced with absurd
sentences will strain his interpretative faculty to the utmost to read them meaningfully. For (1),
My uncle always sleeps standing on one toe, two strategies of interpretation seem possible.
The first is to assume a transfer of meaning by which either sleeps or standing on one toe is
understood in a new or unusual sense. Standing on one toe, for instance, might be taken as a
hyperbole or exaggerated substitute for “topsy-turvy”, or ‘in a weird posture’. The second
strategy is to imagine some miraculous, unprecedented situation (e.g. the uncle’s having
subjected himself to training in a hitherto unpractised version of yoga) in which this statement
might be true. For (2) My uncle always sleeps awake, however, only the first strategy of
transfer of meaning can be applied: the solution here must be to resolve the semantic conflict
between “sleeping” and “waking” by (for example) understanding sleeps in a metaphorical way
as “behaves as if asleep”. A factual absurdity can be made sensible by extending one’s
imagination to the conception of a possible world (perhaps a dream world or fictional world) in
which it could be true. A logical contradiction is on the other hand a linguistic absurdity, which,
if it is to be made meaningful, requires a linguistic remedy, a “tampering with the rules of the
language game”, just as the impossible manoeuvre described under (b) above would require a
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rewriting of the rules of football.
The distinction between language (including “logic”) on the one hand, and factual or “real
world” knowledge on the other, will be explored further in Chapter 2 (pp. 12–13), and in
Chapter 11 we shall also investigate the notion of transfer of meaning, and see in what sense it
amounts to a “tampering with language”. At this stage, let us simply note that such a distinction
is felt to exist, but that it is not easy for a linguist or a philosopher to justify it, or to prescribe
how to draw a line in individual cases. Nevertheless, practical considerations, if no others,
compel us to make such a distinction, for to do otherwise would be to enlarge the domain of
semantics (as Bloomfield by implication enlarged it) into the impossibly vast study of
everything that is to be known about the universe in which we live. We shall look at this
distinction more critically in Chapter 5 (pp. 82–86).
Summary
In this chapter I have tried to make three main points about the study of meaning:
1. That it is mistaken to try to define meaning by reducing it to the terms of Sciences other than
the science of language: e.g. to the terms of psychology or chemistry.
2. That meaning can best be studied as a linguistic phenomenon in its own right, not as
something “outside language”. This means we investigate what it is to “know a language”
semantically, e.g. to know what is involved in recognizing relations of meaning between
sentences, and in recognizing which sentences are meaningful and which are not.
3. That point (2) rests on a distinction between “knowledge of language” and “knowledge of
the ‘real world’ ”.
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Robin Lakoff
Robin Lakoff (born 1942) is a professor of linguistics at the University of California,
Berkeley. She was educated at Radcliffe, the University of Indiana, and Harvard, and is the
author of Language and Women’s Place (1975) and coauthor of Face Value: The Politics of
Beauty (1984).The essay included here comes from the July 1974 issue of Ms magazine.
You Are What You Say
“Women’s language” is that pleasant (dainty?), euphemistic, never – aggressive way of talking
we learned as little girls. Сultural bias was built into the language we were allowed to speak, the
subjects we were allowed to speak about, and the ways we were spoken of. Having learned our
linguistic lesson well, we go out in the world, only to discover that we are communicative
cripples – damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.
If we refuse to talk “like a lady”, we are ridiculed and criticized for being unfeminine. (“She
thinks like a man” is, at best, a left – handed compliment.) If we do learn all the fuzzy-headed,
unassertive language of our sex, we are ridiculed for being unable to think clearly, unable to
take part in a serious discussion, and therefore unfit to hold a position of power.
It doesn’t take much of this for a woman to begin feeling she deserves such treatment because
of inadequacies in her own intelligence and education.
“Women’s language” shows up in all levels of English. For example, women are encouraged
and allowed to make far more precise discriminations in naming colors than men do. Words
like mauve, beige, ecru, aquamarine, lavender, and so on, are unremarkable in a woman’s
active vocabulary, but largely absent from that of most men. I know of no evidence suggesting
that women actually see a wider range of colors than men do. It is simply that fine
discriminations of this sort are relevant to women’s vocabularies, but not to men’s; to men,
who control most of the interesting affairs of the world, such distinctions are trivial-irrelevant.
In the area of syntax, we find similar gender-related peculiarities of speech. There is one
construction, in particular, that women use conversationally far more than men: the tagquestion. A tag is midway between an outright statement and a yes-no question; it is less
assertive than the former, but more confident than the latter.
A flat statement indicates confidence in the speaker’s knowledge and is fairly certain to be
believed; a question indicates a lack of knowledge on some point and implies that the gap in
the speaker’s knowledge can and will be remedied by an answer. For example, if, at a Little
League game, I have had my glasses off, I can legitimately ask someone else: “Was the player
out at third?” A tag question, being intermediate between statement and question, is used when
the speaker is stating a claim, but lacks full confidence in the truth of that claim. So if I say, “Is
Joan here?” I will probably not be surprised if my respondent answers “no”; but if I say, “Joan
is here, isn’t she?” instead, chances are I am already biased in favor of a positive answer,
wanting only confirmation. I still want a response, but I have enough knowledge (or think I
have) to predict that response. A tag question, then, might be thought of as a statement that
doesn’t demand to be believed by anyone but the speaker, a way of giving leeway, of not
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forcing the addressee to go along with the views of the speaker.
Another common use of the tag-question is in small talk when the speaker is trying to elicit
conversation: “Sure is hot here, isn’t it?”
But in discussing personal feelings or opinions, only the speaker normally has any way of
knowing the correct answer. Sentences such as “I have a headache, don’t I?” are clearly
ridiculous. But there are other examples where it is the speaker’s opinions, rather than
perceptions, for which corroboration is sought, as in “The situation in Southeast Asia is
terrible, isn’t it?”
While there are, of course, other possible interpretations of a sentence like this, one possibility
is that the speaker has a particular answer in mind – “yes” or “no” – but is reluctant to state it
baldly. This sort of tag question is much more apt to be used by women than by men in
conversation. Why is this the case?
The tag question allows a speaker to avoid commitment, and thereby avoid conflict with the
addressee. The problem is that, by so doing, speakers may also give the impression of not
really being sure of themselves, or looking to the addressee for confirmation of their views.
This uncertainly is reinforced in more subliminal ways, too. There is a peculiar sentence
intonation – pattern, used almost exclusively by women, as far as I know, which changes a
declarative answer into a question. The effect of using the rising inflection typical of a yes – no
question is to imply that the speaker is seeking confirmation, even though the speaker is clearly
the only one who has the requisite information, which is why the question was put to her in the
first place:
(Q) When will dinner be ready?
(A) Oh … around six o’clock…?
It is as though the second speaker were saying, “Six o’clock – if that’s okay with you, if you
agree.” The person being addressed is put in the position of having to provide confirmation.
One likely consequence of this sort of speech – pattern in a woman is that, often unbeknownst
to herself, the speaker builds a reputation of tentativeness, and others will refrain from taking
her seriously or trusting her with any real responsibilities, since she “can’t make up her mind,”
and “isn’t sure of herself.”
Such idiosyncrasies may explain why women’s language sounds much more “polite” than
men’s. It is polite to leave a decision open, not impose your mind, or views, or claims, on
anyone else. So a tag-question is a kind of polite statement, in that it does not force agreement
or belief on the addressee. In the same way a request is a polite command, in that it does not
force obedience on the addressee, but rather suggests something be done as a favor to the
speaker. A clearly stated order implies a threat of certain consequences if it is not followed,
and – and more impolite – implies that the speaker is in a superior position and able to enforce
the order. By couching wishes in the form of a request, on the other hand, a speaker implies
that if the request is not carried out, only the speaker will suffer; noncompliance cannot harm
the addressee. So the decision is really left up to addressee. The distinction becomes clear in
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these examples:
Close the door.
Please close the door.
Will you close the door?
Will you please close the door?
Won’t you close the door?
In the same ways as words and speech patterns used by women undermine her image, those
used to describe women make matters even worse. Often a word may be used of both men
and women (and perhaps of things as well); but when it is applied to women, it assumes a
special meaning that, by implication rather than outright assertion, is derogatory to women as a
group.
The use of euphemisms has this effect. A euphemism is a substitute for a word that has
acquired a bad connotation by association with something unpleasant or embarrassing. But
almost as soon as the new word comes into common usage, it takes on the same old bad
connotations, since feelings about the things or people referred to are not altered by a change
of name; thus new euphemisms must be constantly found.
There is one euphemism for woman still very much alive. The word, of course, is lady. Lady
has a masculine counterpart, namely gentleman, occasionally shortened to gent. But for some
reason lady is very much commoner than gent (leman).
The decision to use lady rather than woman, or vice versa, may considerably alter the sense of
a sentence, as the following examples show:
(a)
A woman (lady) I know is a dean at Berkeley.
(b)
A woman (lady) I know makes amazing things out of shoelaces and old boxes.
The use of lady in (a) imparts a frivolous, or nonserious, tone to the sentence: the matter under
discussion is not one of great moment. Similarly, in (b), using lady here would suggest that the
speaker considered the “amazing things” not to be serious art, but merely a hobby or an
aberration. If woman is used, she might be a serious sculptor. To say lady doctor is very
condescending, since no one ever says gentleman doctor or even man doctor. For example,
mention in the San Francisco Chronicle of January 31, 1972, of Madalyn Murray O’Hair as
the lady atheist reduces her position to that of scatterbrained eccentric. Even woman atheist is
scarcely defensible: sex is irrelevant to her philosophical position.
Many women argue that, on the other hand, lady carries with it overtones recalling the age of
chivalry: conferring exalted stature on the person so referred to. This makes the term seem
polite at first, but we must also remember that these implications are perilous: they suggest that
a “lady” is helpless, and cannot do things by herself.
Lady can also be used to infer frivolousness, as in titles of organizations. Those that have a
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serious purpose (not merely that of enabling “the ladies” to spend time with one another)
cannot use the word lady in their titles, but less serious ones may. Compare the Ladies’
Auxiliary of a men’s group, or the Thursday Evening Ladies’ Browning and Garden Society
with Ladies’ Liberation or Ladies’ Strike for Peace.
What is curious about this split is that lady is in origin a euphemism – a substitute that puts a
better face on something people find uncomfortable – for woman. What kind of euphemism is
it that subtly denigrates the people to whom it refers? Perhaps lady functions as a euphemism
for woman because it does not contain the sexual implications present in woman: it is not
“embarrassing” in that way. If this is so, we may expect that, in the future, lady will replace
woman as the primary word for the human female, since woman will have become too
blatantly sexual. That this distinction is already made in some contexts at least is shown in the
following examples, where you can try replacing woman with lady:
(a)
She’s only twelve, but she’s already a woman.
(b)
After ten years in jail, Harry wanted to find a woman.
(c)
She’s my woman, see, so don’t mess around with her.
Another common substitute for woman is girl. One seldom hears a man past the age of
adolescence referred to as a boy, save in expressions like “going out with the boys”, which are
meant to suggest an air of adolescent frivolity and irresponsibility. But women of all ages are
“girls”: one can have a man – not a boy – Friday, but only a girl – never a woman or even a
lady – Friday; women have girlfriends, but men do not – in a nonsexual sense – have
boyfriends. It may be that this use of girl is euphemistic in the same way the use of lady is: in
stressing the idea of immaturity, it removes the sexual connotations lurking in woman. Girl
brings to mind irresponsibility: you don’t send a girl to do a woman’s errand (or even, for that
matter, a boy’s errand). She is a person who is both too immature and too far from real life to
be entrusted with responsibilities or with decisions of any serious or important nature.
Now let’s take a pair of words which, in terms of the possible relationships in an earlier
society, were simple male-female equivalents, analogous to bull: cow. Suppose we find that,
for independent reasons, society has changed in such a way that the original meanings now are
irrelevant. Yet the words have not been discarded, but have acquired new meanings,
metaphorically related to their original senses. But suppose these new metaphorical uses are no
longer parallel to each other. By seeing where the parallelism breaks down, we discover
something about the different roles played by men and women in this culture. One good
example of such a divergence through time is found in the pair, master: mistress. Once used
with reference to one’s power over servants, these words have become unusable today in their
original master-servant sense as the relationship has become less prevalent in our society. But
the words are still common.
Unless used with reference to animals, master now generally refers to a man who has acquired
consummate ability in some field, normally nonsexual. But its feminine counterpart cannot be
used this way. It is practically restricted to its sexual sense of “paramour”. We start out with
two terms, both roughly paraphrasable as “one who has power over another”. But the
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masculine form, once one person is no longer able to have absolute power over another,
becomes usable metaphorically in the sense of “having power over something”. Master
requires as its object only the name of some activity, something inanimate and abstract. But
mistress requires a masculine noun in the possessive to precede it. One cannot say: “Rhonda is
a mistress”. One must be someone’s mistress. A man is defined by what he does, a woman by
her sexuality, that is, in terms of one particular aspect of her relationship to men. It is one thing
to be an old master like Hans Holbein, and another to be an old mistress.
The same is true of the words spinster and bachelor – gender words for “one who is not
married”. The resemblance ends with the definition. While bachelor is a neuter term, often
used as a compliment, spinster normally is used pejoratively, with connotations of prissiness,
fussiness, and so on. To be a bachelor implies that one has the choice of marrying or not, and
this is what makes the idea of a bachelor existence attractive, in the popular literature. He has
been pursued and has successfully eluded his pursuers. But a spinster is one who has not been
pursued, or at least not seriously. She is old, unwanted goods. The metaphorical connotations
of bachelor generally suggest sexual freedom; of spinster, puritanism or celibacy.
These examples could be multiplied. It is generally considered a faux pas, in society, in
society, to congratulate a woman on her engagement, while it is correct to congratulate her
fiancé. Why is this? The reason seems to be that is impolite to remind people of things that
may be uncomfortable to them. To congratulate a woman on her engagement is really to say,
“Thank goodness! You had a close call!” For the man, on the other hand, there was no such
danger. His choosing to marry is viewed as a good thing, but not something essential.
The linguistic double standard holds throughout the life of the relationship. After marriage,
bachelor and spinster become man and wife, not man and woman. The woman whose husband
dies remains “John’s widow”; John, however, is never “Mary’s widower”.
Finally, why is it that salesclerks and others are so quick to call women customers “dear,”
“honey”, and other terms of endearment they really have no business using? A male customer
would never put up with it. But women, like children, are supposed to enjoy these
endearments, rather than being offended by them.
In more ways than one, it’s time to speak up.
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PART IV. THE LANGUAGE OF FICTION: A SHORT
STORY
The Art of Reading and Analysing a Story
James Joyce. Eveline
Oscar Wilde. The Model Millionaire
Katherine Mansfield. A Cup of Tea
Somerset Maugham. The Happy Man
O. Henry. The Cop and the Anthem
Ernest Hemingway. Cat in the Rain
Stories for Self-Guided Analysis
Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon
Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour
Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather
Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras
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The Art of Reading and Analysing a Story
We enjoy stories for many reasons. Some are intrinsic to the story itself: language artfully
used, characters we believe in and care about, actions that carry significant messages for us
and give us new insights into ourselves and our society. Other causes of enjoyment are
external, coming not from the artistry of the story, but from the fact that the story fits our
notions of what a story should be like, or calls forth some pleasant personal memories. In
short, the external factors for our response to a story come from things we already think or
feel. Intrinsic factors come from the writer’s craftsmanshift and art.
When we read for pleasure alone, we need not care where our pleasure comes from. When we
study literature or learn to interpret texts, we should concentrate on the intrinsic qualities of
stories, on the “how” aspects of a story, for they can help us to understand the craft of the
writer. To understand the craft we must look closely at such aspects of a story as: the plot, the
structure, the type of narrator, the ways of conveying the message, means of character
portrayal, individual means that constiture a writer’s individual style etc.
Now let’s repeat the question we have already asked: what steps should we take when thinking
about a story in order to discuss and interpret it in class?
STEP I. Give the gist of the story (in 10 sentences or so). Present in a very succinct and
precise form the plot of the story, pointing out its main characters, the place and the time of
action, and the events presented in the story. Give a short characteristic of the plot. This step
is really important because it helps us to make our speech succinct and precise.
STEP II. Share your initial impression. The first thing to do is to jot down whatever things
about the story strike you as being most noticeable – the ideas that affect you most strongly.
STEP III. Consider the structure of the story. The same events that serve as the plot of a
story can be arranged differently and the ordering of events constitute the structure, or the
composition of a story. Traditionally a story’s structure is said to include four basic parts:
1. The exposition. The beginning of the story, which introduces the reader to the setting (time
and place) and to some, or all the characters.
2. The conflict. Every story centers on a conflict of some sort: one person or a group of
people, against another; an individual against some rule or custom of society. Generally the
conflict increases in tension or in complexity until it reaches a climax.
3. The climax. The point of greatest tension, at which the turning point or the breaking point
is reached.
4. The denouement, or resolution. The ending, which brings the narration to a close, picking
up the pieces of the action and reordering the lives left disordered by the conflict and the
climax.
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Of these four parts of the structure, only the conflict and the climax are essential. Not all
writers begin their stories with an exposition, sometimes the first sentence can show the
characters already embroiled in their conflict. The resolution may also be not presented in the
story. Thus stories may have a closed- or an open-end structure. A story with an open end
structure invites the reader to be more active and think of a possible resolution of the conflict.
Sometimes the ending is predictable, or logically expected, but very often stories have an
unexpected, or “surprise ending”, thus creating a defeated expectancy effect, which is a
characteristic feature of O. Henry’s style.
STEP IV. Consider the major aspects of the story. In the introduction we suggested that each
work of fiction involves the following key elements: action, or plot; character; setting; and
language, or voice.
Fiction is the art of the storyteller. Not only are writers of fiction storytellers themselves, but
within every story they create a new storyteller. It is the narrator’s voice that we hear while
reading a novel or a story.
Traditionally stories are told by omniscient narrators. As the term implies these narrators
“know all” about the characters and events of which they tell. Somewhat distanced by their
greater knowledge from action and actors alike, omniscient narrators produce an air of
authority over their material. They seem to stand somewhat apart from the events. Having no
role in the action themselves they can interpret the events and characters somewhat impartially.
First-person narrators or I-narrators appear to be participants of their own stories. They are
telling us something that happened to them and are telling their tale from their own point of
view. They cannot see into the minds of the other characters. In contrast to the total knowledge
of the omniscient narrator, the first-person narrator’s powers of interpretation may be slight.
As the narrator’s knowledge diminishes, the reader’s role increases. If we cannot trust the
narrator as the omniscient, final authority, the role of our role judgement increases.
We often feel closer to first-person narrators that to omniscient narrators. The limitation of
human knowledge and insight within which the first-person narrators work, the blend of
attempted objectivity and personal involvement their voices convey, and their apparent
openness in telling their own stories appeal to our sympathy and our sense of fellowship. In
telling us of their dreams and desires first-person narrators speak eloquently of human
aspirations; in confessing their shortcomings they speak no less eloquently of human
limitations. A characteristic feature of the XXth century literature is the so-called disguised
first-person narration, when the story is told in the third-person, yet from the mode of
presentation we understand that it is not the omniscient third-person narrator, but a personal Inarrator.
When the writer delegates the narration not to one, but several characters, it results in a
polyphony which is another typical feature of modern literature. This type of narration plays an
important role in portraying characters.
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Talking about the characters we must direct our attention to the author’s means of portraying
them. They may be portrayed directly, or through their actions and speech, especially inner
speech. Special attention should be paid to small details which may matter a lot for portraying
a character and conveying a meaning.
Discussing the language of an author we should pay utmost attention to the means which
constitute the author’s idiostyle and by which we can tell one author from another. Some
authors favour metaphors and similes (V. Woolf, K. Mansfield), others use metonymies more
frequently (O. Henry), still others are fond of paradoxes and puns (O. Wilde). There are
authors who use figures of speech very sparingly, whose prose is crystal-clear (E.
Hemingway), which makes it no less expressive in effect.
STEP V. Create a synthesis. At this stage summarize your own observations, add what you
think important from the discussion you had in class and prepare the final analysis of the
story.
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James Joyce (1882–1941)
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882–1941) was an
Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most
influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early
20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a
landmark novel which perfected his stream of consciousness
technique and combined nearly every literary device
available in a modern re-telling of The Odyssey. Other
major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914),
and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre
includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional
journalism, and his published letters.
Joyce was born into a middle class family in Dublin, where
he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes
and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his
early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental
Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of
his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce’s fictional universe does not extend beyond Dublin,
and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and
friends from his time there.
James Joyce had begun his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school
near Clane, County Kildare, in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no
longer pay the fees. Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian Brothers school
on North Richmond Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits’, Dublin
school, Belvedere College, in 1893. By the age of 16, however, Joyce appears to have made
a break with his Catholic roots, even though the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas continued to
have a strong influence on him for most of his life.
He enrolled at the recently established University College Dublin (UCD) in 1898, studying
English, French, and Italian. After graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris to
study medicine, but he soon abandoned this after finding the technical lectures in French too
difficult. The same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Connemara, County
Galway who was working as a chambermaid. On 16 June 1904, they first stepped out
together, an event which would be commemorated by providing the date for the action of
Ulysses. Joyce and Nora went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zurich, where he had
supposedly acquired a post to teach English at the Berlitz Language School through an
agent in England. It turned out that the English agent had been swindled, but the director
of the school sent him on to Trieste, which was part of Austria-Hungary until World War I .
Once again, he found there was no position for him, but he finally secured a teaching
position in Pola, then also part of Austria-Hungary. He stayed there, teaching English
mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the Pola base, when the Austrians –
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having discovered an espionage ring in the city – expelled all aliens. He moved back to
Trieste and began teaching English there. He would remain in Trieste for most of the next
ten years.
In 1915, after most of his students were conscripted in Trieste for World War I, he moved to
Zurich. While in Zurich he wrote Exiles, published A Portrait..., and began serious work on
Ulysses. Joyce set himself to finally finishing Ulysses in Paris, delighted to find that he was
gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer. With the appearance of both Ulysses and
T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, 1922 was a key year in the history of English-language
literary modernism. In Ulysses, Joyce employs stream of consciousness, parody, jokes, and
virtually every other established literary technique to present his characters. The action of
the novel, which takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904, sets the characters and incidents
of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and
Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus,
parodically contrasted with their lofty models. The book consists of 18 chapters, each
covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning around 8 a.m. and ending some time after
2 a.m. the following morning. Each chapter employs its own literary style, and parodies a
specific episode in Homer’s Odyssey. Furthermore, each chapter is associated with a specific
colour, art or science, and bodily organ. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing with an
extreme formal schematic structure renders the book a major contribution to the development
of 20th-century modernist literature. The use of classical mythology as an organising
framework, the near-obsessive focus on external detail, and the occurrence of significant
action within the minds of characters have also contributed to the development of literary
modernism.
Joyce’s method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was
pushed to the limit in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all conventions of plot and
character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure language, based mainly on
complex multi-level puns. This approach is similar to, but far more extensive than that used
by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky. This has led many readers and critics to apply Joyce’s oftquoted description in the Wake of Ulysses as his “usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles”
to the Wake itself. However, readers have been able to reach a consensus about the central
cast of characters and general plot.
On 11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer and died two days later.
He is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery within earshot of the lions in the Zurich Zoo. The
work and life of Joyce is celebrated annually on 16 June, Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an
increasing number of cities worldwide. His influence on the world literature is great.
Eveline
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the
window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.
Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his
footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path
before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play
every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built
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houses in it – not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The
children of the avenue used to play together in that field – the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns,
little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was
too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick;
but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they
seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her
mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown
up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone to England.
Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.
Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted
once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she
would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being
divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose
yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print
of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her
father. Whenever he show. “He is in Melbourne now.”
She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side
of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had
known all her life about her. Of course she had to work hard, both in the house and at
business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away
with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement.
Miss Gavan would be glad she had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were
people listening.
“Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting? ”
“Look lively, Miss Hill, please. ”
She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.
But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would
be married – she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated
as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in
danger of her father’s violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When
they were growing up he had never gone for her, like he used to go for Harry and Ernest,
because she was a girl; but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to
her only for her dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was
dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down
somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had
begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages – seven shillings – and
Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He
said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn’t going to give her his
hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad on
Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of
buying Sunday’s dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her
marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through
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the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep
the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to her charge went
to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work – a hard life – but now that
she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.
She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted.
She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos
Aires where he had a home waiting for her. How well she remembered the first time she had
seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to visit. It seemed a few
weeks ago. He was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair
tumbled forward over a face of bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to
meet her outside the Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian
Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was
awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and, when he sang
about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. He used to call her
Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she
had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a
pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told her the names of the
ships he had been on and the names of the different services. He had sailed through the Straits
of Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in
Buenos Aires, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her
father had found out the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.
“I know these sailor chaps,” he said.
One day he had quarreled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover secretly.
The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One
was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry
too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could
be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a
ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they
had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her
mother’s bonnet to make the children laugh.
Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the
window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty, cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a
street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind her
of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She
remembered the last night of her mother’s illness; she was again in the close dark room at the
other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had
been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her farther strutting back into
the sickroom saying:
“Damned Italians! Coming over here!”
As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very quick of her being
– that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard
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again her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:
“Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!”
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her.
He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy?
She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would
save her.
She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she
knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage aver and over again.
The station was full of soldiers with brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds
she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined
portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of
distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long
mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, to-morrow she would be on the sea with Frank,
steaming towards Buenos Aires. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back
after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke nausea in her body and she kept moving her
lips in silent fervent prayer.
A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
“Come! ”
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them; he would
drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
“Come!”
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent
a cry of anguish!
“Eveline! Evvy! ”
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he
still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave
him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story
1. Speak about James Joyce and his main contribution to British and world literature. James
Joyce was an Irish man. What place does his motherland occupy in his writing?
2. Give a short summary of the story. What exactly happens in the story?
3. Comment on the plot of the story. Is it dynamic? Is it full of events or otherwise? Where
does the action mostly take place: in the outside world or in the inner world of the character?
4. Comment on the title of the story. Does it reveal the contents or the central message of the
story? Can you suggest any other titles to the story?
5. The story is written in the third person, yet who appears to be the narrator? Give facts from
the story to support your opinion.
6. Pay close attention to the temporal structure of the story, compare and comment on the
proportion of the present, past and future in the main character’s inner world. Is present as
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important for her as her past and her future? Point out the language means of expressing
present, past and future (count up the number of times “would” and “used to” are repeated in
the story and comment on the effect of these repetitions). What are the colors in which the
past, the present and the future are painted? What is the girl’s present life like? Comment on the
use of the word ‘dust’ in the story. What are its connotations?
7. Comment on her reminiscences of her family, when her mother was alike. Pay attention to
the tonality of this passage. Did these memories affect her final decision? Is there a moment in
the story when we get a hint that she will not go away? Pay attention to the use of the
conjunction “if” in the following sentence: “If she went, tomorrow she would be…” What
does it suggest?
8. Comment on the climax of the story. Pay attention to the use of expressive means in the
passage describing her emotional state at the moment of departure. Are her actions directed
by reason or by emotions? What exactly makes Eveline stay at home?
9. Does the story have a generalizing effect? How would you define its central message?
10. Summarize your observations and prepare the final analysis of the story.
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Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 –
30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After
writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became
one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early
1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and
the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early
death.
Wilde’s parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their
son became fluent in French and German early in life. At
university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an
outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He
became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of
aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John
Ruskin. He also profoundly explored Roman Catholicism, to
which he would later convert on his deathbed. After
university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural
and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary
activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States of America and
Canada on the new “English Renaissance in Art”, and then returned to London where he
worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering
conversation, Wilde had become one of the most well-known personalities of his day.
At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of
dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his
only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details
precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote
Salome (1891) in French in Paris but it was refused a licence. Unperturbed, Wilde
produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most
successful playwrights of late Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde sued the father of his lover, Lord Alfred
Douglas, for libel. After a series of trials, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency with other
men and imprisoned for two years, held to hard labour. In prison he wrote De Profundis
(written in 1897 & published in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey
through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon
his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he
wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the
harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six. More than a
hundred years after his death Oscar Wilde continues to gain new admirers in every part of
the world: no playwright except Shakespeare is as widely quoted, and few wits are as often
or as happily recalled. His outlook is best expressed by his own words: “We are all in the
gutter, but some of us are looking at the sky”.
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The Model Millionaire
Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of
the rich not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is
better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. These are the great truths of modern
life, which Hughie Erskine never realized. Poor Hughie! Intellectually, we must admit, he was
not of much importance. He never said a brilliant or even an ill-natured thing in his life. But then
he was wonderfully good-looking, with his crisp brown hair, his clear-cut profile, and his gray
eyes. He was as popular with men as he was with women, and he had every accomplishment
except that of making money. His father had bequeathed him his cavalry sword and a History
of the Peninsular War in fifteen volumes. Hughie hung the first over his looking glass, put the
second on a shelf between Ruff’s Guide and Bailey’s Magazine, and lived on two hundred a
year that an old aunt allowed him. He had tried everything. He had gone on the Stock Exchange
for six months; but what was a butterfly to do among bulls and bears? He had been a teamerchant for a little longer, but had soon tired of pekoe and souchong. Then he had tried
selling dry sherry. That did not answer; the sherry was a little too dry. Ultimately he became
nothing, a delightful, ineffectual young man with a perfect profile and no profession.
To make matters worse, he was in love. The girl he loved was Laura Merton, the daughter of a
retired Colonel who had lost his temper and his digestion in India, and had never found either
of them again. Laura adored him, and he was ready to kiss her shoestrings. They were the
handsomest couple in London, and had not a penny-piece between them. The Colonel was
very fond of Hughie, but would not hear of any engagement.
“Come to me, little boy when you have got ten thousand pounds of your own, and we will see
about it,” he used to say; and Hughie looked very glum in those days, and had to go to Laura
for consolation.
One morning, as he was on his way to Holland Park, where the Mertons lived, he dropped in
to see a great friend of his, Alan Trevor. Trevor was a painter. Indeed, few people escape that
nowadays. But he was also an artist, and artists are rather rare. Personally he was a strange
rough fellow, with a freckled face and a red, ragged beard. However, when he took up the
brush he was a real master, and all his pictures were eagerly sought after. He had been very
much attracted by Hughie at first, it must be acknowledged, entirely on the account of his
personal charm. “The only people a painter should know,” he used to say, “are the people
who are bete and beautiful, people who are an artistic pleasure to look at and an intellectual
repose to talk to. Men who are dandies and women who are darlings rule the world, at least
they should do so.” However, after he got to know Hughie better, he liked him quite as much
for his bright, buoyant spirits and his generous, reckless nature, and had given him the
permanent entree to his studio.
When Hughie came in he found Trevor putting the finishing touches to a wonderful life-size
portrait of a beggar-man. The beggar himself was standing on a raised platform in a corner of
the studio. He was a wizened old man, with a face like wrinkled parchment, and a most piteous
expression. Over his shoulder was flung a course brown cloak, all tears and tatters; his thick
boots were patched and cobbled, and with one hand he leant on a rough stick, while with the
other he held out his battered hat for alms.
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“What an amazing model!” whispered Hughie, as he shook hands with his friend.
“An amazing model?” shouted Trevor at the top of his voice; “I should think so! Such beggars
as he are not to be met with every day. A trouvaille, mon cher; a living Velasquez! My stars!
What an etching Rembrandt would have made out of him!”
“Poor old chap!’ said Hughie, ‘how miserable he looks! But I suppose, to you painters, his
face is his fortune?”
“Certainly,” replied Trevor, “you don’t want a beggar to look happy, do you?”
“How much does a model get for his sitting?” asked Hughie, as he found himself a
comfortable seat on a divan.
“A shilling an hour.”
“And how much do you get for your picture, Alan?”
“Oh, for this I get two thousand!”
“Pounds?”
“Guineas. Painters, poets, and physicians always get guineas.”
“Well, I think the model should have a percentage,” cried Hughie, laughing; “they work quite as
hard as you do.”
“Nonsense, nonsense! Why, look at the trouble of laying on the paint alone, and standing all
day long at one’s easel! It’s all very well, Hughie, for you to talk, but I assure you that there are
moments when Art almost attains to the dignity of manual labour. But you mustn’t chatter; I’m
very busy. Smoke a cigarette, and keep quiet.”
After some time the servant came in, and told Trevor that the framemaker wanted to speak to
him.
“Don’t run away, Hughie,” he said, as he went out, “I will be back in a moment.”
The old beggar-man took advantage of Trevor’s absence to rest for a moment on a wooden
bench that was behind him. He looked so forlorn and wretched that Hughie could not help
pitying him, and felt in his pockets to see what money he had. All he could find was a
sovereign and some coppers. “Poor old fellow”, he thought to himself, “he wants it more than
I do, but it means no hansoms for a fortnight”; and he walked across the studio and slipped
the sovereign into the beggar’s hand.
The old man started, and a faint smile flitted across his withered lips. “Thank you, sir”, he said,
“thank you.”
Then Trevor arrived, and Hughie took his leave, blushing a little at what he had done. He spent
the day with Laura, got a charming scolding for his extravagance, and had to walk home.
That night he strolled into the Palette Club about eleven o’clock, and found Trevor sitting by
himself in the smoking-room drinking hock and seltzer.
“Well, Alan, did you get that picture finished all right?” He said as he lit his cigarette.
“Finished and framed, my boy!” answered Trevor, “and by the by, you have made a conquest:
that old model you saw is quite devoted to you. I had to tell him all about you, who you are,
where you live. What your income is, what prospects you have.”
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“My dear Alan”, cried Hughie, “I shall probably find him waiting for me when I go home. But,
of course, you are only joking … Poor old wretch! I wish I could do something for him. I
think it is dreadful that any one should be so miserable. I have got heaps of old clothes at
home – do you think he would care for any of them? Why, these rags are falling to bits.”
“But he looks splendid in them”, said Trevor. “I wouldn’t paint him in a frock coat for
anything. What you call rags I call romance. What seems poverty to you is picturesqueness to
me. However, I’ll tell him of your offer.”
“Alan”, said Hughie seriously, “you painters are a heartless lot.”
“An artist’s heart is his head,” replied Trevor; “and besides, our business is to realize the world
as we see it, not to reform it as we know it. A chacun son metier. And now tell me how Laura
is. The old model was quite interested in her.”
“You don’t mean to say you talked to him about her?” said Hughie.
“Certainly I did. He knows all about the relentless colonel, the lovely Laura, and the 10,000
pounds.”
“You told that old beggar all my private affairs?” cried Hughie, looking very red and angry.
“My dear boy”, said Trevor, smiling, “that old beggar, as you call him, is one of the richest
men in Europe. He could buy all London tomorrow without overdrawing his account. He has a
house in every capital, dines off gold plates, and can prevent Russia going to war when he
chooses.”
“What on earth do you mean?” exclaimed Hughie.
“What I say,” said Trevor. “The old man you saw today in the studio was Baron Houseberg.
He is a great friend of mine, buys all my pictures and that sort of thing, and gave me a
commission a month ago to paint him as a beggar. Que voulez-vous? La fantaisie d’un
millionaire! And I must say he made a magnificent figure in his rags, or perhaps I should say in
my rags; they are an old suit I got in Spain.”
“Baron Houseberg!” cried Hughie. “Good Heavens! I gave him a sovereign”. And he sank into
the armchair, the picture of dismay.
“Gave him a sovereign!” shouted Trevor, and he burst into a roar of laughter. “My dear boy,
you will never see it again.” “I think you might have told me, Alan,” said Hughie sulkily, “and
not have let me make such a fool of myself.” “Well, to begin with, Hughie,” said Trevor, “it
never entered my mind that you went about distributing alms in that reckless way. I can
understand your kissing a pretty model, but your giving a sovereign to an ugly one – by Jove,
no! Besides, the fact that I really was not at home today to any one; and when you came in I
didn’t know whether Houseberg would like his name mentioned. You know he wasn’t in full
dress.”
“What a duffer he must think me!” said Hughie.
“Not at all. He was in the highest spirits after you left, kept chuckling to himself and rubbing
his old wrinkled hands together. I couldn’t make out why he was so interested to know all
about you but I see it all now. He’ll invest your sovereign for you, Hughie, pay you the interest
every six months, and have a capital story to tell after dinner.”
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“I am an unlucky devil,” growled Hughie. “The best thing I can do is to go to bed; and my
dear Alan, you mustn’t tell anyone. I shouldn’t dare show my face in the Row.”
“Nonsense. It reflects the highest credit of your philanthropic spirit, Hughie. And don’t run
away. Have another cigarette, and you can talk about Laura as much as you like.”
However, Hughie wouldn’t stop, but walked home, feeling very unhappy and leaving Alan in
fits of laughter.
The next morning, as he was at breakfast, the servant brought him up a card on which was
written, “Monsieur Gustave Naudin, de la par de M. le Baron Houseberg.” “I suppose he has
come for an apology,” said Hughie to himself and he told the servant to show the visitor up.
An old gentleman with gold spectacles and very gray hair came into the room, and said, in a
slight French accent, “Have I the honour of addressing Monsieur Erskine?”
Hughie bowed.
“I have come from Baron Houseberg,” he continued. “The Baron – ”
“I beg, sir, that you will offer my sincerest apologies,” stammered Hughie.
“The Baron”, said the old gentleman with a smile, “has commissioned me to bring you this
letter”; and he extended a sealed envelope.
On the outside was written, “A wedding present to Hugh Erskine and Laura Merton, from an
old beggar”, and inside was a cheque for ₤10,000.
When they were married Alan Trevor was the best man, and the Baron made a speech at the
wedding breakfast.
“Millionaire models,” remarked Alan, “are rare enough, but, by Jove, model millionaires are
rarer still!”
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story
1. Speak about Oscar Wilde and his aesthetic and literary principles. Is this a typical Oscar
Wilde story or is it different in some way?
2. What exactly happens in the story? Give the gist of the plot. Do you find it intricate or
rather trivial? In the Penguin Edition this story was published in the collection of Oscar
Wilde’s fairy tales. Was it a random choice or are there good reasons for it? Can we regard
this story as a kind of modern fairy tale? What fairy tale features can we point out in the
story?
3. The story opens with a short introduction in which the author states the well known maxim.
Analyze the means of generalization employed by the author in this maxim. Comment on the
role of this introduction in the structure of the story. Do the ensuing events prove the author’s
statement or disprove it?
4. Give sketches of the main characters (draw a parallel with the typical fairy tale characters).
Are they depicted very minutely or rather schematically? Point out the expressive means
employed by the author to portray the characters.
5. Comment on the general mood of the story. Is it lyrical, matter-of-fact or ironical? How is
this mood created?
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6. Can you hear the voice of the narrator in the story? What is the role of the narrator? What
does it add to the general mood of the story?
7. Oscar Wilde is known as a great master of paradox and pun. Are these devices used in
this story? Point them out and comment on their stylistic effect. What are other expressive
means employed by Oscar Wilde and what is their effect?
8. Comment on the message of the story. What appeals to you most in the story? What is
your general impression in the story? You are welcome to add your own observations about
the message and the style of the story.
9. Sum up your observations and present the final analysis of the story.
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Katherine Mans ield (1888–1923)
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (1888–1923) was a prominent
modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up
in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of
Katherine Mansfield, which is in itself a short form of her real
name as she was born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp.
She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen’s
College, along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced
playing the cello, an occupation that she believed, during her
time at Queen’s, she would take up professionally, but she also
began contributing to the school newspaper, with such a
dedication to it that she eventually became editor during this
period. She was particularly interested in the works of the
French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated
amongst peers for her vivacious and charismatic approach to
life and work.
Mansfield first began journeying into continental Europe from 1903–1906, mainly to
Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, Mansfield returned to her
New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories. She had several
works published in the Native Companion (Australia), which was her first paid writing
work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also
the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym ‘K. Mansfield’. She rapidly wearied of
the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, and of her family, during this time, and two years later
headed again for Londo.
Back in London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into the bohemian way of life lived by many
artists and writers of that era. She hastily entered into a marriage, with a singing teacher 11
years her elder, George Bowden, but left him the same evening, having failed to
consummate the marriage.
Mansfield’s time in Bavaria was to have a significant effect on her literary outlook. She was
introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov, a writer who proved to have greater influence
upon her writing in the short-term than Wilde, on whom she had been fixated during her
earlier years. She returned to London in January 1910, and had over a dozen works
published in A.R. Orage’s The New Age, a socialist magazine and highly-regarded
intellectual publication
Although discouraged by the volume’s relative lack of success, Mansfield submitted a
lightweight story to a new avant-garde magazine called Rhythm. The piece was rejected by
the magazine’s editor, John Middleton Murry, who requested something darker. Mansfield
and Murray had begun, in 1911, a relationship that would culminate in their marriage in
1918. Later that year, they moved to Paris, with the hope that the change of setting would
make writing for both of them easier. The couple had befriended D.H. Lawrence and his
wife. Mansfield began to broaden her literary acquaintances for the remainder of the year,
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encountering Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and Bertrand Russell through
social gatherings and introductions from others. At the beginning of 1917, Mansfield and
Murry separated, although he continued to visit her at her new apartment. Mansfield
entered into her most prolific period of writing post-1916, which began with several stories,
including Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day and A Dill Pickle being published in The New Age.
In December 1917, Mansfield became ill, and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Rejecting
the idea of a sanatorium on the basis that it would cut her off from writing, she took the only
available option, which was to move abroad during the English winter. She moved to
Bandol, France, but stayed at a half-deserted and cold hotel, where she became depressed.
However, she continued to produce stories. “Miss Brill,” the bittersweet story of a fragile
woman living an ephemeral life of observation and simple pleasures in Paris, established
Mansfield as one of the preeminent writers of the Modernist period, upon its publication in
1920’s Bliss. The title story from that collection, “Bliss,” which involved a similar character
facing her husband’s infidelity, also found critical acclaim. She followed with the equally
praised collection, The Garden Party, published in 1922.
She died in 1923 and was buried in a cemetery in the Fontainebleau District in the town of
Avon.
A street in Menton, France, where she lived and wrote, is named after her and a Fellowship
is offered annually to enable a New Zealand writer to work at her former home, the Villa
Isola Bella. New Zealand’s pre-eminent short story competition is also named in her honour.
A Cup of Tea
Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn’t have called her beautiful. Pretty?
Well, if you took her to pieces… But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces? She was
young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest
of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important
people and… artists – quaint creatures, discoveries of hers, some of them too terrifying for
words, but others quite presentable and amusing.
Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not Peter – Michael.
And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really rich, not just comfortably well
off, which is odious and stuffy and sounds like one’s grandparents. But if Rosemary wanted to
shop she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street. If she wanted to buy
flowers, the car pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside the shop
just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way, and said: “I want those and those and those. Give
me four bunches of those. And that jar of roses. Yes, I’ll have all the roses in the jar. No, no
lilac. It’s got no shape.” The attendant bowed and put the lilac out of sight, as though this was
only too true; lilac was dreadfully shapeless. “Give me those stumpy little tulips. Those red and
white ones.” And she was followed to the car by a thin shop-girl, staggering under an immense
white paper armful that looked like a baby in long clothes…
One winter afternoon she had been buying something in a little antique shop in Curzon Street.
It was a shop she liked. For one thing, one usually had it to oneself. And then the man who
kept it was ridiculously fond of serving her. He beamed whenever she came in. He clasped his
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hands; he was so gratified he could scarcely speak. Flattery, of course. All the same, there was
something…
“You see, madam,” he would explain in his low respectful tones, “I love my things. I would
rather not part with them than sell them to someone who does not appreciate them, who has
not that fine feeling which is so rare…” And breathing deeply, he unrolled a tiny square of blue
velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale finger-tips.
Today it was a little box. He had been keeping it for her. He had shown it to nobody as yet. An
exquisite little enamel box with a glace so fine it looked as though it had been baked in cream.
On the lid a minute creature stood under a flowery tree, and a more minute creature still had her
arms round his neck. Her hat, really no bigger than a geranium petal, hung from a branch; it had
green ribbons. And there was a pink cloud like a watchful cherub floating above their heads.
Rosemary took her hands out of her long gloves. She always took off her gloves to examine
such things. Yes, she liked it very much. She loved it; it was a great duck. She must have it.
And, turning the creamy box, opening and shutting it, she couldn’t help noticing how charming
her hands were against the blue velvet. The shopman, in some dim cavern of his mind, may
have dared to think so too. For he took a pencil, leant over the counter, and his pale bloodless
fingers crept timidly towards those rosy, flashing ones, as he murmured gently. “If I may
venture to point out to madam, the flowers on the little lady’s bodice.”
“Charming!” Rosemary admired the flowers. But what was the price? For a moment the
shopman did not seem to hear. Then a murmur reached her. “Twenty- eight guineas, madam.”
“Twenty-eight guineas.” Rosemary gave no sign. She laid the little box down; she buttoned her
gloves again. “Twenty-eight guineas. Even if one is rich…” She looked vague. She stared at a
plump tea-kettle like a plump hen above the shopman’s head, and her voice was dreamy as she
answered: “Well, keep it for me – will you? I’ll…”
But the shopman had already bowed as though keeping it for her was all any human being
could ask. He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever.
The discreet door shut with a click. She was outside on the step, gazing at the winter
afternoon. Rain was falling, and with the rain it seemed the dark came too, spinning down like
ashes. There was a cold bitter taste in the air, and the new-lighted lamps looked sad. Sad were
the lights in the houses opposite. Dimly they burned as if regretting something. And people
hurried by, hidden under their hateful umbrellas. Rosemary felt a strange pang. She pressed her
muff against her breast; she wished she had the little box, too, to cling to. Of course the car
was there. She’d only to cross the pavement. But still she waited. There are moments, horrible
moments in life, when one emerges from shelter and looks out, and it’s awful. One oughtn’t to
give way to them. One ought to go home and have an extra-special tea. But at the very instant
of thinking that, a young girl, thin, dark, shadowy – where had she come from? – was standing
at Rosemary’s elbow and a voice like a sigh, almost like a sob, breathed: “Madam, may I
speak to you a moment?”
“Speak to me?” Rosemary turned. She saw a little battered creature with enormous eyes,
someone quite young, no older than herself, who clutched at her coat-collar with reddened
hands, and shivered as though she had just come out of the water.
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“M – madam,” stammered the voice. “Would you let me have the price of a cup of tea?”
“A cup of tea?’ There was something simple, sincere in that voice; it wasn’t in the least the
voice of a beggar. “Then have you no money at all?” asked Rosemary.
“None, madam,” came the answer.
“How extraordinary!” Rosemary peered through the dusk and the girl gazed back at her. How
more than extraordinary! And suddenly it seemed to Rosemary such an adventure. It was like
something out of a novel by Dostoyevsky, this meeting in the dusk. Supposing she took the
girl home? Supposing she did do one of those things she was always reading about or seeing
on the stage, what would happen? It would be thrilling. And she heard herself saying
afterwards to the amazement of her friends: “I simply took her home with me,” as she stepped
forward and said to that dim person beside her: “Come home to tea with me.”
The girl drew back startled. She even stopped shivering for a moment. Rosemary put out a
hand and touched her arm. “I mean it,” she said, smiling. And she felt how simple and kind her
smile was. “Why won’t you? Do. Come home with me now in my car and have tea.”
“You – you don’t mean it, madam,” said the girl, and there was pain in her voice.
“But I do,” cried Rosemary. “I want you to. To please me. Come along.”
The girl put her fingers to her lips and her eyes devoured Rosemary. “You’re – you’re not
taking me to the police station?” she stammered.
“The police station!” Rosemary laughed out. “Why should I be so cruel? No, I only want to
make you warm and to hear – anything you care to tell me.”
Hungry people are easily led. The footman held the door of the car open, and a moment later
they were skimming through the dusk.
“There!” said Rosemary. She had a feeling of triumph as she slipped her hand through the
velvet strap. She could have said, “How I’ve got you,” as she gazed at the little captive she
had netted. But of course she meant it kindly. Oh, more than kindly. She was going to prove to
this girl that – wonderful things did happen in life, that – fairy god-mothers were real, that –
rich people had hearts, and that women were sisters. She turned impulsively, saying: “Don’t be
frightened. After all, why shouldn’t you come back with me? We’re both women. If I’m the
more fortunate, you ought to expect…”
But happily at that moment, for she didn’t know how the sentence was going to end, the car
stopped. The bell was rung, the door opened, and with a charming, protecting, almost
embracing movement, Rosemary drew the other into the hall. Warmth, softness, light, a sweet
scent, all those things so familiar to her she never even thought about them, she watched that
other receive. It was fascinating. She was like the rich little girl in her nursery with all the
cupboards to open, all the boxes to unpack.
“Come, come upstairs,” said Rosemary, longing to begin to be generous. “Come up to my
room.” And, besides, she wanted to spare this poor little thing from being stared at by the
servants; she decided as they mounted the stairs she would not even ring to Jeanne, but take
off her things by herself. The great thing was to be natural!
And “There!” cried Rosemary again, as they reached her beautiful big bedroom with the
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curtains drawn, the fire leaping on her wonderful lacquer furniture, her gold cushions and the
primrose and blue rugs.
The girl stood just inside the door; she seemed dazed. But Rosemary didn’t mind that.
“Come and sit down,” she cried, dragging her big chair up to the fire, ”in this comfy chair.
Come and get warm. You look so dreadfully cold.”
“I daren’t, Madam,” said the girl and she edged backwards.
“Oh, please,” – Rosemary ran forward – “you mustn’t be frightened, you mustn’t, really. Sit
down, when I’ve taken off my things we shall go into the next room and have tea and be cosy.
Why are you afraid?” And gently she half pushed the thin figure into its deep cradle.
But there was no answer. The girl stayed just as she had been put, with her hands by her sides
and her mouth slightly open. To be quite sincere, she looked rather stupid. But Rosemary
wouldn’t acknowledge it. She leant over her, saying: “Won’t you take off your hat? Your pretty
hair is all wet. And one is so much more comfortable without a hat, isn’t one?”
There was a whisper that sounded like “Very good, madam,” and the crushed hat was taken
off.
“And let me help you off with your coat, too,” said Rosemary.
The girl stood up. But she held on to the chair with one hand and let Rosemary pull. It was
quite an effort. The other scarcely helped her at all. She seemed to stagger like a child, and the
thought came and went through Rosemary’s mind, that if people wanted helping they must
respond a little, just a little, otherwise it became very difficult indeed. And what was she to do
with the coat now? She left it on the floor, and the hat too. She was just going to take a
cigarette off the mantelpiece when the girl said quickly, but so lightly and strangely: “I’m very
sorry, madam, but I’m going to faint. I shall go off, madam, if I don’t have something.”
“Good heavens, how thoughtless I am!” Rosemary rushed to the bell.
“Tea! Tea at once! And some brandy immediately!”
The maid was gone again, but the girl almost cried out: “No, I don’t want no brandy. I never
drink brandy. It’s a cup of tea I want, madam.” And she burst into tears.
It was a terrible and fascinating moment. Rosemary knelt beside her chair.
“Don’t cry, poor little thing,” she said. “Don’t cry.” And she gave the other her lace
handkerchief. She really was touched beyond words. She put her arm round those thin,
birdlike shoulders.
Now at last the other forgot to be shy, forgot everything, except that they were both women,
and gasped out: “I can’t go on any longer like this. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. I shall do
away with myself. I can’t bear no more.”
“You shan’t have to. I’ll look after you. Don’t cry any more. Don’t you see what a good thing
it was that you met me? We’ll have tea and you’ll tell me everything. And I shall arrange
something. I promise. Do stop crying. It’s so exhausting. Please!”
The other did stop just in time for Rosemary to get up before the tea came. She had the table
placed between them. She plied the poor little creature with everything, all the sandwiches, all
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the bread and butter, and every time her cup was empty she filled it with tea, cream and sugar.
People always said sugar was so nourishing. As for herself she didn’t eat; she smoked and
looked away tactfully so that the other should not be shy.
And really the effect of that slight meal was marvellous. When the tea-table was carried away a
new being, a light, frail creature with tangled hair, dark lips, deep, lighted eyes, lay back in the
big chair in a kind of sweet languor, looking at the blaze. Rosemary lit a fresh cigarette; it was
time to begin.
“And when did you have your last meal?” she asked softly. But at that moment the doorhandle turned.
“Rosemary, may I come in?” It was Philip.
“Of course.”
He came in. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said, and stopped and stared.
“It’s quite all right,” said Rosemary, smiling. “This is my friend. Miss –”
“Smith, madam,” said the languid figure, who was strangely still and unafraid.
“Smith,” said Rosemary. “We are going to have a little talk.”
“Oh, yes,” said Philip, “Quite,” and his eye caught sight of the coat and hat on the floor. He
came over to the fire and turned his back to it. “It’s a beastly afternoon,” he said curiously, still
looking at that listless figure, looking at its hands and boots, and then at Rosemary again.
“Yes, isn’t it?” said Rosemary enthusiastically. “Vile.”
Philip smiled his charming smile. “As a matter of fact,” said he, “I wanted you to come into the
library for a moment. Would you? Will Miss Smith excuse us?”
The big eyes were raised to him, but Rosemary answered for her: “Of course she will.” And
they went out of the room together.
“I say”, said Philip, when they were alone. “Explain, who is she? What does it all mean?”
Rosemary, laughing, leaned against the door and said: “I picked her up in Curzon Street.
Really. She’s a real pick-up. She asked me for the price of a cup of tea, and I brought her
home with me.”
“But what on earth are you going to do with her?” cried Philip.
“Be nice to her,” said Rosemary quickly. “Be frightfully nice to her. Look after her. I don’t
know how. We haven’t talked yet. But show her – treat her – make her feel…”
“My darling girl,” said Philip, “you’re quite mad, you know. It simply can’t be done.”
“I knew you’d say that,” retorted Rosemary. “Why not? I want to. Isn’t that a reason? And
besides, one’s always reading about these things. I decided –”
“But,” said Philip slowly, and he cut the end of a cigar, “she’s so astonishingly pretty.”
“Pretty?” Rosemary was so surprised that she blushed. “Do you think so? I – I hadn’t thought
about it.”
“Good Lord!” Philip struck a match. “She’s absolutely lovely. Look again, my child. I was
bowled over when I came into your room just now. However… I think you’re making a ghastly
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mistake. Sorry, darling, if I’m crude and all that. But let me know if Miss Smith is going to dine
with us in time for me to look up The Milliner’s Gazette.”
“You absurd creature!” said Rosemary, and she went out of the library, but not back to her
bedroom. She went to her writing – room and sat down at her desk. Pretty! Absolutely lovely!
Bowled over! Her heart beat like a heavy bell. Pretty! Lovely! She drew her chequebook
towards her. But no, cheques would be no use, of course. She opened a drawer and took out
five pound notes, looked at them, put two back, and holding the three squeezed in her hand,
she went back to her bedroom.
Half an hour later Philip was still in the library, when Rosemary came in.
“I only wanted to tell you,” said she, and she leaned against the door again and looked at him
with her dazzled exotic gaze. “Miss Smith won’t dine with us to – night.”
Philip put down the paper. “Oh, what’s happened? Previous engagement?”
Rosemary came over and sat down on his knee. “She insisted on going,” said she, “so I gave
the poor little thing a present of money. I couldn’t keep her against her will, could I?” she
added softly.
Rosemary had just done her hair, darkened her eyes a little and put on her pearls. She put up
her hands and touched Philip’s cheeks.
“Do you like me?” said she, and her tone, sweet, husky, troubled him.
“I like you awfully,” he said, and he held her tighter. “Kiss me.”
There was a pause.
Then Rosemary said dreamily: “I saw a fascinating little box today. It cost twenty-eight
guineas. May I have it?”
Philip jumped her on his knee. “You may, little wasteful one,” said he.
But that was not really what Rosemary wanted to say.
“Philip,” she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, “am I pretty?”
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story
1. Speak about Katherine Mansfield and the peculiarities of her artistic style.
2. Give the gist of the story. What exactly happens in the story? Characterize the plot of the
story and its development. Who is the narrator of the story? Is there one narrator or does the
author delegate the narration to the characters? Give evidence from the text to support your
opinion.
3. Read very carefully the first two paragraphs of the story which present Rosemary Fell. In
what form is the description presented? Who is speaking? How many adjectives are used in
this two paragraphs and what is their role? Point out various means of intensification and
comment on their contribution to the description of Rosemary. Pay attention to her son’s
name. Why does the author draw our attention to it? How many times does the author use the
transferred epithet ‘a duck of a boy’? What is the effect of this repetition?
4. Analyze the passage starting with “One winter afternoon…” and ending with “He would be
willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever.” and comment on this part of narration. Who is
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the narrator here? Through whose eyes can we see the box? What kind of person is the shopkeeper? How is his character-sketch made? Why didn’t Rosemary buy the box immediately?
What is the role of unfinished sentences in this part of the text?
5. Analyze the description of the winter afternoon. The author gives the description of the
evening in great detail. What is the role of this description? What is the tone of the description?
What is the undertone that you can discern? Rosemary was very upset, wasn’t she? Do you
share Rosemary’s feelings? Does the author sympathize with Rosemary? Support your opinion
by quoting the text.
6. Read very carefully the events described in the story and comment on Rosemary’s actions
and their motives. What made her invite the poor girl to her house? Did she do it for the girl’s
or for her own sake? Prove your point of view by quoting the text. Comment on Rosemary’s
behavior when she brought the girl home. Pick out the means of drawing the picture of a
generous person that Rosemary tries to be. Is it her real self or is she acting the role of a
generous person? What proves the fact that it is all staged? Comment on the sentence: “She
was longing to be generous”.
7. Comment on the outcome of the story and the sudden end of Rosemary’s generosity.
What is the role of the short exclamatory sentences: “Pretty! Absolutely lovely! …”? What is
the role of the small detail about a money-gift in this episode?
8. There is a break in the narration of events in between Rosemary’s going to her bedroom
and her returning to the library half an hour later. Let’s reconstruct the events that happened
during this half an hour. Why does the author resort to the gap in the development of the plot?
Analyze the dialogue that took place between Philip and Rosemary half an hour later and its
role in revealing the message of the story. Comment on the closing sentence of the story.
9. What do you think is the theme and message of the story. Can we make a conclusion that
K. Mansfield is a great master of psychological portrayal of people?
10. Summarize your answers, add your own observations about the style of Katherine
Mansfield and prepare the final analysis of the story.
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Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was an
English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He
was among the most popular writers of his era, and
reputedly, the highest paid author during the 1930s.
Maugham’s father was an English lawyer handling the
legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris, France.
Since French law declared that all children born on
French soil could be conscripted for military service, his
father arranged for William to be born at the embassy,
technically on British soil, saving him from conscription
into any future French wars. Maugham’s mother Edith
Mary was consumptive, a condition for which her doctor
prescribed childbirth. As a result, Maugham had three
older brothers already enrolled in boarding school by the
time he was three and he was effectively raised as an only
child. Childbirth proved no cure for tuberculosis: Edith’s
sixth and final son died on 25 January 1882, one day after his birth, on Maugham’s eighth
birthday. Edith died six days later, on 31 January, at the age of 41. The death of his mother
left Maugham traumatized for life, and he kept his mother’s photograph by his bedside until
his own death at the age of 91 in Nice, France. Two years after Maugham’s mother’s death,
his father died of cancer. William was sent back to England to be cared for by his uncle,
Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. The move was catastrophic.
Henry Maugham proved cold and emotionally cruel. The King’s School, Canterbury, where
William was a boarder during school terms, proved merely another version of purgatory,
where he was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short
stature, which he inherited from his father. It is at this time that Maugham developed the
stammer that would stay with him all his life, although it was sporadic and subject to mood
and circumstance.
Maugham was miserable both at the vicarage and at school. As a result, he developed a
talent for applying a wounding remark to those who displeased him. This ability is
sometimes reflected in the characters that populate his writings. At sixteen, Maugham
refused to continue at The King’s School and his uncle allowed him to travel to Germany,
where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. He spent the
next five years as a medical student at St Thomas’ Hospital, Lambeth, London. Some critics
have assumed that the years Maugham spent studying medicine were a creative dead end,
but Maugham himself felt quite the contrary. He was able to live in the lively city of London,
to meet people of a “low” sort that he would never have met in one of the other professions,
and to see them in a time of heightened anxiety and meaning in their lives. In maturity, he
recalled the literary value of what he saw as a medical student: “I saw how men died. I saw
how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief”
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In 1897, he wrote his book Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its
consequences. The novel Liza of Lambeth proved popular with both reviewers and the
public, and the first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. This was enough to convince
Maugham, who had qualified as a doctor, to drop medicine and embark on his sixty-five
year career as a man of letters. Of his entry into the profession of writing he later said, “I
took to it as a duck takes to water.”
By 1914 Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published.
Maugham’s masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semiautobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who like
Maugham, was orphaned, and brought up by his pious uncle. Philip’s clubfoot causes him
endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham’s struggles with his
stutter. Later successful novels were also based on real-life characters: The Moon and
Sixpence fictionalizes the life of Paul Gauguin; and Cakes and Ale contains thinly veiled
characterizations of authors Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Maugham’s last major
novel, The Razor’s Edge, published in 1944, was a departure for him in many ways. While
much of the novel takes place in Europe, its main characters are American, not British. The
protagonist is a disillusioned veteran of World War I who abandons his wealthy friends and
lifestyle, travelling to India seeking enlightenment. The story’s themes of Eastern mysticism
and war-weariness struck a chord with readers as World War II waned, and a movie
adaptation quickly followed.
Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of
Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East, and are typically concerned with the
emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Some of his more outstanding works
in this genre include “Rain”, “Footprints in the Jungle”, and “The Outstation”. “Rain”,
in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert
the Pacific island prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its fame and been made into a movie
several times. Maugham said that many of his short stories presented themselves to him in
the stories he heard during his travels in the outposts of the Empire.
In 1928, Maugham bought Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, which
was his home the rest of his life. His output continued to be prodigious, including plays,
short stories, novels, essays and travel books. Commercial success with high book sales,
successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock
market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life.
He died in 1965 at his villa in France.
Maugham wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William
Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing
popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized
as “such a tissue of clichés that one’s wonder is finally aroused at the writer’s ability to
assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way”. W.
Somerset Maugham’s style of writing is clear and precise. He does not impose his views on
the reader. He puts a question and leaves it to the reader to answer it. Even criticizing
something he sounds rather amused than otherwise.
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The Happy Man
It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have always wondered at the selfconfidence of the politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to force upon their
fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of view. I have always
hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to act unless one knows that
other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows, I know little enough of myself: I know
nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbours. Each
one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower land he communicates with the other prisoners, who
form mankind, I by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for
himself. And life, unfortunately, is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often
irreparable and who am I that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a
difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own; a complete and rounded
thing; I have not been tempted to teach my neighbour what he should do with his. But there are
men who flounder at the journey’s start, the way before them is confused and hazardous, and
on occasion, however unwillingly, I have been forced to point the finger of fate. Sometimes
men have said to me, what shall I do with my life? And I have seen myself for a moment
wrapped in the dark cloak of Destiny. Once I know that I advised well.
I was a young man, and I lived in a modest apartment in London near Victoria Station. Late
one afternoon, when I was beginning to think that I had worked enough for that day, I heard a
ring at the bell. I opened the door to a total stranger. He asked me my name; I told him. He
asked if he might come in.
“Certainly.”
He seemed a trifle embarrassed, I offered him a cigarette and he had some difficulty in lighting
it without letting go off his hat. When he had satisfactorily achieved this feat I asked him if I
should put it on a chair for him. He quickly did this and while doing it he dropped his umbrella.
“I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you like this,” he “My name is Stephens and I am a
doctor. You’re in the medical, I believe.”
“Yes, but I don’t practise.”
“No, I know. I’ve just read a book of yours about Spain and I wanted to ask you about it.”
“It’s not a very good book, I’m afraid.”
“The fact remains that you know something about Spain and there’s no one else I know who
does. And I thought perhaps I wouldn’t mind giving me some information.”
“I shall be very glad.”
He was silent for a moment. He reached out for his hat and holding it in one hand absentmindedly stroked it with the other. I surmised that it gave him confidence.
“I hope you won’t think it very odd for a perfect stranger to come to you like this.” He gave an
apologetic laugh. “I’m not going to tell you the story of my life.”
When people say this to me I always know that it is precisely what they are going to do. I do
not mind. In fact I rather like it.
“I was brought up by two old aunts. I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve never done anything. I’ve
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been married for six years. I have children. I’m a medical officer at the Camberwell Infirmary. I
can’t stick it any more.”
There was something’ very striking in the short, sharp sentences he used. They had a forcible
ring. I had not given him more than a cursory glance, but now I looked at him with curiosity.
He was a little man, thick-set and stout, of thirty perhaps, with a round face from which shone
small, dark and very bright eyes. His black hair was cropped close to a bullet-shaped head. He
was dressed in a blue suit a good deal the worse for wear. It was baggy at the knees and the
pockets bulged untidily.
“You know what the duties are of a medical officer in an infirmary. One day is pretty much like
another. And that's all I’ve to look forward to for the rest of my life. Do you think it's worth?”
“It’s a means of livelihood,” I answered.
“Yes, I know. The money’s pretty good.”
“I don’t exactly know why you've come to me.”
“Well, I wanted to know whether you thought there would any chance for an English doctor in
Spain?”
“Why Spain?”
“I don’t know, I just have a fancy for it.” “It’s not like Carmen, you know.” “But there’s
sunshine there, and there’s good wine, and there’s colour, and there's air you can breathe. Let
me say what I have to say straight out. I heard by accident that there was no English doctor in
Seville. Do you think 1 could earn a living there? Is it madness to give up a good safe job for
an uncertainty?” “What does your wife think about it?”
“She's willing.”
“It's a great risk.”
“I know. But if you say take it, I will; if you say stay where you re, I'll stay.”
He was looking at me intently with those bright dark eyes of his and I knew that he meant what
he said. I reflected for a moment.
“Your whole future is concerned: you must decide for yourself. But this I can tell you: if you
don't want money but are content to earn just enough to keep body and soul together, then go.
For you will lead a wonderful life.”
He left me, I thought about him for a day or two, and then forgot. The episode passed
completely from my memory.
Many years later, fifteen at least, I happened to be in Seville and having some trifling
indisposition asked the hotel porter whether there was an English doctor in the town. He said
there was and gave me the address. I took a cab and as I drove up to the house a little fat man
came out of it. He hesitated when he caught sight of me.
“Have you come to see me?” he said. “I’m the English doctor.” explained my errand and he
asked me to come in. He lived in ordinary Spanish house, with a patio, and his consulting
room which led out of it littered with papers, books, medical appliances, and lumber. The sight
of it would have startled a squeamish patient. We did our business and then I asked the doctor
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what his fee was. He shook his head and smiled. “There’s no fee.” “Why on earth not?”
“Don’t you remember me? Why, I’m here because of something you said to me. You changed
my whole life for me. I’m Stephens.”
I had not the least notion what he was talking about. He reminded me of our interview, he
repeated to me what we had said, and gradually, out of the night, a dim recollection of the
incident came back to me.
“I was wondering if I’d ever see you again,” he said, “I was wondering if ever I’d have a
chance of thanking you for all you’ve done for me.”
“It’s been a success then?”
I looked at him. He was very fat now and bald, but his eyes twinkled gaily and his fleshy, red
face bore an expression of perfect: good-humour. The clothes he wore, terribly shabby they
were, had been made obviously by a Spanish tailor and his hat was the wide-brimmed
sombrero of the Spaniard, He looked to me as though he knew a good bottle of wine when he
saw it. He had a dissipated, though entirely sympathetic, appearance. You might have hesitated
to let him remove your appendix, but you could not have imagined a more delightful creature to
drink a glass of wine with.
“Surely you were married?” I asked.
“Yes. My wife didn’t like Spain, she went back to Camberwell she was more at home there.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for that.”
His black eyes flashed a bacchanalian smile. He really had somewhat the look of a young
Silenus.
“Life is full of compensations,” he murmured.
The words were hardly out of his mouth when a Spanish woman, no longer in her first youth,
but still boldly and voluptuously beautiful, appeared at the door. She spoke to him in Spanish,
and I could not fail to perceive that she was the mistress of the house.
As he stood at the door to let me out he said to me:
“You told me when last I saw you that if I came here I should, earn just enough money to keep
body and soul together, but that I should lead a wonderful life. Well, I want to tell you that you
were right. Poor I have been and poor I shall always be, but by heaven I’ve enjoyed myself. I
wouldn’t exchange the life I’ve had with that of any king in the world.”
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story
1. Point out the most important facts of Maugham’s biography which are important for
understanding his artistic credo and the peculiarities of his individual style.
2. Comment on the title of the story and its theme.
3. Analyze the thesis presented by the author in the exposition to the story and express your
own opinion about it. How does it reflect the mentality and the cultural specificity of the
English? Point out the language means of generalization used in the presentation of the thesis.
Point out the metaphor employed by the author in describing people in modern society and
relations between them. Point out other expressive means in the exposition and comment on
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their contribution to the style.
4. Give a short summary of events described in the story and characterize the plot. Is the plot
intricate or rather simple and predictable?
5. What parts can we point out in the structure of the story? Reread the conversation that
took place between the narrator and the unexpexted visitor. Why did the author feel so
surprised to see a total stranger in his house? Was the author willing to give advice to the
stranger? How did he try to decline the request? What made him finally give in and listen to
the visitor’s problem?
6. Comment on the character of Dr. Stepens and the means used by the author to portray his
character. Pay special attention to the little details which reveal his character. Comment on
the author’s method of character drawing. What exactly was wrong with the man’s life that
made him say “I can’t stick it any more”? Analyze the sentences in which he presents his story.
What does the repetition of the same structure in his story reflect?
7. Compare the description of Stephens’ appearance in London and in Spain. What were the
reasons of such a radical change? Point out the epithets, similes and other stylistic means
which are used to describe his appearance.
8. Comment on the concluding lines of the story which actually express the message of the
story. What is, in your opinion, the message of the story?
Write an essay on the topic of happiness. You may make use of the following
quotations.
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensible part of happiness”. Bertrand
Russel
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise man grows it under his feet”.
James Oppenhaim
“Happiness is nothing more than a good health and a bad memory” . Albert Scgweitzer
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy”. Guillaume
Apollinaire
“To be happy for an hour, get drunk; to be happy for a year, fall in love; to be happy for life,
take up gardening”. Chinese proverb
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O. Henry (1862–1910)
William Sidney Porter was born on September 11,
1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. His middle name
at birth was Sidney; he changed the spelling to Sydney
in 1898. His parents were Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter,
a physician, and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter).
When William was three, his mother died from
tuberculosis, and he and his father moved into the
home of his maternal grandmother. As a child, Porter
was always reading, everything from classics to dime
novels; his favorite works were Lane’s translation of
One Thousand and One Nights, and Burton’s Anatomy
of Melancholy.
Porter graduated from his aunt Evelina Maria Porter’s
elementary school in 1876. He then enrolled at the
Lindsey Street High School. His aunt continued to tutor
him until he was fifteen. In 1879, he started working in
his uncles drugstore and in 1881, at the age of nineteen, he was licensed as a pharmacist.
At the drugstore, he also showed off his natural artistic talents by sketching the townsfolk.
Porter traveled with Dr. James K. Hall to Texas in March 1882, hoping that a change of air
would help alleviate a persistent cough he had developed. While on the ranch, he learned
bits of Spanish and German from the mix of immigrant ranch hands. He also spent time
reading classic literature. Porter took a number of different jobs over the next several years,
first as pharmacist then as a draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began writing as
a sideline.
Porter led an active social life in Austin, including membership in singing and drama
groups. Porter was a good singer and musician. He played both the guitar and mandolin.
He became a member of the “Hill City Quartet,” a group of young men who sang at
gatherings and serenaded young women of the town. Porter met and began courting Athol
Estes, then seventeen years old and from a wealthy family. Her mother objected to the match
because Athol was ill, suffering from tuberculosis. On July 1, 1887, Porter eloped with Athol
to the home of Reverend R.K. Smoot, where they were married. The couple continued to
participate in musical and theater groups, and Athol encouraged her husband to pursue his
writing. Athol gave birth to a son, who died hours after birth, and then a daughter. Porter
began working at the First National Bank of Austin as a teller. In 1894, he was accused by
the bank of embezzlement and lost his job but was not indicted.
Porter and his family moved to Houston in 1895, where he started writing for the Post. His
salary was only $25 a month, but it rose steadily as his popularity increased. Porter
gathered ideas for his column by loitering in hotel lobbies and observing and talking to
people there. This was a technique he used throughout his writing career. While he was in
Houston, the First National Bank of Austin was audited and the federal auditors found
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several discrepancies. They managed to get a federal indictment against Porter. Porter was
subsequently arrested on charges of embezzlement, charges which he denied, in connection
with his employment at the bank.
Athol Estes Porter died on July 25, 1897, from tuberculosis. Having little to say in his own
defense, was found guilty of embezzlement in February 1898, sentenced to five years jail,
and imprisoned on March 25, 1898 While in prison, Porter, as a licensed pharmacist,
worked in the prison hospital as the night druggist. Porter was given his own room in the
hospital wing, and there is no record that he actually spent time in the cell block of the
prison. He had fourteen stories published under various pseudonyms while he was in prison,
but was becoming best known as O. Henry . Porter was released on July 24, 1901, for good
behavior after serving three years. Porter reunited with his daughter Margaret, now age 11,
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Porter’s most prolific writing period started in 1902, when he moved to New York City to be
near his publishers. While there, he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote a story a week for over
a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine. His wit, characterization and plot twists
were adored by his readers, but often panned by critics. Porter married again in 1907, to
childhood sweetheart Sarah (Sallie) Lindsey Coleman, whom he met again after revisiting
his native state of North Carolina.
His health began to deteriorate in 1908, which affected his writing. Sarah left him in 1909,
and Porter died on June 5, 1910.
O. Henry’s stories are famous for their surprise endings, to the point that such an ending is
often referred to as an “O. Henry ending.” He was called the American answer to Guy de
Maupassant. Both authors wrote twist endings, but O. Henry stories were much more
playful. His stories are also well known for witty narration. Most of O. Henry’s stories are set
in his own time, the early years of the 20th century. Many take place in New York City and
deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses.
Fundamentally a product of his time, O. Henry’s work provides one of the best examples of
catching the entire flavor of an age written in the English language. Whether roaming the
cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the “gentle grafter,” or investigating the tensions
of class and wealth in turn-of-the-century New York, O. Henry had an inimitable hand for
isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of
language.
The Cop and the Anthem
On the bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese honk high of nights,
and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves
uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand.
A dead leaf fell in Soapy’s lap. That was Jack Frost’s card. Jack is kind to the regular denizens
of Madison Square, and gives fair warning of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he
hands his pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All Outdoors, so that the
inhabitants thereof may make ready.
Soapy’s mind became cognizant of the fact that the time had come for him to resolve himself
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into a singular Committee of Ways and Means to provide against the coming rigor. And
therefore he moved uneasily on his bench.
The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them were no considerations
of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific Southern skies or drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three
months on the Island was what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and bed and
congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things
desirable.
For years the hospitable Blackwell’s had been his winter quarters. Just as his more fortunate
fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so
Soapy had made his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time
was come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath his coat,
about his ankles and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near
the spurting fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed big and timely in Soapy’s
mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the city’s dependents. In
Soapy’s opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There was an endless round of
institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and
food accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy’s proud spirit the gifts of charity are
encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at
the hands of philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of
a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it
is better to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly
with a gentleman’s private affairs.
Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his desire. There
were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive
restaurant; and then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and without uproar to a
policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest.
Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level sea of asphalt, where
Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering
sign, where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm, and
the protoplasm.
Soapy had confidence in himself in the lowest button of his vest upward. He was shaven, and
his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a
lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected
success would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table would raise no
doubt in the waiter’s mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing –
with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demitasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar
would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of
revenge from the I management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the
journey to his winter refuge.
But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter’s eye fell upon his frayed
trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in
silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.
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Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted Island was not to be an
epicurean one. Some other way of entering limbo must be thought of.
At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares behind plate-glass
made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass.
People came running around the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his
hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons.
“Where’s the man that done that?” inquired the officer, excitedly.
“Don’t you figure out that I might have had something to do with it?” said Soapy, not without
sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good fortune.
The policeman’s mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who smash windows do
not remain to parley with the law’s minions. They take to their heels. The policeman saw a man
halfway down the block running to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit.
Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful.
On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great pretensions. It catered to large
appetites and modest purses. Its crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery
thin. Into this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and telltale trousers without challenge. At a
table he sat and consumed beefsteak, flapjacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter he
betrayed the fact that the minutest coin and himself were strangers.
“Now, get busy and call a cop,” said Soapy. “And don’t keep a gentleman waiting.”
“No cops for you,” said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and an eye like the cherry in a
Manhattan cocktail. “Hey, Con!”
Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched Soapy. He arose joint by
joint, as a carpenter’s rule opens, and beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy
dream. The Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drug store two
doors away laughed and walked down the street.
Five blocks Soapy traveled before his courage permitted him to woo capture again. This time
the opportunity presented what he fatuously termed to himself a “cinch”. A young woman of a
modest and pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at
its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards form the window a large policeman
of severe demeanor leaned against a water plug.
It was Soapy’s design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated “masher”. The
refined and elegant appearance of his victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop
encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that
would insure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little isle.
Soapy straightened the lady missionary’s ready-made tie, dragged his shrinking cuffs into the
open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her,
was taken with sudden coughs and “hems”, smiled, smirked and went brazenly through the
impudent and contemptible litany of the “masher”. With half an eye Soapy saw that the
policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, and again
bestowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to
her side, raised his hat and said:
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“Ah there, Bedelia! Don’t you want to come and play in my yard?”
The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to beckon a finger and
Soapy would be practically en route for his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel
the cozy warmth of the station house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand,
caught Soapy’s coat sleeve.
“Sure, Mike,” she said joyfully, “if you’ll blow me to a pail of suds. I’d have spoke to you
sooner, but the cop was watching.”
With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked past the policeman
overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty.
At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the district where by night
are found the lightest streets, hearts, vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats
moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had
rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon it, and when he came
upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the
immediate straw of “disorderly conduct”.
On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He
danced, howled, raved, and otherwise disturbed the welkin.
The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked to a citizen.
“ ‘Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin’ the goose egg they give to the Hartford College. Noisy;
but no harm. We’ve instructions to lave them be.”
Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a policeman lay hands on him?
In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the
chilling wind.
In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging light. His silk umbrella
he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered
off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily.
“My umbrella,” he said, sternly.
“Oh, is it?” sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. “Wee, why don’t you call a
policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don’t you call a cop? There stands one on the
corner.”
The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a presentiment that luck would
again run against him. The policeman looked at the two curiously.
“Of course,” said the umbrella man – “that is – well, you know how these mistakes occur – I –
if it’s your umbrella I hope you’ll excuse me – I picked it up this morning in a restaurant – If
you recognize it as yours, why – I hope you’ll – ”
“Of course it’s mine,” said Soapy, viciously.
The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall blonde in an opera cloak
across the street in front of a street car that was approaching two blocks away.
Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements. He hurled the umbrella
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wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs.
Because he wanted to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could
do no wrong.
At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but
faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even
when the home is a park bench.
But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here was an old church, quaint
and rambling and gabled. Through one violet stained window a soft light glowed, where, no
doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath
anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy’s ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed
against the convolutions of the iron fence.
The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were few; sparrows
twittered sleepily in the eaves – for a little while the scene might have been a country
churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he
had known it well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and
ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.
The conjunction of Soapy’s receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church
wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into
which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wrecked faculties
and base motives that made up his existence.
And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and
strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the
mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had taken
possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet: he would resurrect his
old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes
had set up a revolution in him. Tomorrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and
find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him tomorrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would –
Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a
policeman.
“What are you doin’ here?” asked the officer.
“Nothin’,” said Soapy.
“Then come along,” said the policeman.
“Three months on the Island,” said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning.
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story
1. Speak about O. Henry and his literary art: the story of his life, his literary career, his favorite
themes, his favorite characters.
2. Where is the scene laid? Give a short summary of what exactly happens in the story.
3. Is this a typical or an atypical O. Henry story? Give reasons for your opinion.
4. In what key is the story written? Is the mood of the story the same or does it change as the
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plot develops? Point out the main stages in the development of the plot. What is the main
means of creating a humorous effect in the story? Pay attention to the mixture of styles, which
finds its reflection in the choice of words, the choice of syntactic constructions and the
peculiarity of his phrases.
5. Speak about the main character of the story. Comment on his name, his appearance, his
lifestyle, his thoughts, and his wishes. Is he presented as an ordinary primitive tramp or as a
philosopher? Follow Soapy’s desperate attempts to provide himself a shelter. Is he pleased to
be sent to the Island? What is the author’s attitude to his character? What devices does the
author use to portray the character? Quote the text to support your opinion.
6. Comment on the title and the message of the story.
7. Summarize your observations of the style and the language of the story. Point out the
stylistic devices that the author favours.
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Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American
author and journalist. His distinctive writing style,
characterized by economy and understatement, influenced
20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and his
public image. He produced most of his work between the
mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1954. Many of his works are classics of
American literature. He published seven novels, six short
story collections, and two non-fiction works during his
lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short
stories, and three non-fiction works were published
posthumously.
Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois.
After leaving high school he worked for a few months as a
reporter for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the
Italian front to become an ambulance driver during
World War I, which became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1918, he was
seriously wounded and returned home within the year. In 1922 Hemingway married Hadley
Richardson, the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a
foreign correspondent. During his time there he met and was influenced by modernist writers
and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the “Lost Generation”. His first
novel, “The Sun Also Rises”, was published in 1926.
After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they
divorced following Hemingway’s return from covering the Spanish Civil War, after which he
wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they split
when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. During the war he was present at
D-Day and the liberation of Paris.
Shortly after the publication of “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952 Hemingway went on
safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or illhealth for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West,
Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and ’40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to
Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.
Hemingway’s legacy to American literature is his style. He referred to his style as the iceberg
theory: in his writing the facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism
operate out-of-sight. Writing in “The Art of the Short Story,” he explains: “A few things I
have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the
story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story
will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors,
omit.”
The simplicity of his prose is deceptive. Zoe Trodd believes Hemingway crafted skeletal
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sentences in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had “used up words.”
Hemingway offers a “multi-focal” photographic reality. His iceberg theory of omission is the
foundation on which he builds. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates
static sentences. The photographic “snapshot” style creates a collage of images. Many types
of internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) are omitted in favor of
short declarative sentences. The sentences build on each other, as events build to create a
sense of the whole. Multiple strands exist in one story; an “embedded text” bridges to a
different angle. He also uses other cinematic techniques of “cutting” quickly from one scene
to the next; or of “splicing” a scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to
fill the gap, as though responding to instructions from the author, and create threedimensional prose.
In his literature, and in his personal writing, Hemingway habitually used the word “and”
in place of commas. This use of polysyndeton may serve to convey immediacy. Hemingway’s
polysyndetonic sentence – or in later works his use of subordinate clauses – uses
conjunctions to juxtapose startling visions and images; Jackson Benson compares them to
haikus. Many of Hemingway’s followers misinterpreted his lead and frowned upon all
expression of emotion; Saul Bellow satirized this style as “Do you have emotions? Strangle
them.” However, Hemingway’s intent was not to eliminate emotion, but to portray it more
scientifically. Hemingway thought it would be easy, and pointless, to describe emotions; he
sculpted collages of images in order to grasp the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact
which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck
and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Many writers of his generation were influenced not only by his style but also by his
philosophy, his masculinity and his public image. His stories and novels became part of
American and world cultural heritage.
The extent of Hemingway's influence is seen in the tributes and echoes of his fiction in
popular culture. A minor planet, discovered in 1978 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai
Stepanovich Chernykh, was named for him (3656 Hemingway); Ray Bradbury wrote The
Kilimanjaro Device, with Hemingway transported to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro; the 1993
motion picture Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, about the friendship of two retired men, Irish
and Cuban, in a seaside town in Florida, starred Robert Duvall, Richard Harris, Shirley
MacLaine, Sandra Bullock, and Piper Laurie.
Cat in the Rain
There were only two Americans at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed
on the stairs to their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the
public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public
garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the
palms grew and the bright colours of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came
from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in
the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the
gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come
up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor-cars were gone from the square by the
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war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the café a waiter stood looking out at the
empty square.
The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat
was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so
compact that she would not be dripped on.
“I’m going down and get that kitty,” the American wife said.
“I’ll do it,” her husband offered from the bed.
“No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.”
The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.
“Don’t get wet,” he said.
The wife went downstairs and the hotel owner stood up and bowed to her as she passed the
office. He was an old man and very tall.
“Il piove,” the wife said. She liked the hotelkeeper.
“Si, si, Signora, brutto tempo. It’s very bad weather.”
He stood behind his desk in the far end of the dim room. The wife liked him. She liked the
deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he
wanted to serve her. She liked the way he felt about being a hotelkeeper. She liked his old,
heavy face and big hands.
Liking him she opened the door and looked out. It was raining harder. A man in a rubber cape
was crossing the empty square to the café. The cat would be around to the right. Perhaps she
could go along under the eaves. As she stood in the doorway an umbrella opened behind her.
It was the maid who looked after their room.
“You must not get wet,” she smiled, speaking Italian. Of course, the hotelkeeper had sent her.
With the maid holding the umbrella over her, she walked along the gravel path until she was
under their window. The table was there, washed bright green in the rain, but the cat was gone.
She was suddenly disappointed. The maid looked up at her.
“Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signora?”
“There was a cat,” said the American girl.
“A cat?”
“Si, il gatto.”
“A cat?” the maid laughed. “A cat in the rain?”
“Yes,” she said, “under the table.” Then, “Oh, I wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty.”
When she talked English the maid’s face tightened.
“Come, Signora,” she said. “We must get back inside. You will be wet.”
“I suppose so,” said the American girl.
They went back along the gravel path and passed in the door. The maid stayed outside to
close the umbrella. As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk.
Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at
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the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance.
She went on up the stairs. She opened the door of the room. George was on the bed, reading.
“Did you get the cat?” he asked, putting the book down.
“It was gone.”
“Wonder where it went to?” he said, resting his eyes from reading.
She sat down on the bed.
“I wanted it so much,” she said. “I don’t know why I wanted it so mush. I wanted that poor
kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain!”
George was reading again.
She went over and sat in front of the mirror of the dressing-table looking at herself with the
hand glass. She studied her profile, first one side and then the other. Then she studied the back
of her head and her neck.
“Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?” she asked, looking at her
profile again.
George looked up and saw the back of her neck, clipped close like a boy’s.
“I like it the way it is.”
“I get so tired of it,” she said. “I get so tired of looking like a boy.”
George shifted his position in the bed. He hadn’t looked away from her since she started to
speak.
“You look pretty darn nice,” he said.
She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the widow and looked out. It was
getting dark.
“I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,”
she said. “I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.”
“Yeah?” George said from the bed.
“And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring
and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new
clothes.”
“Oh, shut up and get something to read,” George said. He was reading again.
His wife was looking out of the widow. It was quite dark now and still raining in the palm trees.
“Anyway, I want a cat,” she said, “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or
any fun, I can have a cat.”
George was not listening. He was reading his book. His wife looked out of the window where
the light had come on in the square.
Someone knocked at the door.
“Avanti,” George said. He looked up from his book.
In the doorway stood the maid. She held a big tortoiseshell cat pressed tight against her and
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swung down against her body.
“Excuse me,” she said, “the padrone asked me to bring this for the Signora.”
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Story
1. Speak about Ernest Hemingway: the most important facts from his life, his literary career,
the peculiarities of his literary style, his artistic credo. What technique of writing is associated
with the name of Ernest Hemingway?
2. What is your first impression of the story? What exactly happens in the story? What do you
think about the plot? Is it absorbing, intricate or very simple, dynamic or somewhat static? Is
there any connection between the character of the plot and the message of the story?
3. Analyze the first paragraph of the story. What do you think of the description contained in
it? Do you find it emotional or rather matter of-fact? Comment on the words used in the
description: are they literary or every day? Does the author resort to the ample use of epithets
or metaphors which are usually employed in description? Comment on the length of sentences.
Are most of them long or short? Do the structures of sentences vary much or are they mostly
identical? What effect does it produce? Critics often say that Hemingway’s prose is very
visual, that it has a kind of cinematographic effect. Do you agree? If you do, how is this effect
created? How many times is the rain mentioned and what is the role of the rain in the story?
Does it create a certain mood? If it does what is the mood it creates? What does the rain
symbolize?
4. Speak about the central character of the story, the American wife. What kind of person is
she? Do we learn much about her appearance, her thoughts? Through whose eyes are the
events perceived? Find elements in the narration that support your point of view. Is their
marriage happy? What exactly does she want to feel happy? Count up the number of times the
verb “want” is used in the story and comment on the effect of this repetition. What other
words are repeated in the story and how do they help us to perceive the message? Why does
she want the cat so badly? What does the cat mean to her? The cat is a very complex symbol,
isn’t it? What does it include?
5. Sum up the character of the husband. Does he act or speak much in the story? What is he
doing all the time? Why is he reading throughout the whole story? Is he really engrossed in
reading or is it a kind of shelter for him? Does he care much about his wife’s problems? Does
he try to understand her and help her or is he irritated? Find facts from the story to support
your opinion. Pay special attention to the shift in the narration in this part of the text. Through
whose eyes are the events presented in the part devoted to her husband?
6. Comment on the minor characters of the story: the hotel keeper and the maid. What is their
role in the development of the plot? Why does the American wife like the hotel keeper? Does
he understand what she really wants? How does he try to help her?
7. Comment on the outcome of the story. Is the end expected or unexpected? If you consider
the end unexpected, does it have anything in common with the unexpected ends in O. Henry’s
stories or is it different? What does the tortoise-shell cat brought by the maid symbolize?
8. Speak about the message and the title of the story. Is the message perceived from what is
written or mostly from the undercurrent (from what remains unsaid)? Sum up your
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observations about Hemingway’s style and give your impression of it.
Stories for Self-Guided Analysis
Stories for Self-Guided Analysis
Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon
Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour
Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather
Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras
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Stories for Self-Guided Analysis
Stories for Self-Guided Analysis
Katherine Mansfield. Honeymoon
Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour
Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather
Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras
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Katherine Mans ield. Honeymoon
And when they came out of the lace shop there was their own driver and the cab they called
their own cab waiting for them under a plane tree. What luck! Wasn’t it luck? Fanny pressed
her husband’s arm. These things seemed always to be happening to them ever since they –
came abroad. Didn’t he think so too? But George stood on the pavement edge, lifted his stick,
and gave a loud “Hi!” Fanny sometimes felt a little uncomfortable about the way George
summoned cabs, but the drivers didn’t seem to mind, so it must have been all right. Fat, goodnatured, and smiling, they stuffed away the little newspaper they were reading, whipped the
cotton cover off the horse, and were ready to obey.
“I say,” George said as he helped Fanny in, “suppose we go and have tea at the place where
the lobsters grow. Would you like to?”
“Most awfully,” said Fanny fervently, as she leaned back wondering why the way George put
things made them sound so very nice.
“R-right, bien.” He was beside her. “Allay,” he cried gaily, and off they went.
Off they went, spanking along lightly, under the green and gold shade of the plane trees,
through the small streets that smelled of lemons and fresh coffee, past the fountain square
where women, with water-pots lifted, stopped talking to gaze after them, round the corner past
the cafe, with its pink and white umbrellas, green tables, and blue siphons, and so to the sea
front. There a wind, light, warm, came flowing over the boundless sea. It touched George, and
Fanny it seemed to linger over while they gazed at the dazzling water. And George said, “Jolly,
isn’t it?” And Fanny, looking dreamy, said, as she said at least twenty times a day since they –
came abroad: “Isn’t it extraordinary to think that here we are quite alone, away from
everybody, with nobody to tell us to go home, or to – to order us about except ourselves?”
George had long since given up answering “Extraordinary!” As a rule he merely kissed her. But
now he caught hold of her hand, stuffed it into his pocket, pressed her fingers, and said, “I
used to keep a white mouse in my pocket when I was a kid.”
“Did you?” said Fanny, who was intensely interested in everything George had ever done.
“Were you very fond of white mice?”
“Fairly,” said George, without conviction. He was looking at something, bobbing out there
beyond the bathing steps. Suddenly he almost jumped in his seat. “Fanny!” he cried. “There is
a chap out there bathing. Do you see? I’d no idea people had begun. I’ve been missing it all
these days.” George glared at the reddened face, the reddened arm, as though he could not
look away. “At any rate,” he muttered, “wild horses won’t keep me from going in to-morrow
morning.”
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Fanny’s heart sank. She had heard for years of the frightful dangers of the Mediterranean. It
was an absolute death-trap. Beautiful, treacherous Mediterranean. There it lay curled before
them, it’s white, silky paws touching the stones and gone again… But she’d made up her mind
long before she was married that never would she be the kind of woman who interfered with
her husband’s pleasures, so all she said was, airily, “I suppose one has to be very up in the
currents, doesn’t one?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said George. “People talk an awful lot of rot about the danger.”
But now they were passing a high wall on the land side, covered with flowering heliotrope, and
Fanny’s little nose lifted. “Oh, George,” she breathed. “The smell! The most divine…”
“Topping villa,” said George, “Look, you can see it through the palms.”
“Isn’t it rather large?” said Fanny, who somehow could not look at any villa except as a
possible habitation for herself and George.
“Well, you’d need a crowd of people if you stayed there long,” replied George. “Deadly,
otherwise. I say, it is ripping. I wonder who it belongs to”. And he prodded the driver in the
back.
The lazy, smiling driver, who had no idea, replied, as he always did on these occasions, that it
was the property of a wealthy Spanish family.
“Masses of Spaniards on this coast,” commented George, leaning back again, and they were
silent until, as they rounded a bend, the big bone-white hotel-restaurant came into view. before
it there was a small terrace built up against the sea, planted with umbrella palms, set out with
tables, and at their approach, from the terrace, from the hotel, waiters came running to receive,
to welcome Fanny and George, to cut them off from any possible kind of escape.
“Outside?”
Oh, but of course they wouldn’t sit outside. The sleek manager, who was marvelously like a
fish in a frock-coat, skimmed forward.
“Dis way, sir. Dis way, sir. I have a very nice little table,” he gasped. “Just the little table for
you, sir, over in de corner. Dis way.”
So George, looking most dreadfully bored, and Fanny, trying to look as though she’d spent
years of life threading her way through strangers, followed after.
“Here you are, sir. Here you will be very nice,” coaxed the manager, taking the vase off the
table, and putting it down again as if it were a fresh little bouquet out of the air. But George
refused to sit down immediately. He saw through these fellows; he wasn’t going to be done.
These chaps were always out to rush you. So he put his hands in his pockets, and said to
Fanny, very calmly, “This is right for you? Anywhere else you’d prefer? How about over
there? ” And he nodded to a table right over the other side.
What it was to be a man of the world! Fanny admired him deeply, but all she wanted to do was
to sit down and look like everybody else.
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“I – I like this,” said she.
“Right,” said George hastily, and he sat down almost before Fanny, and said quickly, “Tea for
two and chocolate éclairs.”
“Very good, sir,” said the manager, and his mouth opened and shut as though he was ready for
another dive under the water. “You will not’ave toasts to start with? We’ave very nice toasts,
sir.”
“No,” said George shortly. “You don’t want toast, do you, Fanny?”
“Oh no, thank you, George,” said Fanny, praying the manager would go.
“Or perhaps de lady might like to look at de live lobsters in de tank while the tea is coming?”
And he grimaced and smirked and flicked his serviette like a fin.
George’s face grew stony. He said “No” again, and Fanny bent over the table, unbuttoning her
gloves. When she looked up the man was gone. George took off his hat, tossed it on a chair,
and pressed back his hair.
“Thank God,” said he, “that chap’s gone. These foreign fellows bore me stiff. The only way
to get rid of them is simply to shut up as you saw I did. Thank heaven!” sighed George again
with so much emotion that if it hadn’t been ridiculous Fanny might have imagined that he had
been as frightened of the manager as she. As it was she felt a rush of love for George. His
hands were on the table, brown, large hands that she knew so well. She longed to take one of
them and squeeze it hard. But, to her astonishment, George did just that thing. Leaning across
the table, he put his hand over hers, and said, without looking at her, “Fanny, darling Fanny!”
“Oh, George!” It was in that heavenly moment that Fanny heard a twing-twing-tootle-tootle,
and a light strumming. There’s going to be music, she thought, but the music didn’t matter just
then. Nothing mattered except love. Faintly smiling she gazed into that faintly smiling face, and
the filling was so blissful that she felt inclined to say to George, “Let us stay here – where we
are – at this little table. It’s perfect, and the sea is perfect. Let us stay.” But instead her eyes
grew serious. “Darling,” said Fanny. “I want to ask you something fearfully important. Promise
me you’ll answer. Promise.”
“I promise,” said George, too solemn to be quite as serious as she.
“It’s this,” Fanny paused a moment, looked down, looked up again. “Do you feel,” she said
softly, “that you really know me now? But really, really know me?”
It was too much for George. Know his Fanny? He gave a broad, childish grin. “I should jolly
well think I do,” he said emphatically. “Why, what's up?”
Fanny felt he hadn't quite understood. She went on quickly: “What I mean is this. So often
people, even when they love each other, don't seem to – to – it’s so hard to say – know each
other perfectly. They don't seem to want to- And I think that's awful. They misunderstand each
other about the most important things of all.” Fanny looked horrified. “George, we couldn't do
that, could we? We never could.”
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“Couldn't be done,” laughed George, and he was just going to tell her how much he liked her
little nose, when the waiter arrived with the tea and the band struck up. It was a flute, a guitar,
and a violin, and it played so gaily that Fanny felt if she wasn't careful even the cups and
saucers might grow little wings and fly away. George absorbed three chocolate éclairs, Fanny
two. The funny-tasting tea – “Lobster in the kettle,” shouted George above the music – was
nice all the same, and when the tray was pushed aside and George was smoking, Fanny felt
bold enough to look at the other people. But it was the band grouped under one of the dark
trees that fascinated her most. The fat man stroking the guitar was like a picture. The dark man
playing the flute kept raising his eyebrows as though he was astonished at the sounds that came
from it. The fiddler was in shadow.
The music stopped as suddenly as it had begun. It was then she noticed a tall old man with
white hair standing beside the musicians. Strange she hadn’t noticed him before. He wore a
very high, glazed collar, a coat green at the seams, and shamefully shabby button boots. Was
he another manager? He did not look like a manager, and yet he stood there gazing over the
tables as though thinking of something different and far away from all this. Who could he be?
Presently, as Fanny watched him, he touched the points of his collar with his fingers, coughed
slightly, and half turned to the band. It began to play again. Something boisterous, reckless, full
of fire, full of passion, was tossed into the air, was tossed to that quiet figure, which clasped
its hands, and still with that far-away look, began to sing.
“Good Lord!” said George. It seemed that everybody was equally astonished. Even the little
children eating ices stared, with their spoons in the air... Nothing was heard except a thin, faint
voice, the memory of a voice singing something in Spanish. It wavered, beat on, touched the
high notes, fell again, seemed to implore, to entreat, to beg for something, and then the tune
changed, and it was resigned, it bowed down, it knew it was denied.
Almost before the end a little child gave a squeak of laughter, but everybody was smiling –
мexcept Fanny and George. Is life like this too? thought Fanny. There are people like this.
There is suffering. And she looked at that gorgeous sea, lapping the land as though it loved it,
and the sky, bright with the brightness before evening. Had she and George the right to be so
happy? Wasn’t it cruel? There must be something else in life, which made all these things
possible. What was it? She turned to George.
But George had been feeling differently from Fanny. The poor old boy’s voice was funny in a
way, but, God, how it made you realise what a terrific thing it was to be at the beginning of
everything, as they were, he and Fanny! George, too, gazed at the bright, breathing water, and
his lips opened as if he could drink it. How fine it was! There was nothing like the sea for
making a chap feel fit. And there sat Fanny, his Fanny, leaning forward, breathing so gently.
“Fanny!” George called to her.
As she turned to him something in her soft, wondering look made George feel that for two pins
he would jump over the table and carry her off.
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“I say,” said George rapidly, “let’s go, shall we? Let’s go back to the hotel. Come. Do, Fanny
darling. Let’s go now.”
The band began to play. “Oh, God!” almost groaned George. “Let's go before the old codger
begins squawking again.”
And a moment later they were gone.
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Kate Chopin. The Story of an Hour
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break
to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half
concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in
the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently
Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed”. He had only taken the time to assure himself of its
truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in
bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to
accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms.
When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no
one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank,
pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her
soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with
the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was
crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly,
and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and
piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except
when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep
continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain
strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on
one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a
suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did
not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky,
reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was
approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will – as powerless as
her two white slender hands would have been.
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When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said
it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that
had followed it went from her eyes. They staed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the
coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did nit stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted
perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the
face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw
beyond that bitter moment a procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.
And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself.
There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and
women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind
intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime, as she looked upon it in that
brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him – sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could
love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she
suddenly recognize as the strongest impulse of her being!
“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for
admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door – you will make yourself ill. What are
you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”
“Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that
open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and
all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It
was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish
triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped
her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at
the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a
little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the
scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s
piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease – of joy that kills.
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Ray Bradbury. In a Season of Calm Weather
George and Alice Smith detrained at Biarritz one summer noon and in an hour had run through
their hotel onto the beach into the ocean and back out to bake upon the sand.
George Smith was a man who loved art more than life itself.
“There…” George Smith sighed. Another ounce of perspiration tricked down his chest. His
mouth moved, forming a name.
“George?” His wife loomed over him. “I know what you’ve been thinking. I can read your
lips.”
He lay perfectly still, waiting.
“And?”
“Picasso,” she said.
“Please,” she said. “Relax. I know you heard the rumor this morning, but you should see your
eyes – your tic is back. All right, Picasso is here, down the coast a few miles away, visiting
friends in some small fishing town. But you must forget it or our vacation is ruined.”
“I wish I’d never heard the rumor,” he said honestly.
“If only,” she said, “you liked other painters.”
“Alice,” he said patiently, “how can I explain? Coming down on the train, I thought, good lord,
it’s all Picasso country!”
But was it really? he wondered. The sky, the land, the people, the flushed pink bricks here –
how much was Picasso, how much George Smith staring round the world with wild Picasso
eyes? He despaired of answering.
“I keep thinking,” he said aloud, “if we saved our money…”
“We’ll never have five thousand dollars.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “But it’s nice thinking we might bring it off someday. Wouldn’t it be
great to just step up to him, say, “Pablo, here’s five thousand! Give us the sea, the sand, that
sky, or any old thing you want, we’ll be happy…”
After a moment his wife touched his arm.
“I think you’d better go in the water now,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d better do just that.”
White fire showered up when he cut the water.
During the afternoon George Smith came out and went into the ocean. People, with the sun’s
decline, their bodies all lobster colors and colors of broiled squash, trudged for their hotels.
�Содержание
The beach lay deserted for endless mile on mile save for two people. One was George Smith,
towel over shoulder.
Far along the shore another shorter, square-cut man walked alone in the tranquil weather. He
was deeper-tanned, his close-shaven head dyed almost mahogany by the sun, and his eyes
were clear and bright as water in his face.
The stranger stood alone. Glancing about, he saw his aloneness, saw the waters of the lovely
bay, saw the sun sliding down, the late colors of the day, and then, half turning, spied a small
wooden object on the sand. It was no more than the slender stick from a lime ice-cream
delicacy long since melted away. Smiling, he picked the stick up. With another glance around
to reinsure his solitude, the man stooped again and, holding the stick gently, with light sweeps
of his hand began to do the one thing in all the world he knew best how to do.
He began to draw incredible figures along the sand.
He sketched one figure and then moved over and, still looking down, completely focused on
his work now, drew a second and a third figure, and after that a fourth and a fifth and a sixth.
George Smith, printing the shore line with his feet, gazed here, gazed there, and then saw the
man ahead. George Smith, drawing nearer, saw that the man deeply tanned, was bending
down. Nearer yet, and it was obvious what the man was up to. George Smith chuckled. Of
course, of course… Alone on the beach this man – how old? Sixty-five? Seventy? – was
scribbling and doodling away. How the sand flew? How the wild portraits flung themselves out
there on the shore! How…
George Smith took one more step and stopped, very still.
The stranger was drawing and drawing and didn’t seem to sense that anyone stood
immediately behind him and the world of his drawings in the sand. By now he was so deeply
enchanted with his solitudinous creation that depth bombs set off in the bay might not have
stopped his flying hand nor turned him round.
George Smith looked down at the sand. After a long while, looking, began to tremble.
For there on the flat shore were pictures of Grecian lions and Mediterranean goats and maidens
with flesh of sand like powdered gold and satyrs piping on hand-carved horns and children
dancing, strewing flowers along and along the beach with lambs gamboling after, and
musicians skipping to their harps and lyres and unicorns racing youths toward distant
meadows, woodlands, ruined temples and volcanoes. Everything whirled and poised in its own
wind and gravity. Now wine was being crushed from under the grape-blooded feet of dancing
vintners’ daughters, now steaming seas gave birth to monsters while flowered kites strewed
scent on blowing clouds… now… now… now…
The artist stopped.
George Smith drew back and stood away.
�Содержание
The artist glanced up, surprised to find someone so near. Then he simply stood there, looking
from George Smith to his own creations fling like idle footprints down the way. He smiled at
last and shrugged as if to say, “Look what I’ve done; see what a child? You will forgive me,
won’t you? One day or another we are all fools… You too, perhaps? So allow an old fool this,
eh? Good! Good!”
But George Smith could only look at the little man with the sun-dark skin and the clear sharp
eyes and say the man’s name once, in a whisper, to himself.
They stood thus for perhaps another five seconds. George Smith staring at the sand-frieze, and
the artist watching George Smith with amused curiosity. George Smith opened his mouth,
closed it, put out his hand, took it back. He stepped forward the pictures, stepped away. Then
he moved along the line of figures, like a man viewing a precious series of marbles cast up
from some ancient ruin on the shore. His eyes didn’t blink, his hand wanted to touch but
didn’t dare to touch. He wanted to run but didn’t run.
He looked suddenly at the hotel. Run, yes! Run! What? Grab a shovel, dig, excavate, save a
chunk of this all-too-crumbling sand? Find a repairman, race him back here with plaster to cast
a mold of some small fragile part of these? No, no. Silly, silly. Or…? His eyes flicked to his
hotel window. The camera! Run, get it, get back, and hurry along the shore, clicking, changing
film, clicking, until…
George Smith whirled to face the sun. It burned faintly on his face, his eyes were two small
fires from it. The sun was half underwater, and as he watched it sank the rest of the way in a
matter of seconds.
The artist had drawn nearer and now was gazing into George Smith’s face with great
friendliness, as if he were guessing every thought. Now he was bowing his head in a little bow.
Now the ice-cream stick had fallen casually from his fingers. Now he was saying good night,
good night. Now he was gone, walking back down the beach toward the south.
George Smith stood looking after him. After a full minute he did the only thing he could
possibly do. He started at the beginning of the fantastic frieze of satyrs and fauns and winedipped maidens and prancing unicorns and piping youths and he walked slowly along the
shore. He walked a long way, looking down at the free-running bacchanal. And when he came
to the end of the animals and men he turned around and started back in the other direction, just
starting down as if he had lost something and did not quite know where to find it. he kept on
doing this until there was no more light in the sky or on the sand to see by.
He sat down at the supper table.
“You’re late,” said his wife. “I just had to come down alone. I’m ravenous.”
“That’s all right,” he said.
“Anything interesting happen on your walk?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
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“You look funny; George, you didn’t swim out too far, did you, and almost drown? I can tell
by your face. You did swim out too far, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Well,” she said, watching him closely. “Don’t ever do that again. Now – what’ll you have?”
He picked up the menu and started to read it and stopped suddenly.
“What’s wrong?” asked his wife.
He turned his head and shut his eyes for a moment.
“Listen.’
“I don’t hear anything,” she said.
“Don’t you?”
“No. What is it?”
“Just the tide,” he said after a while, sitting there, his eyes still shut. “Just the tide coming in.”
�Содержание
Peter Mayle. The Genetic Effects of Two Thousand Years of Foie Gras (an
extract)
Old age is unlikely to be a keenly anticipated period in anybody's life, and no amount of
euphemistic camouflage by the senior-citizen lobby can make it any more attractive than a longawaited bill that finally arrives. Even so, it seems to me that growing old in Provence is not
without its share of consolations. Some are mental, others are physical; one you can actually
take to the bank.
Let us say you have retired, and that your main asset is your house. It suits you, and you have
every intention of living in it until you make your final public appearance in the obituary
columns. But the expenses of old age – and
there's always something: the Ferrari for your grandson, the services of a live-in chef, the
ruinous price of vintage wines – will inevitably increase every year, and there comes a moment
when a windfall might be very welcome. This may be the appropriate time to consider selling
your house under that particular French arrangement which is called en viager.
It's a gamble. You sell the house at a price below the full market value, but with yourself
included as a fixture, having the right to continue in residence for the rest of your life. For you,
it is like having your cake and living in it; for the buyer, it is a chance to acquire property at a
discount – always providing that you, the ancient proprietor, have the good grace not to hang
around for too long and make a lingering inconvenience of yourself. Some people find this
system morbid. The French, always very practical in matters of money, see it as a chance for
both buyer and seller to profit from natural causes.
But the gamble can sometimes backfire, as it did not long ago in the town of Aries, itself a
monument to old age. Founded before Christ and noted for its pretty women, Aries was until
1997 the home of Madame Jeanne Calment. Her story is a testament to the bracing air of
Provence and a warning to all property speculators.
She was born in 1875, and had met Van Gogh when she was a girl. At the age of 90, she
decided to sell her apartment en viager to a local lawyer, a mere sprig in his forties, who had
every reason to think he was making an impeccably sound investment.
But Calment lived on. And on. And on. She treated her skin with olive oil, ate almost a kilo of
chocolate a week, rode a bicycle until she was 100, and gave up smoking when she was 117.
According to official records, she was the oldest person in the world when she eventually died
at the age of 122. As for the unfortunate lawyer, he had died the previous year, aged 77.
Calment, obviously, was an exception, one of those blips that spoil the symmetry of actuarial
statistics. But while her accumulation of years was quite extraordinary, it would not surprise me
if her record was eventually broken by one of the lively octogenarians I see every week – the
antiques dealers who predate some of their stock, the elderly ladies who elbow you aside in the
epicene with the vigor of young girls, those gnarled but stately figures muttering words of
encouragement to the tomatoes in their vegetable gardens. What is it about Provence that
sustains them? What is their secret?
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For several years, we lived near a family whose oldest member, known as Pepe, was a daily
fascination to me. A small, lean man, invariably dressed in jacket and trousers of washed-out
blue and a flat cap that never left his head, he would take his promenade along the road before
coming up our drive to inspect the vines. He liked it best when there were people working in
the long, green alleys-weeding, trimming overlong shoots, distributing the ration of sulfate –
because then he could lean on his stick and supervise.
He was generous with his advice, which, as he often reminded his captive audience, was the
result of more than eighty years’ experience. If anyone had the impertinence and temerity to
disagree with him on matters of wine or weather, he would reach back into his memory and
produce some dusty scrap of evidence from the past to prove that he was right. “Of course,”
he once said, “you wouldn’t remember the summer of 1947. Hailstones in August, big as
quails’ eggs. The vines never recovered.” That kind of remark was usually enough to put a
stop to any loose talk about conditions being perfect for a vintage year. Optimism and nature
don't mix, he used to say. After an hour or so, having satisfied himself that the vineyard was
being properly attended to, he would walk back down our drive, along the road, and into his
daughter-in-law’s kitchen, no doubt to supervise the preparation of the midday meal.
I believe he was a contented man. The lines and wrinkles of his face went upward, as though a
smile were on the way. (It often arrived, more gum than teeth, but no less delightful for that.) I
never saw him agitated or upset. He was mildly critical of some modern novelties, such as
noisy motorcycles, but delighted with others, particularly his large television set, which enabled
him to indulge his weakness for old American soap operas. He died when he was ready,
somewhere in his nineties, his passing marked by an affectionate village funeral.
There are others, plenty of others, like him. You see them moving, often quite briskly and
always with great deliberation, to take up their seats in the cafe for a mid-morning nip of wine
or pastis. You see them perched, like a row of amiable buzzards, on a wooden bench by the
war memorial in the village place, their hands with swollen brown knuckles clasped over the
tops of their sticks; or sitting on chairs in the shade outside their front doors, their eyes
flickering up and down the street, missing nothing. By today’s standards, they have had hard
lives, working the land with little to show for their efforts but subsistence. No skiing trips, no
winter breaks in the Caribbean, no golf, no tennis, no second homes, no new cars every three
years, nothing of what is endlessly referred to as the good life. But there they are, spry, happy,
and apparently indestructible.
There are too many of them to be dismissed as exceptions, and whenever I see them I'm
tempted to ask them to explain their longevity. Nine times out of ten, the only answer would be
a shrug, and so I have been left to come to my own unreliable conclusions.
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Their generation seems to have escaped the modern affliction of stress, which may be a result
of having spent their working lives coping with nature rather than with a capricious boss. Not
that nature – with its storms, forest fires, and crop diseases – is either reliable or forgiving as
an employer. But at least it's free from personal malice and the pressure of office politics, and
it has no favorites. The setback of a bad year is shared among neighbors, and there’s nothing
to be done about it except hope for better times to come. Working with (or fighting against)
nature teaches a man to be philosophical, and even allows him to derive a certain perverse
enjoyment from complaining. Anyone who has lived among farmers will know the relish with
which they discuss misfortune, even their own. They’re as bad as insurance agents.
There must also be something reassuring about working to the fixed and predictable rhythm of
the seasons, knowing that spring and early summer and the harvest season will be busy;
knowing that winter will be slow and quiet. It is a pattern of life that would probably drive most
corporate executives – seething with impatience and ambition – into an early grave. But not all.
I have a friend who, like myself, is a refugee from the advertising business. Some years ago, he
moved to the Luberon, where he now makes wine for a living. Instead of the big glossy car and
matching chauffeur, he drives to work on a tractor. His problems are no longer with fractious
clients but with the weather and the drifting bands of grape-pickers who come to the vineyards
for the vendange. He has learned to do without what the French grandly call his entourage of
secretaries and personal assistants. He has some difficulty remembering when he last wore a
tie. He works long hours – longer than he ever used to in Paris – and makes less money. But
he feels better, sleeps more soundly, and has a genuine pride in his work. Another contented
man.
The day may come when he will want to join the ranks of what he calls the living antiques who
spin out the days in the village cafe. In the meantime, he leads a life of sustained physical
activity, and this must be an important ingredient in the recipe for ripe old age. The human
body, so we are told by men of science (who spend most of their time sitting down), is a
machine that thrives on use. When left idle, muscles atrophy, and other working parts of the
system deteriorate more rapidly than they would if subjected to regular exercise. The urban
solution is the jog and the gym. A more primitive alternative is the kind of nianual labor that
comes with country life, the rural aerobics necessary for existence. Bending and stretching to
prune, lifting and piling sacks of fertilizer, cutting brush, clearing ditches, stacking logs – these
are unglamorous chores, but wonderful exercise. A day of this produces an epic crop of
blisters and excruciating stiffness. A month rewards you with a feeling of well-being and a
distinct looseness of the waistband. A lifetime works wonders.
TASK. Read the following extracts and try to identify the authors.
1. Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say. Perhaps her first real
partner was the cab. It did not matter that she shared the cab with: the Sheridan girls and their
brother. She sat back in her own little corner of it, and the bolster on which her hand rested felt
like the sleeve of an unknown young man’s dress suit; and away they bowled, past waltzing
lamp-posts and houses and fences and trees,
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“Have you really never been to a ball before, Leila? But, my child, how too weird _” cried the
Sheridan girls.
“Our nearest neighbour was fifteen miles,” said Leila softly, gently opening and shutting her
fan.
Oh dear, how hard it was to be indifferent like others! She tried not to smile too much; she
tried not to care. But every single thing was so new and exciting... Meg’s tuberoses, Jose’s
long loop of amber, Laura’s little dark head, pushing above her white fur like a flower through
snow. She would remember for ever. It even gave her a pang to see her cousin Laurie throw
away the wisps of tissue paper he pulled from the fastenings of his new gloves. She would like
to have kept those wisps as a keepsake, as a remembrance.
Laurie leaned forward and put his hand on Laura’s knee.
“Look here, darling,” he said. “The third and the ninth as usual. Twig?”
Oh, how marvelous to have a brother! In her excitement Leila felt that if there had been time, if
it hadn’t been impossible, she couldn't have helped crying because she was an only child and
no brother had ever said “Twig?” to her; no sister would ever say, as Meg said to Jose that
moment, “I’ve never known your hair go up more successfully than it has tonight!”
But, of course, there was no time. They were at the drill hall already; there were cabs in front,
of them and cabs behind. The road was bright on other sode with moving fan-like lights, and
on the pavement gay couples seemed to float through the air; little satin shoes chased each
other like birds.
2. Mr. Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, had been walking up and down
Doublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty pieces of paper, arranging
about the series of concerts. He had a game leg and for this his friends called him Hoppy
Hollohan. He Walked up and down constantly, stood by the hour at street corners and made
notes; but in the end it was Mrs. Kearney who arranged everything.
Miss Devlin had become Mrs. Kearney out of spite. She had been educated in a high-class
convent, where she had learned French and music. As she was naturally pale and unbending in
manner she made few friends at school. When she came to the age of marriage she was sent
out to many houses, where her playing and ivory manners were much admired. She sat amid
the chilly circle of her accomplishments, waiting for some suitor to brave it and offer her a
brilliant life. But the young men whom she met were ordinary and she gave them no
encouragement, trying to console her romantic desires by eating a great deal of Turkish Delight
in secret. However, when she drew near the limit and her friends began to loose their tongues
about her, she silenced them by marrying Mr. Kearney, who was a bookmaker on Ormond
Quay.
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He was much older than she. His conversation, which was serious, took place at intervals in his
great brown beard. After the first year of married life, Mrs. Kearnet perceived that such a man
would wear better that a romantic person, but she never put her own romantic ideas away. He
was sober, thrifty and pious; he went to the altar every first Friday, sometimes with her, oftener
by himself. But she never weakened in her religion and was a good wife to him.
3. Charm is the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences.
If you’ve got it you need almost nothing else, neither money, looks, nor pedigree. It’s a gift,
only given to give away, and the more used, there more there is. It is also a climate of
behaviour set for perpetual summer and thermostatically controlled by taste and tact.
True charm is an aura, an invisible mask in the air; if you see it working, the spell is broken. At
its worst, it is the charm of the charity duchess, like being struck in the face with a bunch of
tulips; at its best, it is a smooth and painless injection which raises the blood to a genial fever.
Most powerful of all, it is obsessive, direct, person to person, forsaking all others. Never
attempt to ask for whom the char bells ring, if they toll for anyone, they must toll for you.
4. It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the
leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the daytime the street was dusty, but at night
the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night
it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man
was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he
would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.
“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said, “Why?”
“He was in despair.”
“What about?”
“Nothing.”
“How do you know it was nothing?”
“He has plenty of money”
They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the cafe and looked
at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of
the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind. A girl and a soldier went by in the street.
The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl wore no head covering and
hurried beside him.
5. There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which
commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable. Shabbiness of appearance and irregularity
of life are not only forgiven to the artist but expected. Art offers scope for profound and
prolonged laziness and in the event of success
gives rewards quite out of proportion to industry.
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Of all the arts the one most recommended to the young beginner is literature. Painting is messy;
music is noisy; and the applied arts and crafts require a certain amount of skill. But writing is
clean, quiet, and can be done anywhere at any time by anyone. All you need is some ink, a
piece of paper, a pen and some vague knowledge of spelling. Even the last is not essential if
you employ a competent typist.
All you have to do is to write “Chapter One” at the head of your paper and from then onwards
for better or worse you are an author. Many people never get any further that that.
6. Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, of Nashville, Tennessee! There are just
three big cities in the United States that are “story cities” New York, of course, New Orleans,
and, best of the lot, San Francisco – Frank Norris.
East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of
people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West, Now,
Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak
of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians go into detail.
Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour while you are
thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your
silence for conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden
Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far as a matter of opinion, no refutation is
necessary. But dear cousins (from Adam and Eve descended), and it is a rash one who will lay
his finger on the map and say: “In this town there can be no romance – what could happen
here?” Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and
Rand and McNally.
Nashville. – A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the state of Tenessee, is on the
Cumberland River and on the N.C.& St. L. and L.&N. railroads, this city is regarded as the
most important educational center in the South.
I stepped off the train at 8 p.m. Having searched thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a
substitution, tie me to comparison in the form of a recipe.
Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a
brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix,
The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant
as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soap: but ’tis enough – ’twill serve.
7. Mr. Kelada was chatty. He talked of New York and of San Francisco. He discussed plays,
pictures, and politics. He was patriotic. The Union Jack is an impressive piece of drapery, but
when it is flourished by a gentleman from Alexandria or Beirut, I cannot but feel that it loses
somewhat in dignity. I do not wish to put on airs, but I cannot help feeling that it is seemly in a
total stranger to put mister before my name when he addresses me. Mr. Kelada, doubtless to
set me at my ease, used no such formality. I did not like Mr. Kelada. I had put aside the cards
when he sat down, but now, thinking that for this first occasion our conversation had lasted
long enough, I went on with my game.
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“The three on the four”, said Mr. Kelada.
There is nothing more exasperating when you are playing patience than to be told where to put
the card you have turned up before you have had a chance to look for youself.
“It’ coming out, it’s coming out,” he cried.
With rage and hatred in my heart I finished.
I did not like Mr. Kelada.
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PART V. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY
Analysing Poetry
Sir Walter Raleigh. Even Such Is Time
John Donne. Holy Sonnets. Sonnet XIII
Robert Herrick. To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
William Blake. A Poison Tree
Edgar Allan Poe. Alone
Emily Dickinson. There is no Frigate like a Book
Christina Rossetti. Up-hill
William Butler Yeats. For Anne Gregory
Edwin Arlington Robinson. Richard Cory
Robert Frost. Gathering Leaves
Edward Estlin Commings. Pity this Busy Monster, Manunkind
Dylan Thomas. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Dorothy Parker. Frustration
Allen Ginsberg. A Supermarket in California
Tom Clark. Poem
Poems for Self-Guided Analysis
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Analysing Poetry
One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy. Poetry is a compact
language that expresses complex feelings.
Unlike prose, poetry often has an underlying purpose that goes beyond the literal meaning of
the words. It evokes in the reader an intense emotion: joy, sorrow, anger, love, etc. It has the
ability to surprise the reader or make the reader experience revelation or insight. William
Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Dylan
Thomas said, “Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle,
what makes me want to do this or that or nothing.”
Poems often make heavy use of imagery and word association to quickly convey emotions.
The emphasis on the aesthetics of language and the use of different techniques such as meter
and rhyme dictates a specific approach to the analysis of poetic text.
The reader needs to examine a poem from different perspectives and identify various tools the
poet uses to make the meaning clear and understandable. Elements, including theme, structure
and writing style, should be taken into consideration.
The following scheme aims to organize the reader’s responses to a poem into a logical, pointby-point explanation. It involves questions that apply to most poetry.
I.
Impression
The first immediate responses to a poem are very important. Emotional reactions, positive or
negative, reminders of personal experiences, or things the reader would like to share with
others, can provide a focus for the analysis and help logically connect its main aspects.
The reader may change their mind about the poem later, but these first ideas are worth
recording.
Answering the following questions the reader should summarize their personal responses.
1. Are you emotionally moved or touched by the poem?
2. Are you entertained or bored, rejoiced or terrified?
3. Do you agree or disagree with the author?
4. Do some words and phrases capture your attention? Why?
II.
Background Information
Knowing something about the poet’s life, times, and culture helps the reader understand what
is contained in a poem and why.
1. Who is the author of the poem?
2. Does the poet’s life suggest any special point of view, such as political affiliation, religion,
profession, talent or handicap, family or personal problems?
3. When was the poem written?
4. What does it tell about life during some period in history?
5. Does the poem belong to a particular literary movement?
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Poetic Trends
Neoclassical Poetry
– poetry that contains the principles and ideals of beauty characteristic of the Greek and
Roman period. Classicism concerns itself with form and discipline as opposed to emotional
impact as in Romanticism. The works of Neoclassical poets (John Dryden, Alexander
Pope) are characterized by their formality, simplicity, and emotional restraint
Metaphysical Poetry
– a group of British lyric poets of the 17th century (John Donne, George Herbert,
Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughn) whose witty, ingenious, and highly philosophical works
were characterized by unusual verse forms, elaborate and surprising metaphors (conceits),
puns and paradoxes. Their topics include love, God, life and death
Cavalier Poets
– a school of English poets of the 17th century (Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace,
John Suckling), who came from the classes that supported King Charles I during the
English Civil War. Much of their poetry is light in style, and generally secular in subject
Graveyard Poets
– a group of the 18th century poets (Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair,
Edward Young) who saw in the graveyard an occasion for reflection on human
mortality and emphasized the subjects of religion, death, and loss. They paved the way for
the Gothic and Romanticism
Romantic Poetry
– an artistic and intellectual movement originated in the late 18th as a reaction against the
Enlightenment. Romantic Poets (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley) emphasized imagination,
strong emotion and intuition
Fireside Poets
– a group of 19th-century American poets associated with New England (Henry
Longfellow, William Bryant, John Whittier, James Lowell, Oliver Holmes) whose
poetry is characterized by domestic themes and messages of morality presented in
conventional poetic forms
Symbolist Poetry
– a late 19th century poetic movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin.
Symbolists (Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud,
Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Blok, Oscar Wilde) believed that art should represent
absolute truths that could only be described indirectly, and wrote in a very metaphorical
manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning
Imagism
– a group of American and English poets (Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Carlos
Williams) who wrote compact and clear verse in which an exact visual image made a total
poetic statement
Modernist Poetry
– poetry written, mainly in Europe and North America, between 1890 and 1950 in the
tradition of modernist literature which is characterized by the radical break with the
conventions and established rules of the past. Modernist poets (e. e. commings, William
Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens)
experimented in form, style and subject to reveal fresh ways of looking at man’s position
and function in the universe
The Beat Generation – a group of American post WWII writers and poets (Allen Ginsberg, William S.
Poetry
Burrough, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Gregory Corso) who questioned mainstream politics and culture. In the 1960s, elements
of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger
counterculture movements
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The Movement
– a group of English writers and poets (Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Alfred
Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings and Robert Conquest) who were
opposed to modernists. Their tone was anti-romantic and rational. To these poets, good
poetry meant simple, sensuous content and traditional form
The reader should apply definitions of many categories to determine which describes the
poem's length and style.
6. What is the genre of the poem?
7. Was it popular in the time the poem was created?
8. Does it contribute to the overall message of the poem?
Poetic Genres
Epic
Epitaph
Lyric
Elegy
–
–
–
–
–
a long poem about a great person or national hero
a commemorative inscription on a tomb or monument about the person buried
a short, musical verse expressing the author’s thoughts and feelings
a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem
a lengthy lyric poem typically of a serious or meditative nature and having an elevated
style
Ode
–
Narrative poem
–
Dialogue poem
–
“Carpe diem” poem –
Pastoral
a poem that depicts rural life in a peaceful, romanticized way
a poem that tells a story
a poem in which two characters carry on a conversation
is a poem that has the theme of living for the present derived from the Latin expression
that means “seize the day”
Satire poem
– a poem using irony, exaggeration and ridicule, to expose and criticize stupidity and
vice
– a poem which deals with subjects which are "beyond reality”
Dramatic monologue – a poem which is spoken to a listene
Confessional poem
– a poem which focuses on extreme moments of individual experience, psyche, or
Speculative poem
personal trauma
III.
Title
The reader’s search for the ideas should begin at the title of the poem. It was probably
carefully chosen.
1. What information does the title give?
2. Is the title’s meaning obvious, or does it imply multiple possibilities?
3. What expectations does it create?
4. Is the title an object or event that becomes a symbol?
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IV.
Speaker
Another important aspect in a poem is the speaker.
1. Does the voice speak in first person (I, me, my, mine)?
2. Does the voice sound like the direct voice of the poet speaking to you, expressing thoughts
and feelings?
3. Does the speaker address another person?
4. Is the speaker a man or a woman, someone young or old?
5. For what audience was the poem written?
6. Is the voice meant to be universal – for example, relevant to any person, time or place?
V.
Themes and Ideas
Theme is the poem’s essence. Asking the questions “who,” “what,” “where,” “when” and
“why” can help to understand the theme.
“What” creates focus on the general topic and can also be used to describe the plot of the
poem.
1. What is the poem about?
2. Are there several subjects? How do they relate to each other?
3. Answering the “who” question is identifying the characters of the poem.
4. Who are the characters of the poem?
5. Does the name of a character suggest extra meaning?
“Where” refers to the physical location of the action in the poem.
6. Where do the events take place?
“When” may refer to the time of day or the time in history the poem occurs.
7. What details specify time?
8. How long is the period of time? Are there gaps?
“Why” answers the question of the author’s purpose in writing the poem. Here the reader
comes close to the idea about the theme. The idea is what makes up the message of the poem.
9. What does the poet state about the theme?
10. Which lines bring out the meaning of the poem?
11. Is the idea expressed directly or implied? Does the poet insist on it? Or does he allow the
reader their own interpretation?
VI.
Mood and Tone
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The speaker’s tone (satiric, serious, mock serious, playful, somber, or teasingly) and the mood
of the poem (cheerful or jolly, mysterious, provocative, zany, ominous, festive, fearful, or
brooding) are among the basic aspects of analysis.
1. What is the mood of the poem?
2. Does the mood change within the body of the work? Where does the shift begin?
3. What is the speaker’s tone? Is the speaker angry, sad, happy, or cynical?
4. Is there an obvious reason for this attitude?
5. Is the poet trying to make a point, win an argument, or move someone to action? Or does
the poem express something without requiring an answer?
VII.
Structure and Organization
The structure is an essential part of how the poem is perceived. It affects how fast or slowly it
is read, where the pauses are. It causes certain words to stand out more prominently. It affects
the way the poem looks to the reader on the page. For example, a lot of space between words
and lines gives a feeling of lightness and air. If the words are packed together in a poem it can
imply emotional tension or a complicated subject. Some poems have smooth and delicate
shapes; others have heavy and dense shapes. There poems with shapes that intentionally
imitate what the poem is about.
Thus the structure of a poem can be used as an argument to support its ideas.
The number of stanzas and lines in the poem may contribute to its mood and tone.
1. How is the poem organized? How does it look on the page?
2. Are there individual stanzas or sections?
3. Does each stanza cover a separate topic, or is there a continued theme throughout the
poem?
4. How does the structure reveal the poet’s attitude toward the subject?
Poetic forms include many types and may be discussed in the analysis of a poem.
5. How does the form of the poem contribute to its general atmosphere and tone?
6. How do the subject and the form interact?
Poetic Forms
Acrostic poem
– a poem in which certain letters, usually the first in each line form a word or message when
read in a sequence
Ballad
Blank verse
– a poem that tells a story similar to a folk tale or legend which often has a repeated refrain
– a poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, the form which resembles the rhythm of
ordinary speech
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Cinquain
– a poem of five lines (line 1 has one word (the title), line 2 has two words that describe the
title, line 3 has three words that tell the action, line 4 has four words that express the feeling,
line 5 has one word which recalls the title)
Epigram
Free verse
Haiku
– a very short, ironic and witty poem usually written as a brief couplet or quatrain
– poetry written in either rhymed or unrhymed lines that have no set fixed metrical pattern
– a poem following a Japanese pattern which is a three-line observation about a fleeting
moment involving nature. Haiku poem is composed of unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five
syllables
Sonnet
– a lyric poem that consists of 14 lines which usually have one or more conventional rhyme
schemes
Villanelle
(villanesque)
– a fixed verse form of French origin consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There
are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet
repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines
The expression of feelings and ideas in a poem is given intensity by the use of distinctive metre
and rhythm.
Meter is the regular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. Foot is the basic unit of
meter which consists of one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables. The
number of feet in the line determines its metrical length: monometre – one foot, dimetre – two
feet, trimetre – three feet, tetrameter – four feet, pentameter – five feet, hexameter – six feet,
heptameter – seven feet, octametre – eight feet.
7. What is the poem’s metre? How does it affect your response to the poem?
8. Is there a dominant rhythm?
9. Does the rhythm relate to the prevalent theme of the poem? Or does it seem at odds with
the theme?
10. Does the rhythm increase or decrease in speed?
Iamb
(iambic)
Trochee
(trochaic)
Poetic Metre
– one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (da/DUM):
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
(from She Walks in Beauty by George Gordon Byron)
– one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (DUM/da):
Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odours of the forest,
With the dew and damp of meadows,…
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Anapest
(anapestic)
Dactyl
(dactylic)
Amphibrach
(amphibrachic)
(from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Longfellow)
– two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (da/da/DUM):
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.
(from A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Moore)
– lyric poem that consists of 14 lines which usually have one or more conventional rhyme
schemes.
– one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables(DUM/da/da):
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
(from The Lost Leader by Robert Browning)
– one stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables (da/DUM/da):
How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood,
When fond recollection presents them to view!
The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wild-wood,
And every loved spot which my infancy knew!
(from The Old Oaken Bucket by Samuel Woodworth)
Another important structural element is rhyme. There are many different kinds of rhyme
schemes. Rhymes are used to give the poem a musical, pleasing sound. They can also be used
to deepen meaning, and strengthen the form of the poem.
11. Does the poem rhyme?
12. How does the use of rhyme add to the meaning?
Rhyme
End rhyme
– is one of the most common forms of rhymes when the last word of a line rhymes with
another last word of a line
Internal rhyme
– is the type of rhyme when words in the middle of line rhyme with other words in the middle
of a different line
True rhyme
(perfect rhyme)
Off-rhyme (slant
rhyme)
– a kind of rhyme when words rhyme exactly (“cat” – “rat”)
– a kind of rhyme when words that almost rhyme, but do not rhyme exactly (“fate” –
“saint”). Off rhymes use assonance and consonance. Assonance is when the vowels of two
words rhyme, while consonance is when the consonants of two words are the same
Eye rhyme (visual – a rhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently
rhyme, or sight
rhyme)
Discussion of structure also includes the significant information or emotion contained in the
opening and closing lines of the poem, sentence patterns and punctuation use.
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VIII. Language Tools
Every conclusion the reader draws about a poem should be based on its language. A poem is
only words, and each has been carefully chosen to create a specific emotional response
through its meaning.
Word choice underlines the tone and mood of a poem.
1. Are there stylistically coloured words in the poem?
2. Are there words with common semantic components?
3. What connotations (positive or negative) prevail?
Lexical devices like irony, hyperbole and symbol are typical techniques in a poem.
4. Does the poem introduce some word used in its opposite meaning, or situation that
involves discrepancy?
5. Does the author exaggerate some idea or emotion?
6. Are there any symbols in the poem?
Poems also tend to suggest things beyond what they actually say. Often what causes the
strongest emotions is not what the poem tells, but what it makes the reader imagine. Figurative
language, including metaphors, similes and personification, is the main source of a poem’s
imagery.
7. Are there concrete images or pictures that the poet wants readers to see?
8. Are the pictures created by personification, metaphor, simile or allusion?
9. Which comparisons are stressed? Are they all positive? How are they connected?
Allusions are another source of images. The use of intertextuality enhances a poem’s
composition.
10. Does the poem contain any Biblical, historical or literary references? How do they affect
the understanding of the poem’s ideas?
11. Do the allusions create specific atmosphere or mood?
Some parts of a poem seem to speak directly to the readers’ senses. The use of the senses in a
poem makes it more imaginative and expressive.
12. Does the poem evoke sense impressions – for example, taste, touch, smell, sound, or
sight? What words or phrases accentuate them? Are these impressions pleasant, unpleasant,
or neutral?
13. Does the poet concentrate on a single sense or several of them?
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The words in poems are doing several jobs at the same time. They do one thing with their
meaning, and another thing with their sound. Phonetic devices such as assonance, alliteration,
onomatopoeia adds to the discussion of a poem’s theme, mood and message. Readers should
also look for repetition of specific words, phrases, or verses in the poem, and decide why
certain information seems to deserve the repetition.
14. Does the poet stress certain sounds, such as pleasant sounds (euphony) or harsh letter
combinations (cacophony)?
15. Are certain sounds repeated (alliteration, assonance)?
16. Is there onomatopoeia?
17. How does the sounding of the poem add to its emotional effect?
IX.
Conclusion
Now that the key elements of the poem have been considered, it is time to step back and
decide what the poem means as a whole. To do this, the reader needs to synthesize (combine)
the separate parts of analysis into one main idea.
1. Why do you think the poet wrote the poem?
2. How effective the form of the poem is in communicating the message?
The reader should go back to the questions from the first response stage of the analysis and
summarise all the impressions.
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Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618)
Before his execution for treason, Sir Walter Raleigh brought glory to Elizabethan England as
an explorer of the New World, a scholar and a gifted lyric poet. He is considered one of the
foremost poets of the Elizabethan era. In his poetry Raleigh uses simple, undecorated
language, plain diction and conceptual images.
Even Such Is Time
Да, Время таково
Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days,
And from which earth, and grave, and dust
The Lord will raise me up, I trust.
Да, Время таково – оно ведь управляет
И молодостью, и радостями жизни нашей милой.
За это – отдаём ему года, и жизни наши Время забирает.
И вот, во мраке и безмолвии могилы
Историю мы дней своих покорно завершаем,
Пройдя отпущенный нам путь. Однако знаем,
Что из могилы и из праха нас возродит Господь,
И вновь мы обретём живую плоть.
Перевод А. Горшкова
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is the theme of the poem?
2. The poem is an epitaph. What mood is imposed by the genre of the poem? How is it
revealed in the word choice? Which words are repeated?
3. What is the role of personification? What images of Time are evoked? Are they original or
trite?
4. What elements construct the circular shape of the poem? Consider the repetition and
rhyme.
5. What phonetic devices contribute to the rhythm and melody of the poem?
6. Interpret the idea contained in the last line. What syntactical expressive means intensifies the
speaker’s opinion? Is he convinced, or is he in doubt?
7. What is the message of the poem? Does the idea of resurrection sound optimistic?
8. What is your personal response to the poem?
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John Donne (1572–1631)
John Donne is remembered today as the leading exponent of Metaphysical Poetry, which
flourished in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Eclipsed by Romantic and
Victorian trends this highly intellectual form of poetry remained disregarded until the early
part of the twentieth century when it was rediscovered by modernists like T.S. Eliot.
Metaphysical poetry is witty, ingenious, and highly philosophical. Its topics include life,
love, death. It typically employs uncommon verse forms, elaborate metaphors, irony and
paradox. Donne’s poetry exhibits each of these characteristics. Unusual meters, puns,
conceits and unexpected reasoning are unified in Donne as in no other poet.
Donne was a poet of inner conflict. As a minister in the Anglican Church, Donne possessed
a deep spirituality, but as a man, Donne had a deep longing for life, sensation, and
experience. In his best poems, Donne mixes the physical and the spiritual. His use of
religious imagery in love poems and images of love in religious poetry shocked his
contemporaries.
The rhythm of Donne’s poems is the rhythm of natural speech and the language is dramatic.
Donne usually begins with a bright thought-provoking line. He often tries to persuade his
reader to share his point of view through poetry which appeals both to the intellect and the
emotion.
Holy Sonnets
Sonnet XIII
Благочестивые сонеты
Сонет 13
What if this present were the world’s last night?
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell.
Что, если этот вечер, ночь вот эта –
Последние? В предсмертный лик Христа
Вглядись, душа – хотя б одна черта
Тебя страшит предчувствием ответа?
Смотри: в глазах – сквозь боль – сиянье света;
Чело не пачкает мирская суета;
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite?
No, no; but as in my idolatry
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty, of pity, foulness only is
A sign of rigour: so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned,
This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.
И разве “ад” произнесут уста,
Когда любовь к врагам – суть их завета?
Душа, не бойся. Страсть меня вела,
Но я, бывало, говорил любимой:
“Будь доброй, если хочешь стать красивой,
А пудра не поможет, коли зла; –
Ведь злость – уродством прорастёт из черт...”
А Он прекрасен – значит – милосерд.
Перевод А. Спарбера
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What do you know about “metaphysical poetry”? What are its main themes?
2. What is the main theme of this poem? How does the poet introduce it?
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3. What did you expect the poem to be about after reading the first line?
4. Who is the speaker of the poem? Who does he address?
5. The poem is written in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet. What is the focal image of the
opening sestet? What is the central concept in the following octave? Can you justify the poet’s
logic? Why do you think he decided to combine divine and earthly subject?
6. How does the poet describe Christ? Analyse the word choice. What is the speaker’s tone?
Is he afraid or amazed? Or both? Can you describe his feelings in one word?
7. In what context are beauty and pity introduced? What is the ground for the interaction of
these two concepts?
8. Consider the ambiguity of the closing couplet. Do you support the author’s idea that beauty
is a sign of pity, and ugliness is a sign of severity?
9. What is the message of the sonnet? Is the poet persuasive in his arguments?
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Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
Robert Herrick was one of the Cavalier Poets, the group of English poets who supported
Charles I during The Puritan Revolution. Cavalier Poets were associated with Royalist
unlike the Metaphysical poets who were mostly attracted to the rational and intellectual
atmosphere of Puritanism. “Cavalier” implies more than just “Royalist”. It implies, for
instance, a particular class of man: courtly, well-educated and genteel.
Accomplished as soldiers, courtiers, gallants, and wits, Cavalier poets wrote elegant lyrics,
typically on love and flirtation and sometimes on war, honour, and duty to the king. They
avoided the subject of earnest emotion or public concern. In their casual and affectionate
poems they celebrated pleasures and sadnesses of life using direct and colloquial language.
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Девственницам: спешите наверстать упущенное
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Срывайте розы поскорей,
Подвластно всё старенью,
Цветы, что ныне всех милей,
Назавтра станут тенью.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
Вот солнце движется в зенит,
Небесная лампада,
И чем скорей оно бежит,
Тем ближе миг заката.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Прекрасны юности года,
Что кровь зажгли отменно,
Но время худшее всегда
Приходит на замену.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
Отбросьте скромность, и наряд
Оденьте подвенечный;
Пройдёт весна и сей обряд
Вам ждать, быть может, вечно.
Перевод А. Лукьянова
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What epoch do the Cavalier Poets represent? What are the main features of their poetry?
2. What is a “carpe diem” poem? Is the main statement stated straightforwardly or implied in
the poem?
3. Does the poem have a speaking title?
4. Who is the speaker of the poem? Who does the speaker address? Is the speaker’s appeal
meant to be universal or personal?
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5. Analyse the imagery of the first two quatrians. What stylistic devices does the author
employ? What do the images of nature symbolically represent? Are they original or trite? Are
they effective in communicating the poet’s message?
6. How does the poet develop his idea in the third and the fourth stanzas? What are the poet’s
arguments for the urgent pursuit of love and marriage?
7. The poem is carefully constructed. What poetic techniques contribute to its clear and
simple structure? Analyse metre and rhyme of the poem. How do the mood and the form of
the poem interact?
8. What phonetic expressive means are used in the poem? How do they add to its emotional
effect?
9. Do you support the author’s message? What are the risks of “living for the moment”?
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William Blake (1757–1827)
William Blake is often regarded as the first Romantic poet who revolutionized the concept of
creative process. Being a religious, political, and artistic radical he protested against the
rationalist philosophy of the 18th century and its restrictive influence on man’s life and work.
Blake’s talent was disregarded during his lifetime. He was recognised as a poetic genius
only in the 20th century.
Blake’s work is rich in symbols and images. He tried to create an alternative reality to that
which dissatisfied him. This system of personal myths and visions was complex and elusive.
Blake was fascinated with the idea of “contraries”. He said that the “doors of perception”
are cleansed only by a transformation of categories so that contraries meet in newly
energetic formations. He understood Heaven as a part of a structure which must become one
with the creative energy of Hell raher than stand in opposition to it. Thus the tigers and
horses, the lions and lambs, the children and adults, the innocent and the experienced in
Blake’s poems should be regarded as integral elements of creation.
In his most influential work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake said, “The reason
Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and
Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Thus Blake
believes all poets have free imagination because they belong to the kingdom of Hell which is
the source of creative energy in the whole structure of the universe.
Blake used his imagination to express the innermost emotions of the human race. The
following poem explores themes of indignation, revenge, and more generally the fallen state
of mankind.
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
Древо Яда
В ярость друг меня привёл –
Гнев излил я, гнев прошёл.
Враг обиду мне нанёс –
Я молчал, но гнев мой рос.
And I waterd it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
Я таил его в тиши
В глубине своей души,
То слезами поливал,
То улыбкой согревал.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
Рос он ночью, рос он днём.
Зрело яблочко на нём,
Яда сладкого полно.
Знал мой недруг, чьё оно.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see;
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Темной ночью в тишине
Он прокрался в сад ко мне
И остался недвижим,
Ядом скованный моим.
Перевод С.Я. Маршака
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Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is William Blake’s literary reputation?
2. This poem appears in Blake’s famous work Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing
the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794) in the “Songs of Experience” section.
Why do you think the author included it in this section? What kind of experience is described
in the poem?
3. What is the genre of the poem?
4. What expectations are suggested by the title?
5. Who is the speaker in the poem? Does the voice sound like the direct voice of the poet
speaking to the reader, expressing thoughts and feelings?
6. What is the poem about? Is the theme expressed directly or implicitly?
7. How is the conflict introduced in the first quatrain? What language means accentuate the
speaker’s tone?
8. What image is used to depict human anger? How does the poet foreshadow it in the first
stanza? How does he extend it within the poem?
9. What is the mood of the poem? How does it change as the story progresses? What words
help the poet define each stage of the speaker’s feeling towards his foe.
10. Consider the metre of the poem. Does the rhythm relate to the subject of the poem? Or
does it seem at odds with it?
11. Where is the climax of the poem? How does the reader learn what happened to the
speaker’s foe? Why does the author omit the murder scene from the story?
12. What is the resolution of the poem? Does the speaker regret his crime?
13. What is the message of the poem? Does it contain a moral?
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Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Edgar Poe’s life was surrounded by tragedy with his parents passing away when he was just
3 years old. He became obsessive with drink and gambling and this resulted in his own
rather obscure death as a drunk in Baltimore. Despite this his poems and novels that
explored the conditions of the human psyche earned him international fame both during his
life and after his death.
Edgar Poe was the principal forerunner of aestheticism, or the “art for art’s sake”
movement, in the 19th-century European literature. His poetry and short stories greatly
influenced the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century, who in turn altered the
direction of modern literature.
In his work Edgar Poe demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique. A
literary work, according to Poe, is not a product of inspiration; it should be the result of
careful consideration on the part of the author. Poe’s theory of poetic composition consists in
the following points: a poem should be devoid of any moral, its beauty being an end in
itself; the subject and mood of a poem are accentuated by its rhythm and rhymes; a poem
should have a single effect; a poem can be read in one sitting; a poem should be sad.
The emphasis on literary formalism was connected to Poe’s philosophical ideals: through the
deliberate use of language one can express the essential condition of human existence. In
poetry, the single effect in a poem must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe
closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss. Walt Whitman said, “Poe’s verses
illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess,
an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, and a demoniac undertone behind
every page.” He also pointed out “an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and
reminiscences, as well as the poems”.
Alone
Один
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were – I have not seen
As others saw – I could not bring
My passions from a common spring –
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow – I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone –
And all I lov’d – I lov’d alone –
Then – in my childhood – in the dawn
Of a most stormy life – was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still –
From the torrent, or the fountain –
From the red cliff of the mountain –
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold –
Я не таким был с детских лет,
Как прочие; открылся свет
Иначе мне; мирских начал
В моих страстях не замечал.
Я из других пределов ждал
Мою печаль; не пробуждал
В душе восторг под общий слог;
В любви всегда был одинок.
Тогда же – в детстве, в ранний миг
Мятежной жизни, – вдруг возник
Из глубины добра и зла
Блеск тайны, что меня прожгла:
Из потока, от истока,
С красных круч горы высокой,
От светила на заре
В золотистом сентябре,
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From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by –
From the thunder, and the storm –
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view –
От зарницы озорной,
Пролетевшей надо мной,
Из грозы, под грома стук,
Да из тучи, ставшей вдруг
На лазурных небесах
Демоном в моих глазах.
Перевод В. Бойко
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is Edgar Poe’s literary reputation?
2. What is the genre of the poem? What traumatic psychological experience is described?
How does the poem reflect the poet’s life?
3. What is the theme of the poem? What is the idea? Is it expressed directly? Which lines
bring out the meaning of the poem?
4. What were the circumstances surrounding the speaker’s childhood? How does the speaker
describe his uniqueness at the beginning of the poem?
5. What is the tone of the poem? What words reinforce the tone?
6. Analyse the meter and rhyme. Where does the metre change? How does it affect the mood
of the poem?
7. What images are employed to show the speaker’s mysterious estrangement?
8. What phonetic devices accentuate the rhythm of the poem?
9. What is the role of punctuation?
10. Interpret the symbol in the last line. Who or what is the demon?
11. Does the poem contain any message?
12. Does the poem meet the requirements Edgar Poe enlisted in his theory of poetic
composition?
13. What is your personal response to the poem?
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Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Emily Dickinson is such a unique poet that it is very difficult to place her in any single
tradition. Unlike William Blake or William Wordsworth she made no effort to organize her
thoughts and feelings into a coherent, unified philosophic system. Dickinson’s poems simply
record thoughts and feelings experienced naturally over the course of a lifetime. They are
astonishing and thought-provoking verses devoted to reflection and creativity.
Emily Dickinson had a quiet and reserved family life. Choosing to live life internally within
the confines of her home, Dickinson brought her life into sharp focus. She chose to live
within the limitless expanses of her imagination. She redefined the meaning of deprivation
because being denied something – whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some
other desire – provided a sharper understanding than she would have experienced had she
achieved what she wanted. “Water, is taught by thirst”, she wrote, “Success is counted
sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.”
Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems are written in short stanzas, mostly quatrains, with short
lines. She ended lines with dashes and capitalized nouns sporadically. She used forms of
rhyme that were not generally accepted till late in the 19th century and are used by modern
poets. Off-rhymes, or slant rhymes, seem consistent with the brooding quality of the poet’s
mind and may have helped Emily Dickinson to focus on selection of words.
Dickinson’s greatest achievement as a poet of inwardness is her brilliant language. She often
writes aphoristically, meaning that she compresses a great deal of meaning into a very small
number of words. This can make her poems hard to understand on the first reading, but
when their meaning unveils itself, it often explodes in the mind all at once, and lines that
seemed strange can become intensely clear.
Emily Dickinson’s poems are famous for their metaphorical conceits drawn from many
diverse sources. Her images sometimes create natural or social scenes but are more likely to
create fantastic or allegorical landscapes. Her favorite themes are love, death, separation,
inner world, religion, nature.
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Travel may the poorest take
Without offence of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human soul.
Нет лучше Фрегата – чем Книга –
Домчит до любых берегов.
Нет лучше Коня – чем страница
Гарцующих стихов.
Ни дозоров в пути – ни поборов –
Не свяжет цепью недуг.
На какой простой колеснице
Летит человеческий Дух!
Перевод В. Марковой
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is the connection between Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the circumstances of her
life?
2. What is the theme of the poem? Is the poem about some aspect of human life or human life
in general?
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3. What is the general idea? Is it stated directly?
4. What comparisons does the author use to convey the essence of reading? Analyse the
imagery of the poem. Does the author use one extended image or several images?
5. Which words are capitalized? Why do you think the author decide to make them
prominent?
6. What purpose do the dashes serve in the poem?
7. Does the poem have a strict metre or rhyme scheme? How does the form affect the mood
of the poem?
8. What is the message of the poem?
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Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
Christina Rossetti was one of the finest poets of the Victorian era. After the death of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861, she became the main female poet of the time. She
experimented with verse forms such as sonnet, hymn, and ballad, drawing stories from the
Bible and folk takes.
In the Romantic tradition Rossetti’s early pieces feature meditations on death and loss. Many
scholars have identified feminist themes in her poetry as well. Some of her works explore
gender ideology, the restrictions imposed upon women, the difficulties facing the female
writer.
Christina Rossetti’s innovative use of gothic themes, medievalism and Christian symbolism
established her as an influential figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement. By writing thoughtprovoking poetry that demanded meticulous reading and interpretation, Rossetti developed a
literary counterpart to the Pre-Raphaelite painting method characterised by sensual detail,
intense colours and complex compositions. Pre-Raphaelite paintings present an original
combination of romanticised view of life inspired by Medieval and early Renaissance art
with almost photographic realism. Similarly Rossetti’s palpable images communicate deep
sentiments and moral truths.
The peculiar gift of Christina Rossetti is the gift of song manifested in perfect command of
rhythm and metre, effective rhymes and refrains. Even when she wished to write allegories
and moralities music would break uncontrollably through her argument.
Up-hill
Дорога вверх
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Крута дорога до конца ль пути?
Крута всегда она.
Весь долгий день до места ли идти?
С утра и дотемна.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Найдется ль там, где лечь и отдохнуть?
Когда часы ночные к нам придут.
Я в темноте не потеряю путь?
Увидишь ты приют.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Мне путников придётся ль повстречать?
Кто путь прошёл быстрей.
Когда приду, позвать иль постучать?
Там не стоят у запертых дверей.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Усталый, я смогу ль покой узнать?
Своих трудов узнаешь суть.
Для странников готова ли кровать?
Для всех, прошедших путь.
Перевод К. Андрейчук
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Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What do you know about the author of the poem?
2. What associations are suggested by the title?
3. How many speakers are there in the poem? Who are they? Are they generic or
individualized persons?
4. What are the advantages of question and answer form in this poem?
5. What is the general topic of the poem? Does the poem refer to a literal, physical journey?
6. How does the metre contribute to the impression of the steady up-hill climb?
7. How does rhyme differentiate the speakers in the poem? What else indicates the change
from one speaker to another?
8. What is the general mood of the poem? Find the words and expressions to support your
impression.
9. How does the poet describe life and its hardships? What images are used?
10. What clues prompt the reader to interpret the poem symbolically? What are the key
symbols in the poem?
11. In what way does the poem resemble a Biblical parable? What is its message?
12. What is your personal response to the poem? Do you agree with the poet’s definition of
life as a hard “journey”? What other images can you offer?
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William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Yeats is not only a national favorite in Ireland but also a major literary figure around the
world. He was one of those artists and writers who were beginning to realize that the form
and subject they used was inadequate in the face of the social and political upheavals of the
early 20th century.
Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the
traditional verse forms.
Much of Yeats’ poetry reflects his interest in Irish subject. Fascinated by his motherland, he
wrote poems about Irish history and figures of Celtic mythology. Yeats’ early poetry drew
heavily on Irish myths and folklore. Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment
of the literary movement known as the Irish Literary Revival.
Yeats’ new, modern, way of seeing the world matched with a rapidly changing political
landscape in one of his best-known works “Easter, 1916”, a reaction to the Easter uprising,
a violent and failed attempt by Irish nationalists to overthrow British rule.
Yeats admired William Blake and developed a lifelong interest in mysticism and spiritualism.
From early life he associated poetry with religious insights. In later years his writing became
even more reflective as he contemplated the world around him. His great themes are youth
and old age and the head and the heart.
Yeats’ mystical inclinations were reinforced by Hindu religion. Theosophical beliefs and the
occult formed much of the basis of his later poetry which is full of allusions and symbols.
Yeats’s wide range of styles and subjects reflected the changing world he inhabited and
influenced generations of writers who came after him. The poems and plays he produced are
simultaneously local and general, personal and public, Irish and universal.
For Anne Gregory
Анн Грэгори
“Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.”
«Нет, никогда парнишка,
Страдающий, несчастный,
От Ваших волн медовых,
Что к ушку вьются страстно,
Саму Вас не полюбит,
Лишь волосы атласны».
“But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.”
«Но я могу покрасить
Их в рыжий цвет прекрасный,
Коричневый, иль чёрный.
Тогда юнец несчастный,
Меня саму полюбит,
Не волосы атласны».
“I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
«Слыхал, вчера священник,
Лишь вечер пал ненастный,
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That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.”
Стих отыскал, гласящий,
Что лишь Господь всевластный
Любить саму Вас может,
Не волосы атласны».
Превод А. Лукьянова
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What makes For Ann Gregory a typical Yeats’ poem?
2. What is the genre of the poem?
3. What information is contained in the title of the poem? Is the title speaking?
4. Who are the speakers? What do they argue about? Mark the repetition of some words.
Does the subject of their conversation coincide with the theme of the poem?
5. What is the theme of the poem? Are there several themes? How do they relate to each
other?
6. What does the poet state about the theme/themes? Does he express his ideas directly?
7. What is the tone of the poem? How does it interact with the structure of the poem? What
phonetic tools contribute to the melody of the poem?
8. Who is the embodiment of wisdom in the last stanza? Why does the poet refer to religion
speaking about such an earthly subject as hair?
9. What is the philosophic message of the poem? How does the author’s interpret the
concepts of internal and external beauty? Are his ideas conventional? Do you agree with the
author?
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Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
Robinson is a true forerunner of the modernist movement in poetry. Robinson’s subject
matter differs remarkably from that of his predecessors’, but his form is traditional. He said
that if free verse were as easy to write as it was difficult to read, he was not surprised there
was so much of it.
Robinson wrote almost exclusively about individuals or individual relationships rather than
common themes of the nineteenth century. He exhibits a curious mixture of irony and
compassion toward his characters – most of whom are failures.
Some tragic circumstances of Robinson’s life led many of his poems to have a dark
pessimism. Many of his poems deal with “an American dream gone awry”. One of his
brothers died of a drug overdose. The other one, a handsome and charismatic man, married
the woman Robinson himself loved, suffered business failures, became an alcoholic, and
ended up in a charity hospital impoverished and estranged from his wife and children.
Richard Cory
Ричард Кори
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
Когда он выходил за свой порог,
Мы, жители окраины, глядели
На джентльмена с головы до ног,
Гуляющего в царственном безделье.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
При этом он был скромен и умён
И счастлив оказать несчастным милость.
Он первый всем отвешивал поклон,
Он шёл, и все вокруг него светилось.
And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
Он был богат – богаче королей, –
Он был прекрасен,— и сказать по чести,
Всяк полагал, что нет судьбы светлей,
И жаждал быть на дивном этом месте.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Мы трепетали, думая о нём,
И кляли чёрствый хлеб, и спину гнули,
А Ричард Кори тихим летним днём,
Придя домой, отправил в сердце пулю.
Перевод А. Сергеева
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is the genre of the poem?
2. What is the poem about? Where is the scene of the poem set? Who are the characters?
3. Who is the speaker in the poem? Why does the author choose this point of view?
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4. Interpret the collective image of “people on the pavement”. What does the use of
metonymy underline?
5. Analyse the description of the main character. What features do the epithets underline? Are
they objective or exaggerated?
6. What words and phrases reveal people’s attitude to Richard Cory?
7. What is the tone of the poem? How is it supported by the metre and rhyme? Find the cases
of onomatopoeia, alliteration and assonance in the poem. What purpose do they serve in the
poem?
8. How does the tone change in the last stanza? What was the poet’s purpose in making this
shift?
9. What causes the defeated expectancy effect in the end of the poem?
10. What is the message of the poem? Does it concern only American Dream concept? Can it
be interpreted on the scale of human condition in general?
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Robert Frost (1874–1963)
Robert Frost stood right at the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He does
not fit into any one era. He was one of the first poets to advocate for individualism in
language, before the idea became fashionable in the early 20th century, but he always wrote
in his own style, never imitating the current trends.
Frost was not an experimental poet. He believed that the sound of a poem, made by its metre
and rhyme, is as important to the overall work as the words. He used traditional techniques
to describe the world in simple detail.
Many of Frost’s most famous poems are inspired by the world of nature. Frost said, “Poetry
is more often of the country than the city… Poetry is very, very rural – rustic. It might be
taken as a symbol of man, taking its rise from individuality and seclusion – written first for
the person that writes and then going out into its social appeal and use.”
Frost is famous for his colloquial tone and the subject of everyday life. However, within a
seemingly banal event from an ordinary day – mending the stones of a wall, mowing a field
of hay – Frost always discerned a deeper meaning.
Frost’s poetry is also significant because of the amount of autobiographical material that it
contains. He was not a happy man. He suffered from serious depression and anxiety
throughout his life and was never convinced that his poetry was truly worthwhile. He
suffered through the untimely deaths of his father, mother, and sister, as well as four of his
six children and his beloved wife, all of which contributed to the melancholy that appears in
much of Frost’s work.
Gathering Leaves
Собирая листья
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
Лопатой грести –
Что детским совком.
И листьев мешок,
Как шар, невесом.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.
Начавши с утра,
Шуршу целый день,
Как кролик в лесу
Иль, может, олень.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
Сухая волна
Уходит из рук
И с силой в лицо
Кидается вдруг.
I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?
А после носить
Мешки на спине.
Заполнить сарай. –
Зачем это мне?
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Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.
Вес вовсе не вес.
Цвет вовсе не цвет.
И зрелища нет.
И выгоды нет.
Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who’s to say where
The harvest shall stop?
И все же, есть сбор.
И все же, есть жнец.
И кто скажет, где
Сей жатве конец?
Перевод Т. Стамовой
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is Robert Frost’s persistent focus in poetry?
2. Does this poem serve a good example of Robert Frost’s typical combination of casual
subject and profound message?
3. What is the genre of the poem?
4. Analyse the metre of the poem. Is it regular syllabic meter? How many beats are there in
each line? How does it contribute to the mood of the poem? Does the form correlate with the
content?
5. What is the poem about? Is the theme explicit or implied?
6. Analyse similes and metaphors used in the poem. What do they tell us about the speaker’s
attitude to what he is doing?
7. How does the fact that dry leaves are being gathered to “fill the whole shed” foreshadow
the philosophic meaning of the poem?
8. How does the poet describe the leaves? What is the role of repetition in this description?
Find the examples of repetition in the whole poem. What purpose does this device serve?
9. How does the last stanza illustrate the overall theme of the poem? What is the key idea
Robert Frost implies in the image of “harvest”? Does he speak about the process or the result,
or both?
10. Why isn’t the speaker happy about the “crop”? What do the useless leaves symbolise?
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Edward Estlin Commings (1894–1962)
As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Edward Estlin Cummings experimented with
poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style which is immediately recognized
by the liberal use of lowercase letters and acrobatic word arrangement. Cummings’s name is
often turned into “e. e. cummings” in the mistaken belief that the poet legally changed his
name to lowercase letters only. Cummings used capital letters only irregularly in his verse
and did not object when publishers began lowercasing his name, but he himself capitalized
his name in his signature and in the title pages of original editions of his books.
Commings wrote avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were
ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language. He revised grammatical rules to suit his own
purposes, assigning his own private meanings to words. Readers benefit from reading his
poems both verbally and visually. A typical Ccummings’ poem is compact and precise,
employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were
invented by the poet.
Despite their nontraditional form, Cummings’ poems came to be popular with many readers.
They focused on universal ideas of love, childhood, and nature. e. e. commings was a
lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. Some of his love poems are frankly erotic and were
meant to shock the Puritanical sensibilities of the early 20th century.
Alongside his lyrical celebrations of love, nature, and imagination e. e. commings also wrote
satirical poems denouncing urban and political life. His attacks on the mass mind,
conventional patterns of thought, and society’s restrictions on free expression, were born of
his strong commitment to the individual. Cummings satirized what he called “mostpeople,”
that is, the herd mentality found in modern society.
Pity this Busy Monster, Manunkind
Не сострадай больному бизнесмонстру
Pity this busy monster, manunkind,
Не сострадай больному бизнесмонстру,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease –
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
бесчеловечеству. Прогресс – болезнь
приятная: предавшийся безумству
plays with the bigness of his littleness
– electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
гигантом карлик мнит себя всю жизнь
– рой электронов чтит, как гор гряду,
лезвие бритвы; линзы увеличат
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born -pity poor flesh
невласть немысли и согнут в дугу
где-и-когда, вернув немысль в неличность.
Мир «сделано» не есть мир «рождено» –
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagital
жалей живую тварь, любую, кроме
вот этой, мнящей, что она над всеми
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ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
владычествует. Мы, врачи, давно
a hopeless case if-listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go
рукой махнули – слушай: за углом
чертовски славный мир, ей-ей; идём
Перевод В. Британишского
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is Edward Commings’ literary reputation?
2. What theme does he develop in this poem? What is the author’s idea?
3. What metaphors are used in the first lines of the poem? How do the epithets “busy” and
“comfortable” develop the images?
4. What words exemplify the concept of progress? What words does the poet use to create
the picture of nature?
5. Analyse the words composed by the poet. What are the word-building means he uses?
What meaning do they accentuate?
6. Find the examples of non-standard use of grammar. What is the author’s purpose in the
violation of grammar rules?
7. What is the general mood of the poem? What helps to define it?
8. Does the shape of the poem contribute to its content?
9. Who are the “doctors” the speaker identifies himself with at the end of the poem? Is the
speaker sympathetic or resentful to mankind? Does his attitude remain the same throughout the
poem?
10. What is the role of initial and final imperative sentences?
11. Analyse the message of the poem. Is there any way to stop progress and return to nature?
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Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
Dylan Thomas is one of the most well-known and influential poets of the twentieth century.
He possessed a tremendous talent that made him a literary sensation at a relatively young
age. However, his personal life was often disappointing.
The estimation of the work has often been colored by an estimation of the man. Thomas’s
biography was dominated by numerous unflattering reminiscences concerning the poet's
drinking, debauching and philandering during his last years in America. The legend tells
about a hard-drinking Welsh bard, a romantic artist at odds with the modern world.
Attempting to define himself Thomas said, “One: I am a Welshman; two: I am a drunkard;
three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women.”
Thomas was a skilled reader of his own poetry which is notoriously lyrical. There is no doubt
that the sound of language is central to Thomas’ style. His poems are written in tight rhyme
schemes reminiscent of ballads and nursery rhymes. A typical feature in most of Thomas’
poetry is conflict between the content and the structure of the poem. Nevertheless, it is the
music of his poems, as much as their themes of lost innocence, nostalgia for childhood and
death, which has proved so seductive to readers and listeners.
Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social and intellectual issues. His
writing has a lot in common with the Romantic tradition particularly in its emphasis on
imagination, emotion, intuition, spontaneity, and organic form. He uses symbols and images
of nature to create a feeling of love towards life and humanity.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Не уходи покорно в сумрак смерти
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Не следуй мирно в даль, где света нет,
Пусть гневом встретит старость свой конец.
Бунтуй, бунтуй, когда слабеет свет.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Хоть знают мудрецы, что тьма – ответ
На свет всех слов, не следует мудрец
Безропотно туда, где света нет.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
И праведник, сдержавший свой обет
Нести добро как солнечный венец,
Рыдает зло, когда слабеет свет.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Дикарь, свободный человек, поэт,
Прекрасного певец, лучей ловец,
Не побредет туда, где света нет.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Увидев перед смертью рой комет
Сквозь слепоту всех лет былых, слепец
Бунтует, если угасает свет.
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And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Ты не на склоне – на вершине лет.
Встреть гневом смерть, прошу тебя, отец.
Не следуй мирно в даль, где света нет.
Бунтуй, бунтуй, когда слабеет свет.
Перевод А. Берлиной
Questions and Tasks for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is the form of the poem? What atmosphere is created by this ballad-like style? How
do the subject and the form interact?
2. Who is the speaker of the poem? Who does the speaker address?
3. What does “good night” in the first line mean? Analyse other metaphors of the first tercet.
4. What examples does the speaker give to illustrate people’s resistance to death? Why does
he choose “wise”, “good”, “wild” and “grave” men? Describe the main features of each
category of people. Why does the poet arrange the adjectives in this order?
5. What is the attitude of “wise men” to the approaching death? Analyse the imagery in the
second tercet. What does “to fork lightning” mean?
6. How do “good men” face death? Interpret the extended image of the ocean.
7. What is the reaction of “wild men” towards death? What does “the sun” stand for? What
“grieves” the sun in the actions of “wild men”?
8. Interpret the two meanings of the word “grave” in the fifth tercet. Why does the poet focus
on blindness as the feature of “grave men”? What does it symbolyse? Analyse the simile
employed by the poet.
9. What is the role of oxymoron in the last stanza? What words and phrases create the climax
of the poem?
10. What is the general tone of the poem? What phonetic expressive means add to the
emotional effect of the poem?
11. What words bring out the contrast in the whole poem? What concepts are contrasted?
How does the contrast highlight the theme of the poem?
12. What is the main idea of the poem? Does it present a conventional point of view? Do you
support the author’s appeal?
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Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
As with many literary figures, Parker’s life was filled with drama and personal darkness,
which often came through in her writing which is known for its sharp wit and cynicism.
Though she maintained high popularity and a steady employment in popular periodicals,
theatres and film studios, the pattern of depression, affairs, suicide attempts and recovery
would continue throughout Parker’s life. It seems ironic that a woman so drawn to
pessimism and drinking, who had attempted suicide at least four times, lived into her
seventies.
Though Parker’s works are full of morbid thoughts and images of isolation, degradation
and loneliness it is her many-sided humor, tenderness and pathos that readers pay attention
to.
The targets of Parker’s satire are the upper class, the shallow and boring, the self-pitying,
the selfish, the envious and the jealous. Her major themes are universal and timeless: human
frailties, social conventions, middle-class complacency, disintegration of relationships,
unrequited love, and the women’s emotional dependency upon men.
That Parker was a feminist is undeniable. Her voice is confined for the most part to women
and what was important to them. Critics often described her poetry as sentimental, trivial,
and melodramatic.
Parker’s poems are written in rhymed and metered stanzas. Her romantic lyrical ballads are
rich with imagery and symbolism, though her favourite devices are paradox, exaggeration,
repetition, clichéd speech, epigrams, irony and sarcasm.
Frustration
Разочарование
If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;
Когда б имела пистолет,
так развлекла бы целый свет
и враз мозги повышибала
всем, от которых пострадала.
Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.
Имей я ядовитый газ,
так от меня б никто не спас
всю ту немалую ораву,
что мне на свете не по нраву.
But I have no lethal weapon –
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.
Но нет оружия в руках,
и тем намерениям – крах,
и жизнь покуда не поблекла
для тех, кому дорога в пекло.
(И радостно живут сегодня
все кандидаты в преисподню).
Перевод В. Кормана
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Questions for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is Dorothy Parker’s literary reputation? Does the poem serve a typical example of her
style?
2. What is the theme of the poem? Does it deal with physical or spiritual human experience, or
both?
3. What is the form of the poem? What is this kind of metre reminiscent of? Is it suitable for
children reading?
4. What pictures does the poet use to illustrate the vigor and force of the speaker’s feeling?
5. What is the general mood of the poem? Can the poem be taken seriously? What device
foregrounds the author’s irony?
6. What is the role of personification in the last stanza? Why does the author shift from the
first to the third person?
7. Does the poem focus on personal experience or human condition in general? What is the
message of the poem?
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Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)
Allen Ginsberg is one of the 20th century’s most influential poets. He is regarded as a
founding father of the Beat Movement and an American artistic icon. As a leading member
of the Beat Generation Allen Ginsberg promoted free thought and expression over cultural
conformity. His works present the bleak urban landscapes focusing on poverty and despair
of people living outside the mainstream. They were a generation that felt they could never
settle into the lives of corporate jobs and nuclear families – ordinarily the ideal of men of the
post-war era.
A Supermarket in California was one of his first experiments with the long line form which
would become Ginsberg’s trademark style. Ginsberg’s use of varying lengths of line and
rhythm was inspired by Walt Whitman, who is considered to be America’s first original poet.
In subject matter Ginsberg continued Whitman’s poetic attack on social conventions by
writing about the consequences of corporate industrial growth and consumerism.
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
– and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
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smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?
Супермаркет в Калифорнии
Этим вечером, слоняясь по переулкам с больной головой
и застенчиво глядя на луну, как я думал о тебе, Уолт
Уитмен!
Голодный, усталый я шел покупать себе образы и забрел под
неоновый свод супермаркета и вспомнил перечисленья
предметов в твоих стихах.
Что за персики! Что за полутона! Покупатели вечером
целыми семьями! Проходы набиты мужьями! Жены у гор
авокадо, дети среди помидоров! – и ты, Гарсия Лорка, что
ты делал среди арбузов?
Я видел, как ты, Уолт Уитмен, бездетный старый
ниспровергатель, трогал мясо на холодильнике и глазел
на мальчишек из бакалейного.
Я слышал, как ты задавал вопросы: Кто убил поросят?
Сколько стоят бананы? Ты ли это, мой ангел?
Я ходил за тобой по блестящим аллеям консервных банок,
и за мною ходил магазинный сыщик.
Мы бродили с тобой, одинокие, мысленно пробуя артишоки,
наслаждаясь всеми морожеными деликатесами, и всегда
избегали кассиршу.
Куда мы идем, Уолт Уитмен? Двери закроются через час.
Куда сегодня ведет твоя борода?
(Я беру твою книгу и мечтаю о нашей одиссее по
супермаркету, и чувствую – все это вздор.)
Так что, мы будем бродить всю ночь по пустынным улицам?
Деревья бросают тени на тени, в домах гаснет свет,
мы одни.
Что же, пойдём домой мимо спящих синих автомобилей,
мечтая об утраченной Америке любви?
О, дорогой отец, старый седобородый одинокий учитель
мужества, какая была у тебя Америка, когда Харон
перевез тебя на дымящийся берег и ты стоял и смотрел, как
теряется лодка в черных струях Леты?
Перевод А. Сергеева
Questions for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What do you know about the Beat Generation cultural movement? How did it influence the
poetic form and subject matter?
2. Interpret the title of the poem. What does the indefinite article suggest?
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3. Where is the scene of the poem set? What is the author’s purpose in contrasting urban
landscape and natural world?
4. When do the events happen? Why does the poet choose this time of the day? What does
the full moon symbolyse?
5. Why does the poet go to the “neon fruit supermarket”? What does “shopping for images”
mean? What is he looking for? What does the diversity of supermarket commodities fail to
substitute?
6. What impression is created by the enumeration used in the first stanza? What sentence type
prevails?
7. The poet sees two famous literary figures in the supermarket. Who are they? Who becomes
the poet’s companion? Underline the words and expressions the poet uses to describe Walt
Whitman. Can you define Ginsberg’s poem as an ode to his poetic hero?
8. The poem is an example of free verse. How does the structure of the poem contribute to its
general atmosphere and tone?
9. Define the speaker’s mood. Is he calm, sad, disturbed, disappointed or indignant? What is
the reason for this attitude? How does the tone change within the poem? How does the word
choice reflect the poet’s growing pessimism in the last stanza?
10.What is the role of epithets in the poem?
11.Ginsberg ends the poem comparing America to the mythological Hades. Charon was the
guardian of Hades who would lead souls across the River Styx to their eternity. Lethe was
another river that ran through Hades. The river Lethe, in Greek mythology, would cause
complete forgetfulness for those that drank from its waters. Interpret the mythological allusions
in the poem. What does the poet state about Walt Whitman, himself and the modern world with
the help of intertextuality?
12.What is the message of the poem?
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Tom Clark (born 1941)
Tom Clark has worked as a poetry editor, writer and teacher in both America and England.
Clark is also a respected writer in such genres of literature as biography, literary criticism,
essays, novels and drama. He has written many books on sports and popular culture.
Clark possesses a wistful yet ultimately optimistic sense of observation. Specific details and
metaphors are arranged in his poems in service of a deep message, delivered with wit and
sophistication. Clark uses a conversational pattern in his poems which are often elegiac in
tone. They are thought-demanding and inspiring.
Clark’s poetry has been consistently attentive to form. He focuses on the arrangement of lines
treating the page as imaginative space, a framing device for words.
Poem
Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings
Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined
Never to occur
You don’t mind
You feel spiritual and alert
As the air must feel
Turning into sky aloft and blue
You feel like
You’ll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do
Questions for the Analysis of the Poem
1. What is the poem about?
2. Who is the speaker in the poem? What effect is produced by the pronoun “you”?
3. Analyse the imagery of the poem. What devices join in?
4. Mark the case of non-standard grammar. What was the author’s purpose in breaking the rules?
5. Where does the author make pauses? What words are emphasized by them?
6. Interpret the end of the poem. What implication is contained in the last line?
7. Does the shape of the poem contribute to its overall effect?
8. What is the message of the poem?
Poems for Self-Guided Analysis
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Poems for Self-Guided Analysis
On the World
by Francis Quarles (1592–1644)
Holy Sonnets, Sonnet X
by John Donne (1572–1631)
The world’s an Inn; and I her guest.
I eat; I drink; I take my rest.
My hostess, nature, does deny me
Nothing, wherewith she can supply me;
Where, having stayed a while, I pay
Her lavish bills, and go my way.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus (1849–1887)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! ”
I’m nobody
by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Parting
By Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d advertise – you know!
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
How dreary to be somebody!
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How public like a frog
To tell one’s name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
Never Seek to Tell Thy Love
by William Blake (1757–1827)
The Three Arrows
by Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1983)
Porcia’s Song
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently invisibly.
I told my love I told my love
I told her all my heart
Trembling cold in ghastly fears.
Ah! she did depart!
Soon after she was gone from me
A traveler came by
Silently invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.
OF all the shafts to Cupid’s bow,
The first is tipp’d with fire;
All bare their bosoms to the blow
And call the wound Desire.
Love’s second is a poison’d dart,
And Jealousy is named:
Which carries poison to the heart
Desire had first inflamed.
The last of Cupid’s arrows all
With heavy lead is set:
That vainly weeping lovers call
Repentance, or Regret.
Never for Society
by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
We Outgrow Love
by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Never for Society
He shall seek in vain –
Who His own acquaintance
Cultivate – Of Men
Wiser Men may weary –
But the Man within
We outgrow love, like other things
And put it in the Drawer –
Till it an Antique fashion shows –
Like Costumes Grandsires wore.
Never knew Satiety –
Better entertain
Than could Border Ballad –
Or Biscayan Hymn –
Neither introduction
Need You – unto Him –
Who Has not Found the Heaven – Below –
by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Who has not found the Heaven – below –
Will fail of it above –
For Angels rent the House next ours,
Wherever we remove –
The Best Thing in the World
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
Remember
by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
What’s the best thing in the world ?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
�Содержание
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Light, that never makes you wink;
Memory, that gives no pain;
Love, when, so, you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world ?
– Something out of it, I think.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
We Wear the Mask
by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
When You Are Old
by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, –
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
An Old Song Resung
by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
’Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
�Содержание
The Kiss
by Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)
I Shall not Care
by Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)
I hoped that he would love me,
And he has kissed my mouth,
But I am like a stricken bird
That cannot reach the south.
When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho’ you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
For though I know he loves me,
To-night my heart is sad;
His kiss was not so wonderful
As all the dreams I had.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.
Do not stand at my grave and weep
by Mary Elizabeth Frye (1905–2004)
The Snow Man
By Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft star-shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
The Door In The Dark
by Robert Frost (1874–1963)
General Review Of The Sex Situation
by Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
In going from room to room in the dark,
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.
A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman’s moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
�Содержание
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don't pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.
Dreams
by Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
As Is The Sea Marvelous
by e. e. commings (1894–1962)
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Every Night I Look up at the Freckled Sky
by e. e. commings
as is the sea marvelous
from god’s
hands which sent her forth
to sleep upon the world
and the earth withers
the moon crumbles
one by one
stars flutter into dust
but the sea
does not change
and she goes forth out of hands and
she returns into hands
and is with sleep…
love,
the breaking
of your
soul
upon
my lips
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
every
night
i
look
up
at
the
freckled
sky
and
fall
in love
with
the
universe
all
over
again.
i
will
be
counting
the
�Содержание
Hope
by Tom Clark (born 1941)
slowly it unravels
strings falling apart
going this way and that
such a multitude of colors
before me
yarn falling to and fro
surrounding this form
twisting slowly round this corpse
such a wonderous sight
before my dim eyes
slowly, it drifts away
away from my shaking hands
and my aching heart
like snow it drifts
...like snow...
lazily, it expands into the twilight
filling the dark corners in front
with fleeting glimpses of beauty
and then is gone
stars
for
the
rest
of
my
life.
Narcissus
by Alice Oswald
Once I was half flower, half self,
That invisible self whose absence inhabits mirrors,
That invisible flower that is always inwardly,
Groping up through us, a kind of outswelling weakness,
Yes once I was half frail, half glittering,
Continually emerging from the store of the self itself,
Always staring at rivers, always
Nodding and leaning to one side, I came gloating up,
And for a while I was half skin half breath,
For a while I was neither one thing nor another,
A waterflame, a variable man-woman of the verges,
Wearing the last self-image I was left with
Before my strenth went down down into the darkness
For the best of the year and lies crumpled
In a clot of sleep at the root of nothings all
�Содержание
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Гальперин, И. Р.
Стилистика английского языка : учебник для студентов
институтов и факультетов иностранных языков / И. Р. Гальперин ; [вступ. ст. автора].
– [2-е изд., испр.]. – Москва : Высшая школа, 1977. – 332 с.
2. Обнорская, М. Е. Аналитическое чтение и интерпретация текста : учебное пособие
для студентов, обучающихся по специальностям направления «Лингвистика и
межкультурная коммуникация» : [на английском языке] / М. Е. Обнорская,
Н. Н. Золина ;
Барнаульский государственный
педагогический
университет,
Лингвистический институт. – Барнаул : БГПУ, 2007. – 162 с.
3. Adler, M. J. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading / M. J. Adler,
Ch. V. Doren. – Revised and Updated Edition. – New York : Touchstone, 1972. – 426 p.
4. Cambridge Paperback Encyclopedia / Ed. by David Crystal. – 2 edition. – Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press, 1994. – 506 p.
5. Cross, D. W. Propaganda: How Not To Be Bamboozled [Электронный ресурс]. –
Режим доступа: http://kellimcbride.com/pdf/cross_propaganda.pdf, свободный. – Загл. с
экрана (дата обращения: 16.10.2017).
6. Famous People – Biography [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https://
www.biography.com/people, свободный.
7. Functional Styles of the English Language [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим
доступа: http://irastraw.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64:2010-06-2816-40-01&catid=42:2010-06-22-19-46-16&Itemid=66, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата
обращения: 12.08.2017).
8. Goumovskaya, G. English for specific purposes. Publicistic style [Электронный ресурс] /
G. Goumovskaya // Английский язык. – 2007. – № 6. – Электрон. версия печ. публ. –
Режим доступа: http://eng.1september.ru/article.php?ID=200700609, свободный. – Загл. с
экрана (дата обращения: 06.11.2017).
9. How to analyse a speech [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://
jorgenboge.wikidot.com/how-to-analyze-a-speech, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата
обращения: 16.11.2017).
10.Landy, A. S. The Heath Introduction to Literature / A. S. Landy. – Fourth Edition. –
Lexington, Massachusetts : D. H. Heath & Company, 1992. – 1142 p.
11.Lester, James D. A Writer’s Handbook. Style and Grammar / James D. Lester – Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1991. – 585 p.
�Содержание
12.Manipulation through Words: Rhetorical Devices in Political Speeches [Электронный
ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https://ru.scribd.com/document/267962121/Manipulationthrough-Words-Rhetorical-Devices-in-Political-Speeches, свободный. – Загл. с экрана (дата
обращения: 28.11.2017).
13.PoemHunter.com
[Электронный
www.poemhunter.com/, свободный.
14.Poetry Foundation [Электронный
www.poetryfoundation.org/, свободный.
ресурс].
ресурс].
–
Режим
–
Режим
доступа:
https://
доступа:
https://
15.Sparknotes: Today’s Most Popular Study Guides [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим
доступа: http://www.sparknotes.com, свободный.
16.U.S. Presidents [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.history.com/
topics/us-presidents, свободный.
17.Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https://
www.wikipedia.org/, свободный.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Козлова, Любовь Александровна
Dublin Core
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Title
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Further steps in text analysis
Subject
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1. Языкознание. 2. Германские языки. 3. английский язык. 4. лингвостилистический анализ. 5. интерпретация текста. 6. жанровые особенности.
Description
An account of the resource
Further steps in text analysis [Электронный ресурс] : учебное пособие / Л. А. Козлова, Л. Л. Шевченко ; Алтайский государственный педагогический университет. — Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2018. — 268 с.
Настоящее пособие предназначено для занятий со студентами V курса по лингвостилистическому анализу и интерпретации текстов различных жанров: эссе, биографии, автобиографии, короткого рассказа, публичной речи, научного текста и поэзии. С учетом того, что начальные навыки лингвостилистического анализа закладываются на IV курсе, данное пособие ставит своей целью расширение знаний и закрепление навыков интерпретации текстов различных жанров, выявление жанровых особенностей текста и тех стилистических приемов, которые формируют в своей совокупности идиостиль конкретного автора.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Козлова, Любовь Александровна
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Алтайский государственный педагогический университет
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
21.05.2018
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Шевченко, Людмила Леонидовна
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
©Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2018
Format
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pdf, exe
Language
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русский
Type
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Учебное пособие
Identifier
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<a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/kozlova1.pdf" target="_blank">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/kozlova1.pdf<br /></a><a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/kozlova1.exe" target="_blank">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/kozlova1.exe</a>
-
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840ec84cee80cb4dc5f3af2977300774
http://books.altspu.ru/files/original/38/33/Shevchenko_History_of_English_Literature[cover].pdf
8552cb23cf430a170f9d4d26cfcc9bfa
PDF Text
Text
Contents
�Contents
Об издании
Основной титульный экран
Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 1
Дополнительный титульный экран непериодического издания – 2
�Contents
Министерство образования и науки Российской Федерации
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение высшего образования
«Алтайский государственный педагогический университет»
HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
(FROM ANGLO-SAXONS TO THE AGE OF REASON)
Барнаул
ФГБОУ ВО «АлтГПУ»
2015
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
ISBN 978–5–88210–788–7
�Contents
УДК 811.111'0(075)
ББК 81.432.1-03я73
Ш379
Шевченко, Л. Л.
History of English Literature (from Anglo-Saxons to the Age of Reason) [Электронный ресурс] : учебное
пособие / Л. Л. Шевченко. – Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2015.
ISBN 978–5–88210–788–7
Рецензенты:
Кочешкова И.Ю., кандидат филологических наук, доцент (АлтГПУ);
Лушникова Д.И., доктор филологических наук, профессор (Гуманитарно-педагогическая академия
ФГАОУ ВО «Крымский федеральный университет им. В. И. Вернадского»)
Учебное пособие предлагает материал для подготовки и проведения практических занятий по
дисциплине «История литературы страны изучаемого языка». В нем представлен теоретический
материал, охватывающий основные периоды английской литературы с V по XVIII век и включающий
сведения о направлениях в развитии литературных жанров, авторах и их произведениях. Тексты
произведений сопровождаются комментариями, вопросами и практическими заданиями,
направленными на формирование у студентов навыков интерпретации и анализа художественного
текста. В пособии даются определения изучаемых литературоведческих, культурологических и
философских понятий, а также дополнительные сведения о персоналиях и событиях изучаемых эпох,
которые позволят студентам расширить их кругозор.
Материал данного учебного пособия ориентирован на студентов факультетов иностранных языков, а
также студентов филологических факультетов, изучающих английский язык по углубленной программе.
Рекомендовано к изданию редакционно-издательским советом АлтГПУ 22.10.2015 г.
Текстовое (символьное) электронное издание.
Системные требования:
Intel Celeron 2 ГГц ; ОЗУ 512 Мб ; Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ; SVGA монитор с разрешением 1024х768.
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
�Contents
Электронное издание создано при использовании программного обеспечения Sunrav BookOffice.
Объём издания - 16 285 КБ.
Дата подписания к использованию: 03.12.2015
Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение высшего образования
«Алтайский государственный педагогический университет» (ФГБОУ ВО «АлтГПУ»)
ул. Молодежная, 55, г. Барнаул, 656031
Тел. (385-2) 36-82-71, факс (385-2) 24-18-72
е-mail: rector@altspu.ru, http://www.altspu.ru
Об издании - 1, 2, 3.
�Contents
Contents
Introduction
Anglo-Saxon Literature
Historical Context
Anglo-Saxon Poetry
Beowulf
Elegiac Poetry. The Seafarer
Anglo-Saxon Riddles
Old English Christian Poetry
Anglo-Saxon Prose
English Literature in the Middle Ages
Historical Context
Literary Context
Chivalric Romances
Ballads
William Langland: Piers Plowman
Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
The Development of English Drama
English Literature in the Time of Renaissance
Cultural Context
Historical Context
Renaissance Poetry
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547)
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
Shakespeare's Sonnets
John Donne (1572–1631) – the Father of Metaphysical poetry
Renaissance Prose
Thomas More: Utopia
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Renaissance Drama
The University Wits
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
Late Elizabethan Drama
English Literature in the Time of Puritan Revolution and Restoration
�Contents
Historical Context
Literary Context
Cavalier Poets
Restoration Drama
John Milton (1608–1674)
John Bunyan (1628–1688)
English Literature in the Enlightenment Period
Historical and Cultural Context
Literary Context
Daniel Defoe (1607-1731)
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
Henry Fielding (1707–1754)
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
Reference List
�Contents
Introduction
There are as many reasons to study literature as there are to study man. Alongside with other
forms of art literature participates in the mighty task of rendering people’s lives, minds and
hearts. Human experience contained in the works of literature is a vast continuum of
information from which we can benefit in various ways. We read books for educational
purposes, intellectual training, escape and enjoyment. We also read books because they can
help us better understand what we are.
For centuries people have accumulated and verified knowledge of man, the best works of
literature being the quintessence of all intellectual and spiritual achievements of their time.
Studying History of Literature we can observe culture in progress. Referring every single
literary work to a particular epoch we can interpret its message in a broader context of human
evolution. We can observe the development of literary forms against the historical, social,
ideological, religious and all other kinds of changes.
This book was designed to highlight a complex approach to the study of history of English
literature that would give students an integrated presentation of each literary epoch and
encourage their appreciation. It covers the 1st half of the curriculum and offers an overview of
the English literature from its origin to the 18th century.
The periods of English literature are presented chronologically in the five sections of the book:
Anglo-Saxon Literature, English Literature in the Middle Ages, English Literature in the Time of
Renaissance, English Literature in the Time of Puritan Revolution and Restoration, English
Literature in the Enlightenment Period.
The general framework of each section follows a similar pattern. It includes an outline of
historical and literary context, information on authors’ life and work, texts for critical analysis,
questions and tasks. A brief account of important historical and cultural facts, as well as facts
of the authors’ biographies, is included to deepen students’ awareness of the strong
connection between literary works and the time they were created in. Literary context aims to
provide an overview of the gradual development of genres, themes and literary techniques.
The material of the book is supplied with encyclopedic entries that offer interdisciplinary links
to other fields of study. This information is introduced within the four main categories: literary
studies, philosophy, religion and general knowledge, the last one embracing a wide range of
subjects and being less specified. These categories are marked by symbolic pictures.
�Contents
Texts are followed by exercises designed with many approaches in mind: stylistic analysis,
interpretation, creative thinking and writing. They allow students to examine the way writers
shape their thoughts and give them an opportunity to experiment with some of the techniques.
Some questions and assignments project to broader literary and cultural contexts and offer an
extension activity in which students can share their responses to the issues and themes raised
by the literary works. The focus of questions and tasks is also enhanced graphically.
This book aims to provide a general manual of English Literature with the emphasis on a crosscurricular link. It presents the information in multiple perspectives showing how History of
Literature overlaps with many other fields of study. The knowledge of historical, philosophic,
religious and other cultural facts enriches students’ competence. This background knowledge
provides them with a deeper understanding of literary epochs, and consequently gives them
more satisfaction from reading, analyzing and discussing literature.
�Contents
Anglo-Saxon Literature
Historical Context
Anglo-Saxon Poetry
Beowulf
Elegiac Poetry. The Seafarer
Anglo-Saxon Riddles
Old English Christian Poetry
Anglo-Saxon Prose
�Contents
Historical Context
The history of English Literature begins sixteen hundred years ago when Anglo-Saxon tribes
came to Britain from the north of Europe. A primitive, warlike people the Anglo-Saxons
became known for their hearty feasts, skill in handicrafts and long, heroic tales. Before they
were conquered by the Normans from France, the Anglo-Saxons produced the epic poem
Beowulf and lyrics which became the foundation stone of the English literature.
England has been invaded and settled many times: by an ancient people called the Iberians, by
the Celts, by the Romans, by the Angles and Saxons, and by the Normans.
The first mention of Britain occurs in the writings of the ancient Greeks. In the fourth century
BC they found an island settled by the tall, blond Celtic warriors. Among the Celts was a
group called Brythons or Britons, who gave their name to the nation and country they
inhabited. They spoke Celtic, and had a religion to be characterized as animism. They believed
that different spirits or gods lived in the dark parts of the forest and controlled all aspects of
life. Those gods had to be constantly placated. It was the Druids, a class of priests who acted
intermediaries between gods and people. They performed ritual dances, animal sacrifices and
sometimes human sacrifices.
The Romans were the next to inhabit the British Isles. Julius Caesar crossed the English
channel in the course of one of his Gallic Wars in 55 BC. Caesar made no attempt to colonize
the island, and the development of a Roman province did not begin until nearly a century later.
Then Roman emperor Claudius, in 43 AD led a campaign which overcame the Celtic Britons
and established the Roman Rule. The Romans were practical people who had an administrative
genius. The period of their dominance was marked by stability and organization. For nearly
400 years Britain remained part of the Roman Empire. Romans and Britons intermarried, towns
grew, magnificent roads were constructed over the province, peace was maintained. Christian
missionaries came from Europe, and the old Celtic religion began to vanish.
However, when the Roman Empire began to fall apart under repeated attacks of barbarians
early in the fifth century, the Romans had to abandon the province. They left behind all the
material wealth (wall, roads, public baths), as well as some changes in language. For example,
the Latin word castra – “camp” became a suffix and was later pronounced [kester], [shester],
[chester], which is recognized in the names of many English towns: Manchester, Worcester
[Wuster], Lancaster. Other words are vallum – “wall”, strata – “street, road”, etc. The only
thing the Romans didn’t leave was central government.
All that the Romans wanted was to make Britons work for them. The result was weakness and
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a series of successful invasions. Eventually, the remnants of the Roman province were
conquered by the Germanic tribes from across the North Sea.
Among those invaders were Angles, Saxons and Jutes who lived in the northwest coast of
Germany and the Danish peninsula. The language of Anglo-Saxons became dominant. The land
took another name – Engalond, or England. The Celts put up a strong resistance before they
retreated into Wales in the far West of the country. One of the most heroic Celtic leaders was a
man called Arthur, who became the character of many national legends.
The Anglo-Saxons were agricultural people who recognized two classes of society: the earls
(ruling class) and the churls (bondmen). The warrior also occupied a preeminent position in
the Anglo-Saxon society. The prestige of a successful warrior was immense. Even the king was
essentially a warrior. Although he ruled absolutely, he was attentive to the advice of the Witan
(assembly of elders, wise men). The earls ruled, the warriors fought wars and the churls did
hard labor. The place of women was unimportant as they were regarded valuable only for
domestic duties, although wives of kings, earls and wise men were honored.
Great feasts were also part of Anglo-Saxon life. To celebrate the deeds of a hero there had
been from ancient times the professional bard, called the scop who combined the roles of chief
entertainer, antiquarian and poet, and press agent for the king and tribe.
Scop – was an Anglo-Saxon poet who was appointed by the early Germanic kings or soldiers to entertain
them by reciting poetry to the accompaniment of a harp or another stringed instrument. From the Old English
word “scieppan”, scop means to create, form or shape. The scop was also referred to as a gleeman, from the
Old English word “gleoman”, who was a musician or performer. Scops were known to travel from village to
village; however, many had permanent posts in the king’s court or mead halls. Usually, they performed for
great feasts, celebrations, or the homecoming of soldiers from war. Scops were also commissioned to write
elegies or songs for the dead. It was considered an honor to have a scop sing one's praise or mourn one’s
death. Scops were messengers of traditional morality. They used poetry to motivate their listeners to live
good and honest lives, to keep true to the values of loyalty, family, kinship, and religion. Also, because most
of the historic events were recorded in poetry, they were carried by the scops to places far and near. By
traveling with these stories, the scops helped to preserve the history of the Germanic people for generations
later. Thanks to the work of these oral historians, we can still read about their culture, achievements, and
beliefs.
The Anglo-Saxons were loyal to their kings, because they depended on him for protection,
fame, success, even survival, especially during war, and success was measured by gifts from
the king. This loyalty pattern was part of their life. It grew out of the need to protect the group
from the enemy-infested virgin wilderness, especially in winter. Anglo-Saxons tended to live
close to their animals in a single-family homesteads, wooden buildings surrounded by wooden
fences. This also contributed to the sense of security.
The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were also pagans, as the Britons. The gods of the Anglo-
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Saxons were:
Tu, or Tuesco – god of darkness,
Woden (Odin) – god of War,
Thor – the Thunderer,
Freia – goddess of Prosperity.
Names of these gods survived in the language as days of the week: Tuesday – the day of the
god Tuesco; Wednesday – Woden’s day; Thursday – Thor’s day; Friday – Freia’s day.
One of the most important Norse gods was Odin, the god who overcame death itself in order
to learn the great mysteries contained in runes (the Briton’s alphabet), or religious inscriptions.
As the god of death, poetry and magic, Odin could help humans communicate with spirits. It is
not surprising that this god of poetry and death would have been so important to a people who
produced great poetry in the elegiac and mournful mood.
The history of England from about 600 to 850 is the story of the rise and fall of Anglo-Saxon
kingdoms. First Kent became the strongest of the kingdoms. From about 650 to 750
Northumbria achieved political and cultural eminence. Then power moved to Mercia until
Wessex attained supremacy early in the ninth century.
Around 850 in the kingdom of Wessex there emerged the figure of King Alfred the Great, most
remarkable of the Anglo-Saxon kings. His enemies were Viking Danes. Beginning at the end of
the eighth century, the Vikings advanced farther and farther. To establish peace, Alfred had to
give up to the Danes the northern and central parts of England then known as the Danelagh
(Danelaw). In 878, Alfred forced the Danes out of Wessex.
Under Alfred’s reign Irish and Continental missionaries came to England and set up little
centers of Christian religion. However, the full flow of Christianity into England came straight
from Rome, when, in 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent his emissary Augustine to convert
King Ethelbert (Kent) of England. Augustine founded the cathedral of Canterbury, and became
the first Archbishop of Canterbury, or the leader of the Church of England. The conversion of
the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity widened their spiritual and intellectual outlook. However, the
core paganism of the people showed in the written records, particularly in the surviving
folklore.
The power of the West Saxon kings declined late in the tenth century, and the new waves of
Danish invaders assaulted the island. In 1014 the Danes conquered England, then the AngloSaxons returned to their rule in 1042, and in 1066, William, the Duke of Normandy, became the
last conqueror of England. That put the end to the Anglo-Saxon history of England.
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Anglo-Saxon Poetry
The poetry of the Old English period is generally grouped in two main divisions, National and
Christian. In the national, or pagan, poems the subjects are drawn from English, or rather
Germanic, tradition and history or from the customs and conditions of English life. Christian
poems deal with Biblical matter, ecclesiastical traditions and religious subjects of definitely
Christian origin. The line of demarcation, however, is not absolutely fixed. Most of the national
poems in their present form contain Christian elements, while English influence often makes
itself obvious in the presentation of Biblical or ecclesiastical subjects.
The early national poems are classified into two groups, epic and elegiac. Epics are
considerably long, while all the elegiac poems are quite short. The best example of Old English
epic poetry is Beowulf. It runs 3183 lines. The Seafarer is an example of elegiac poetry. It is a
sorrowful piece of writing running 124 lines.
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Beowulf
Beowulf is the oldest poem in the English language and one of the earliest monuments of the
Germanic literature. Like most epic poets, the author of Beowulf is unknown. The poem was
probably recited as early as the 6-th century, but the text we have today was composed in the
8-th century and written down in the 10-th. The poem was given the title “Beowulf” only in
1805 and was printed in 1815.
The origin of Beowulf manuscript is completely unknown, but it may have belonged to one of the monasteries
dissolved by Henry VIII. It came into the possession of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton. In the 17th century
his library, was the richest collection of Anglo-Saxon literary and historical documents. In 1700, the Cottonian
library was willed to the British nation and eventually moved to Ashburnham House at Westminster, which
was thought to be a safer location. On October 23, 1731, there was a fire. The manuscript survived but was
burnt along its edges. It has been kept in the British museum till today since the time of its foundation in 1753.
Although the action takes place in Scandinavia, the poem is English. The Angles, Saxons and
Jutes took the story to Britain during their invasions. Then the pagan story was passed on from
generation to generation until it was written down by a monk who ornamented the epic with
Christian morality. Thus Christian ideas in the poem are blended with pagan views.
Alongside with supernatural elements Beowulf contains historical facts and can be read as a
chronicle. The story is remarkable for the glimpse of Anglo-Saxon society and its values. At
the time Beowulf was composed the ideals of the Anglo-Saxons included bravery and prowess
in battle, unselfishness, dignity, the sense of justice and loyalty. The poem describes the
warriors in battle and at peace, during their feasts and amusements. Though they were warriors,
the Anglo Saxons were capable of strong emotions. This emotionality is best captured in
poetry which was recited or sung by scops. Those were skilled minstrels who devoted their
lives to this purpose.
Content
Hrothgar, King of the Danes, built a hall near the sea called Heorot. He and his men
gathered there for feasts. One night as they were all sleeping a frightful monster called
Grendel broke into the hall, killed thirty of the sleeping warriors, and carried off their bodies
to his den under the sea. For twelve winters the horrible half-human creature came night
after night.
In the nearby kingdom of Geatland there lived Beowulf who was a man of immense strength
and courage. When he heard from mariners of Grendel’s murderous attacks, he decided to
fight the monster and free the Danes. With fourteen companions he crossed the sea.
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The Danes received Beowulf with great hospitality. A big feast was held in his honour. That
night the Danes left with their king. Beowulf stayed saying proudly that he would wrestle
with Grendel bare-handed since weapons could not harm the monster. The warriors fell
asleep but Beowulf did not. Breaking into the hall, Grendel seized one of Beowulf’s sleeping
men and drank his blood. Beowulf fought the monster and managed to tear off his arm at
the shoulder. Mortally wounded, Grendel went back into the sea to die. The huge arm of the
monster was hanged over the king’s seat. The Danes rejoiced in Beowulf’s victory. Beowulf
received rich presents from the king.
The following night the Danes once more went to sleep in the hall after the feast. At
midnight Grendel’s mother came to take revenge for her son’s death. She carried off the
king’s best friend as well as Grendel’s torn off arm. Beowulf and his men followed the blood
trail left by the arm and came to the place where Grendel’s mother had hidden. Beowulf
plunged into the water and swam into a cave. He fought Grendel’s mother killing her with
the magic sword he found in the cave. Beowulf cut off Grendel’s head whose body was also
lying there and brought it back to King Hrothgar.
After the great celebration Beowulf returned to his home country, where he was made king.
After fifty years of Beowulf’s successful reign he had to face another evil creature. The fire
dragon kept watch over an enormous treasure hidden in the mountains. A golden cup was
stolen from the treasure. The dragon became furious and began to destroy the country.
Beowulf knew it was going to be his final battle. He slayed the dragon and died himself.
The body of the hero was burned on fire, according to the pagan custom.
Text
Prologue
Перевод В. Тихомирова
Old English Text
Hwæt! We Gardena
in geardagum,
þeodcyninga,
þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas
ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing
sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum,
meodosetla ofteah,
Истинно! исстари
слово мы слышим
о доблести данов,
о конунгах датских,
чья слава в битвах
была добыта!
Первый - Скильд Скевинг,
войсководитель,
не раз отрывавший
вражьи дружины
от скамей бражных.
За все, что он выстрадал
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egsode eorlas.
Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden,
he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum,
weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc
þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade
hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan.
þæt wæs god cyning!
ðæm eafera wæs
æfter cenned,
geong in geardum,
þone god sende
folce to frofre;
fyrenðearfe ongeat
þe hie ær drugon
aldorlease
lange hwile.
Him þæs liffrea,
wuldres wealdend,
woroldare forgeaf;
Beowulf wæs breme
(blæd wide sprang),
Scyldes eafera
Scedelandum in.
The Monster Grendel
translated by Burton Raffel
. . . A powerful monster, living down
In the darkness, growled in pain, impatient
As day after day the music rang
Loud in that hall, the harp’s rejoicing
Call and the poet’s clear songs, sung
Of the ancient beginnings of us all, recalling
The Almighty making the earth, shaping
These beautiful plains marked off by oceans,
Then proudly setting the sun and moon
To glow across the land and light it;
The corners of the earth were made lovely with trees
And leaves, made quick with life, with each
Of the nations who now move on its face. And then
As now warriors sang of their pleasure:
So Hrothgar’s men lived happy in his hall
Till the monster stirred, that demon, that fiend,
Grendel, who haunted the moors, the wild
Marshes, and made his home in a hell
Not hell but earth. He was spawned in that slime,
в детстве, найденыш,
ему воздалось:
стал разрастаться
властный под небом
и, возвеличенный,
силой принудил
народы заморья
дорогой китов
дань доставить
достойному власти.
Добрый был конунг!
В недолгом времени
сын престола,
наследник родился,
посланный Богом
людям на радость
и в утешение,
ибо Он видел
их гибель и скорби
в век безначалия,от Вседержителя вознаграждение,
от Жизнеподателя благонаследие,
знатен был Беовульф,
Скильдово семя,
в датских владениях.
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Conceived by a pair of those monsters born
Of Cain, murderous creatures banished
By God, punished forever for the crime
Of Abel’s death. The Almighty drove
Those demons out, and their exile was bitter,
Shut away from men; they split
Into a thousand forms of evil—spirits
And fiends, goblins, monsters, giants,
A brood forever opposing the Lord’s
Will, and again and again defeated.
Interpret the Biblical allusion in the extract. How do the elements of Christian
morality and national colour coexist in the poem?
Beowulf Fights Grendel’s Mother
translated by Fransis B. Gummere
'MID the battle-gear saw he a blade triumphant,
old-sword of Eotens, with edge of proof,
warriors' heirloom, weapon unmatched,
– save only 'twas more than other men
to bandy-of-battle could bear at all –
as the giants had wrought it, ready and keen.
Seized then its chain-hilt the Scyldings' chieftain,
bold and battle-grim, brandished the sword,
reckless of life, and so wrathfully smote
that it gripped her neck and grasped her hard,
her bone-rings breaking: the blade pierced through
that fated-one's flesh: to floor she sank.
Bloody the blade: he was blithe of his deed.
Then blazed forth light. 'Twas bright within
as when from the sky there shines unclouded
heaven's candle. The hall he scanned.
By the wall then went he; his weapon raised
high by its hilts the Hygelac-thane,
angry and eager. That edge was not useless
to the warrior now. He wished with speed
Grendel to guerdon for grim raids many,
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for the war he waged on Western-Danes
oftener far than an only time,
when of Hrothgar's hearth-companions
he slew in slumber, in sleep devoured,
fifteen men of the folk of Danes,
and as many others outward bore,
his horrible prey. Well paid for that
the wrathful prince!
Style
Beowulf has distinctive features of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, which generally has 4 accented
syllables and an indefinite number of unaccented syllables in each line. Each line is separated
by a pause known as a caesura, and there are generally two strong beats per part.
Caesura (Latin: “cutting off”) is an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura
is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, a
dash, etc. There are two types of caesurae: masculine and feminine. A masculine caesura is a pause
that follows a stressed syllable; a caesura is feminine when it is preceded by an unstressed syllable.
Another distinction is by the position of the caesura in a line. Initial caesura describes a break close to the beginning
of a line, medial denotes a pause in the middle and terminal occurs at the very end. In scansion, the "double pipe"
sign ("||") is used to denote the position of a caesura in a line.
The halves of the two-part line are linked by alliteration of two or three of the accented
syllables:
Bore it bitterly he who bided in darkness
Twelve-winters’ time torture suffered
Soul-crushing sorrow. Not seldom in private
Sat the King in his council; conference held they...
Alliteration (also known as ‘head rhyme’ or ‘initial rhyme’), the repetition of the same sounds – usually initial
consonants of words or of stressed syllables – in any sequence of neighbouring words. Now an optional and
incidental decorative effect in verse or prose, it was once a required element in the poetry of Germanic languages.
Such poetry, in which alliteration rather than rhyme is the chief principle of repetition, is known as alliterative verse.
Anglo-Saxon poetry was recited, often accompanied by music, in front of an
audience. Alliteration gave the language a musical quality. It also played the same role as rhyme
in later poetry; it helped the scop and the audience to memorise the poem.
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Find the examples of alliteration in the above given passages from the poem.
Another feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry is the kenning, a colourful, indirect way of naming
something – a battle is “spear play”, the sun is “the candle in the skies”.
A kenning is a type of literary trope, specifically circumlocution, in the form of a compound (usually two words, often
hyphenated) that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly
associated with Old Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Most commonly kennings present metaphorical compound phrases:
the sea – “a whale-path”;
a ship – “sea-wood”, “wave-floater”;
a body – “bone-house”;
blood – “war-sweat”;
the king – “ring-giver”;
the dragon – “shadow-walker”;
musical instrument – “joy-wood”, “glee-wood”.
Old English beo wulf literally means "bee-wolf," "a wolf to bees", which is a kenning for
"bear."
Make up your own kennings for the following: winter, spring, the moon, sea,
love, time, mobile phone, money, car, refrigerator.
Link
Modern English literature
John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) is a retelling of Beowulf from the point of view of the
monster. In Gardner's version of the epic the central character is Grendel, a beast condemned
to the life of an outlaw. The novel deals with finding meaning in the world and the nature of
good and evil.
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John Edmund Gardner (1926 – 2007) was an English spy and thriller novelist, best known for his James Bond
continuation novels, but also for his series of Boysie Oakes books and three continuation novels containing
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional villain, Professor Moriarty. Gardner received prestigious awards for his wide
range of literary achievements, including short stories, novels, and essays.
Using Grendel’s perspective to tell at least part of the story of Beowulf in more
contemporary language allows the story to been seen in a new light not only in terms of the
point of view but also brings it into the modern era. Grendel is used as a metaphor for the
necessity for a dark side to everything, where a hero is only as great as the villain he faces.
When Grendel meets the dragon in the early chapters of the novel, the two discuss Grendel’s
role in life, and whether or not Grendel is truly capable of controlling his fate. The dragon
insists that Grendel is a monster and his sole purpose is to better mankind through fear and
violence. Grendel opposes this theory optimistically but the dragon persists. Ultimately,
Grendel stops toying with the idea of doing good and turns to a life of absolute terror and
violence as he raids the mead halls of Hrothgar’s kingdom, thus Grendel demonstrates
existentialist ‘all or nothing’ theory by leading a life of complete evil.
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite
profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject – not
merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's
starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and
confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded
traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from
concrete human experience. The themes popularly associated with existentialism – dread, boredom, alienation,
the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness.
Grendel is portrayed mainly as a physical creature in the original work, here a glimpse into his
psyche is offered. Grendel lives in isolation and loneliness with his mother, who is unable to
provide any real companionship to her child. As the only being of his kind, he has no one to
relate to and feels the need to be understood or have some connection. Grendel has a complex
relationship with the humans who hate and fear him. He feels that he is somehow related to
humanity and despite his desire to eat them he can be moved by them and their works. He acts
as a witness to how human lives unfold and their behavior and logic bewilder him. He is cursed
to the eternal life of solitude, which deepens his grief and loneliness. He is only freed from his
tormented life through his encounter with Beowulf.
Grendel has become one of Gardner's best known and reviewed works. Ten years after
publication, the novel was adapted into the 1981 animated movie Grendel Grendel Grendel.
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1. Think of another ancient story that can be interpreted in a new completely
original way. Is the interpretation of a story (myth, legend, fairy-tale) the
matter of individual perception or culturally determined values and opinions?
2. Beowulf is the hero of northern European sagas. He lived in the world of
powerful and mysterious forces where nobility, fatalism, pride, loyalty, the search for glory
and death all played important parts. He lived in violent times in a violent environment
where nature was often hostile and man was constantly under the threat of death from
dreadful monsters. Who would you consider to be a modern hero? How does the hero you
have chosen reflect the time we live in?
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Elegiac Poetry.
The Seafarer
"The Seafarer" is an Old English poem recorded in the Exeter Book, one of the four
surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry. It contains 124 lines and is commonly referred to
as an elegy, a poem that mourns a loss, or more generally, a sorrowful piece of writing. It is
told from the point of view of an old seafarer, who is evaluating his life as he has lived it. This
poem begins as a narrative of a man’s life at sea, and then turns into a praise of God. The first
64 lines present a monologue by a seafarer about the hardships and dangers of his life and
about his love for the sea. The second half of the poem is a didactic discourse intended to
draw a general moral from the seafarer’s description. It tells about the transience of worldly
enjoyments and praises humble, honest living. A man can reach Heaven living a good,
honorable life. This is a reward to man for believing and having faith.
Text
The Seafarer
translated by Burton Raffel
5
10
15
20
This tale is true, and mine. It tells
How the sea took me, swept me back
And forth in sorrow and fear and pain,
Showed me suffering in a hundred ships,
In a thousand ports, and in me. It tells
Of smashing surf when I sweated in the cold
Of an anxious watch, perched in the bow
As it dashed under cliffs. My feet were cast
In icy bands, bound with frost,
With frozen chains, and hardship groaned
Around my heart. Hunger tore
At my sea-weary soul. No man sheltered
On the quiet fairness of earth can feel
How wretched I was, drifting through winter
On an ice-cold sea, whirled in sorrow,
Alone in a world blown clear of love,
Hung with icicles. The hailstorms flew.
The only sound was the roaring sea,
The freezing waves. The song of the swan
Might serve for pleasure, the cry of the sea-fowl,
The death-noise of birds instead of laughter,
The mewing of gulls instead of mead.
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25
30
35
40
45
50
55
60
65
Storms beat on the rocky cliffs and were echoed
By icy-feathered terns and the eagle’s screams;
No kinsman could offer comfort there,
To a soul left drowning in desolation.
And who could believe, knowing but
The passion of cities, swelled proud with wine
And no taste of misfortune, how often, how wearily,
I put myself back on the paths of the sea.
Night would blacken; it would snow from the north;
Frost bound the earth and hail would fall,
The coldest seeds. And how my heart
Would begin to beat, knowing once more
The salt waves tossing and the towering sea!
The time for journeys would come and my soul
Called me eagerly out, sent me over
The horizon, seeking foreigners’ homes.
But there isn’t a man on earth so proud,
So born to greatness, so bold with his youth,
Grown so brave, or so graced by God,
That he feels no fear as the sails unfurl,
Wondering what Fate has willed and will do.
No harps ring in his heart, no rewards,
No passion for women, no worldly pleasures,
Nothing, only the ocean’s heave;
But longing wraps itself around him.
Orchards blossom, the towns bloom,
Fields grow lovely as the world springs fresh,
And all these admonish that willing mind
Leaping to journeys, always set
In thoughts traveling on a quickening tide.
So summer’s sentinel, the cuckoo, sings
In his murmuring voice, and our hearts mourn
As he urges. Who could understand,
In ignorant ease, what we others suffer
As the paths of exile stretch endlessly on?
And yet my heart wanders away,
My soul roams with the sea, the whales’
Home, wandering to the widest corners
Of the world, returning ravenous with desire,
Flying solitary, screaming, exciting me
To the open ocean, breaking oaths
On the curve of a wave. Thus the joys of God
Are fervent with life, where life itself
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70
75
80
85
90
95
100
105
Fades quickly into the earth. The wealth
Of the world neither reaches to Heaven nor remains.
No man has ever faced the dawn
Certain which of Fate’s three threats
Would fall: illness, or age, or an enemy’s
Sword, snatching the life from his soul.
The praise the living pour on the dead
Flowers from reputation: plant
An earthly life of profit reaped
Even from hatred and rancor, of bravery
Flung in the devil’s face, and death
Can only bring you earthly praise
And a song to celebrate a place
With the angels, life eternally blessed
In the hosts of Heaven. The days are gone
When the kingdoms of earth flourished in glory;
Now there are no rulers, no emperors,
No givers of gold, as once there were,
When wonderful things were worked among them
And they lived in lordly magnificence.
Those powers have vanished, those pleasures are dead.
The weakest survives and the world continues,
Kept spinning by toil. All glory is tarnished.
The world’s honor ages and shrinks.
Bent like the men who mould it. Their faces
Blanch as time advances, their beards
Wither and they mourn the memory of friends.
The sons of princes, sown in the dust.
The soul stripped of its flesh knows nothing
Of sweetness or sour, feels no pain,
Bends neither its hand nor its brain. A brother
Opens his palms and pours down gold
On his kinsman’s grave, strewing his coffin
With treasures intended for Heaven, but nothing
Golden shakes the wrath of God
For a soul overflowing with sin, and nothing
Hidden on earth rises to Heaven.
We all fear God. He turns the earth,
He set it swinging firmly in space,
Gave life to the world and light to the sky.
Death leaps at the fools who forget their God.
He who lives humbly has angels from Heaven
To carry him courage and strength and belief.
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110
115
120
A man must conquer pride, not kill it,
Be firm with his fellows, chaste for himself,
Treat all the world as the world deserves,
With love or with hate but never with harm,
Though an enemy seek to scorch him in hell,
Or set the flames of a funeral pyre
Under his lord. Fate is stronger
And God mightier than any man’s mind.
Our thoughts should turn to where our home is,
Consider the ways of coming there,
Then strive for sure permission for us
To rise to that eternal joy,
That life born in the love of God
And the hope of Heaven. Praise the Holy
Grace of Him who honored us,
Eternal, unchanging creator of earth. Amen.
1. Why does the seafarer seek the severities of the sea rather than the
delights of the land?
2. How can you explain the combination of themes in the poem: seaman’s
life and religious teaching?
3. Interpret the lines: Fate is stronger And God mightier than any man’s
mind.
4. This short lyric is full of striking metaphors. Find them in the text. What
emotional effect does each metaphor create?
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Anglo-Saxon Riddles
Almost a hundred Anglo-Saxon riddles have come down to us. Riddle is an almost universal
form, found in most cultures. We can't say with any certainty who composed them, or when,
or how, or for what purpose. They may have been short pieces the bards used as fill between
parts of epics.
They were meant to be performed rather than merely read to oneself and give us a glimpse into
the life and culture of the era. Through many of the riddles we catch glimpses of Anglo-Saxon
life and beliefs that we do not find elsewhere in Old English literature or archaeology.
Like other Anglo-Saxon poems riddle express the notion that virtually everything in the world is
part of a living continuum, any segment of which can speak with its own particular voice. It is
important to note that many things described in the riddles are not seen as fixed and static
entities but as living creatures with biographies. A cross or a spear begins as a tree. A goose
begins as a barnacle. The world of the riddles lives, breathes, and speaks to man and to God.
The creatures of the riddles often have to go through a period of suffering to become what
they are and often experience a good deal of pain in their present state. A striking feature of the
riddles is that the speaker (a creature or a thing) accepts this pain and struggle as part of the
order of things either with cheerful endurance or Christian patience. Often a creature's
biography suggests that its pattern of growth gave it some of the powers it now has.
Parchment had to suffer to become a holy (and magical) Bible. A sword had to endure trials in
order to become strong and honored – not unlike its user.
Many riddles open with a formula like "I saw a wonderful thing" or "I am a marvel." This sort
of formula probably helped the riddler get started, and alerted the audience to the fact that this
was the beginning of a riddle.
Text
1. I am a lonely warrior, wounded by iron,
Stricken by sword, weary of battle-works,
Tired of blades.
Oft I see combat,
Fighting a brave foe,
I cannot expect comfort, safety to come to me in saving struggle,
Before I perish entirely among men;
But the leavings of hammers strike me,
The hard-edged, battle sharp handiwork of smiths,
Bites me in the stronghold.
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I must await a more hateful encounter.
Never a physician could I find on the battlefield,
One who with herbs might heal my wounds;
But the blows of the swords grow greater through death-strokes, by day and by night.
2. My home is not quiet but I am not loud.
The lord has meant us to journey together.
I am faster than he and sometimes stronger,
But he keeps on going for longer.
Sometimes I rest but he runs on.
For as long as I am alive I live in him.
If we part from one another
It is I who will die.
Write a riddle focused on some aspect of present-day life (a soda can, a light
bulb, a mobile-phone, etc.) in the style of the Old English ones.
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Old English Christian Poetry
Caedmon
Caedmon, the first English poet, lived in the latter half of the 7th century. His story is told by
Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (written in Latin). It is
perhaps the most frequently quoted piece of all Bede's writings.
Venerable Bede (673–735) was a Benedictine monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter
at Monkwearmouth. He is well known as an author and scholar, and his most famous work,
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People)
gained him the title "The father of English history". In five books and 400 pages the book gives the
history of England from the time of Caesar to the date of its completion (731).
Text
from Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum,
book IV chapter xxiv
In this abbess's monastery was a certain brother particularly glorified and honoured with a divine gift, in that he fittingly
was accustomed to make songs, which pertained to religion and virtue, so that whatever thus he he learned of divine
letters from scholars, those things he after a moderate space of time he brought forth, in poetic language adorned with
the greatest sweetness and inspiration and well-made in the English language. And by his poem-songs the spirits of
many men were kindled to distain of the world and to service of a heavenly life. And likewise, many others after him
among the English people endeavoured to compose pious songs, but none however in like manner to him could do so
because he had learned not at all from men nor through man that he songcraft learned, but he was divinely aided and
through God's gift received the art of poetry. And he therefore he never could make any sort of lying or idle songs,
but just those alone which pertained to piety, and those which were fitting for his pious tongue to sing. The man was
established in worldly life until the time when he was of advanced age, and he had never learned any songs. And
consequently, often at a drinking gathering, when there was deemed to be occasion of joy, that they all must in turn
sing with a harp, when he saw the harp nearing him, he then arose for shame from that feast and went home to his
house. Then he did this on a certain occasion, that he left the banquet-hall and he was going out to the animal stables,
which herd had been assigned to him that night. When he there at a suitable time set his limbs at rest and fell asleep,
then some man stood by him in his dream and hailed and greeted him and addressed him by his name: 'Caedmon, sing
me something.' Then he answered and said: 'I do not know how to sing and for that reason I went out from this feast
and went hither, because I did not know how to sing at all.' Again he said, he who was speaking with him:
'Nevertheless, you must sing.' Then he said: 'What must I sing?' Said he: 'Sing to me of the first Creation.' When he
received this answer, then he began immediately to sing in praise of God the Creator verses and words which he had
never heard, whose order is this:
Now [we] must honour the guardian of heaven,
the might of the architect, and his purpose,
the work of the father of glory
as he, the eternal lord, established the beginning of wonders;
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he first created for the children of men
heaven as a roof, the holy creator
Then the guardian of mankind,
the eternal lord, afterwards appointed the middle earth,
the lands for men, the Lord almighty.
Then he arose from that sleep, and all of those (songs) which he sang while sleeping he had fast in his memory, and he
soon added in the same manner to those words many words of songs worthy of God. Then in the morning he came to
the town-reeve, who was his alderman. He said to him which gift did he bring, and he directly lead him to the abbess
and made it known and declared to her. Then she ordered all of the most learnèd men and scholars to assemble, and
to those who were present commanded him to tell of that dream and sing that song, so that it might be determined by
the judgement of all of them: what it was and whence it had come. Then it was seen by all even as it was, that to him
from God himself a heavenly gift had been given. Then they spoke to him and told some holy story and divine words
of knowledge; they bade him then, if he could, that he turn it into poetical rhythm. Then, when he had undertaken it in
this manner, then he went home to his house, and came again in the morning, and with the best adorned song he sang
and rendered what he was bid (to recite).
Then the abbess began to embrace and love the gift of God in that man, and she exhorted and adviced him that he
should abandon the worldly life and accept monkhood, and he readily agreed to this. And she accepted him into the
monastery, with his goods, and united him into the community of God's servants, and ordered that he be taught the
(entire) series of holy stories and narratives. And he was able to learn all that he heard, and, keeping it all in mind, just
as a clean animal chewing cud, turned (it) into the sweetest song. And his songs and his poems were so beautiful to
hear, that his teachers themselves wrote and learned at his mouth.
Cynewulf
Cynewulf is regarded as one of the preeminent figures of Old English Christian poetry. He
presumably flourished in the 9th century. We know of his name by means of his runic signature
found in the four poems: The Fates of the Apostles, Juliana, Elene, and Christ II (also
referred to as The Ascension). Unlike his literary predecessor, Caedmon, whose biography is
solely derived from Bede's Ecclesiastical History, Cynewulf's life is a mystery to scholars.
Cynewulf was undoubtedly a literate and educated man. He relied on Latin sources for
inspiration: that means he knew the Latin language and was likely a “man in holy orders”. The
deep Christian knowledge contained in his verse implies that he was well learned in religious
literature.
The Dream of the Rood is a religious poem dating back to the tenth century. It was found in a
manuscript in Northern Italy with a number of other Old English poems, although some of the
passages are also found inscribed on a stone cross in Scotland which dates back to the eighth
century.
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There are sections from The Dream of the Rood that are found on the Ruthwell Cross that
dates back to the 8th century. It was an 18 foot, free standing, Anglo-Saxon Cross, perhaps
intended as a "conversion tool". At each side of the vine-tracery the runes are carved. On the
cross there is an excerpt that was written in runes along with scenes of Jesus healing the blind, the
annunciation, and the story of Egypt. Although it was torn down and destroyed during initial Protestant revolt, it was
reconstructed as much as possible after the fear of iconography passed. Fortunately during that time of religious
unrest, those words that were in the runes were still protected in the Vercelli Book, so called because the book is
kept in Vercelli, Italy. The Vercelli Book dates back to the 10th century, and also holds 23 homilies interspersed with
six poems; The Dream of the Rood, Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, Soul and Body, Elene, and a poetic,
homiletic fragment.
Like much of the surviving Old English poetry, no one knows who actually wrote The Dream
of the Rood, but some features of the poem resemble those of Cynewulf’s poems. That is why
it is sometimes referred to him.
The Dream of the Rood begins with the narration of the speaker of a dream he had. In his
dream he sees a tree covered with gold and surrounded by angles. While he is gazing at the
tree it starts to bleed heavily from its right side. It, then, addresses the dreamer. The tree is
the cross of the crucifixion, and it portrays the details of the story. Jesus is described as a
mighty warrior and a hero. The cross itself has been dug out after the crucifixion and now it
dwells with Jesus and has the power to heal those who pray to him.
The cross requests the dreamer to tell other people of this vision. One who knows the story of
the crucifixion will gain an after-life. After the dream the speaker dedicates his life to
contemplation and spiritual devotion so after his death he could enter the heaven kingdom
of Jesus.
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Anglo-Saxon Prose
Among the most important prose writes in England was the Venerable Bede (673–735). He
was born and educated in Northumbria, and more than any other scholar led the kingdom to its
period of literary supremacy. The title Venerable was given to Bede for his reputation of
wisdom and piety. He is the author of 40 respected and well-read (at his time) books: verses,
biographies of saints, theological commentaries and the Ecclesiastical history of English
Church and People. His other books on natural history and astronomy were a collection of all
the learning known in the Middle Ages.
Among Bede’s many works the Ecclesiastical History of the English People is still an
invaluable source book for our knowledge of the earlier period of Anglo-Saxon rule. Bede, as a
churchman and scholar, wrote in Latin. Only because the Ecclesiastical History was translated
into Old English by Alfred the Great it is considered a part of Anglo-Saxon prose.
Bede’s History contains 5 books.
The first book, beginning with a description of Britian, carries the history from the invasion of
Julius Caesar to the year 603, after the arrival of Augustine.
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The second book begins with the death of Gregory the Great, and ends in 633, when Edwin of
Northumbria was killed and Paulinus (the Christian missionary) retired to Rochester. It is in this
book that the wonderful scene is described in which Edwin of Northumbria takes counsel with
his nobles as to the acceptance or rejection of the Gospel as preached by Paulinus. Here
occurs the unforgettable simile of the sparrow flying out of the winter night into the brightlylighted hall and out again into the dark. The story ran as follows: When King Edwin and his
advisors were debating whether to be converted to Christianity during the seventh century:
“Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man with that time of which we have no
knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a lone sparrow through the banqueting hall
where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counsellors. Inside there is a
comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging.
This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he
is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes
from sight into the darkness whence he came. Similarly man appears on the earth for a little
while, but we know nothing of what went before this life, and what follows. Therefore, if this
new teaching can reveal any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should
follow it.”
In the third book proceeds as far as 664.
The fourth book, beginning with the events of 664, deals with events to the year 698. It is there
that Bede presented a marvelous story of Caedmon.
In the fifth and last book there are different stories of church people, their letters, the
description of the condition of the country in 731, and a list of the author’s works.
The popularity of the History was immense. Bede was not carried away by the Latin manner
and wrote it in a direct and simple style.
King Alfred the Great (849-901) is regarded as the greatest figure in Old English prose. The
reign of Alfred acquired its chief glory from the personality of the king. He was a great ruler
and scholar.
The beginning of the 9th century was a troubled time for England. Danish pirates called
Norsemen kept coming from overseas. Each year their number increased. When Alfred was
made King of England the year 871, England’s danger was the greatest. In 891, the Norsemen
were defeated, and Alfred decided to make peace with them.
The policy which he realised was the policy of unifying the petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and
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making Wessex the nucleus of English expantion. However, Alfred’s conceptions were
cosmopolitan rather than separatist. His reign is remarkable for its educational and political
progress. He never lost sight of the importance of keeping his kingdom in organic relation with
European civilisation. Alfred had contacts with cultured circles of scholars and writers from
the continent, and this has promoted a renaissance of classical study.
The books he chose for translation and dissemination, including philosophy, general
information, religion, and Bede’s history, show the wide range of his interests. It is probable
that Alfred translated these works himself, and he certainly added the material of his own to
some of them.
At the same time he increased the number of monasteries and reformed the educational side of
these institutions by the introduction of teachers, English and foreign.
King Alfred was also responsible for fostering the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year
account of English history, which became a valuable contemporary account of life in AngloSaxon England. It was continued for 250 years after the king’s death.
The last great figure in Old English Prose is Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham, the Crammarian
(955?–1025?), like Bede a great Benedictine scholar and teacher. His works are many, but he
is best known for his homilies or sermons, his lives of the saints, and his amusing Colloquy on
the Occupations. The Colloquy differs from most Anglo-Saxon works in that it gives real
insight into the humdrum life of the ordinary man – farmer, hunter, fisherman and merchant.
Aelfric is much more the conscious stylist than Alfred. With him, Old English prose achieves
balance and rhythm.
Text
from Colloquy on the Occupations
Pupils: Master, we young men would like you to teach us
how to speak properly and with a wide vocabulary,
for we are ignorant and badly spoken
Teacher: How would you like to speak?
Pupils: We are concerned about the way we speak, as we
want to speak correctly and with meaning, and not
with meaningless base words. Would you beat us
and make us learn? For it is better for us to be
beaten to learn than to remain ignorant. However,
we know that you are a kind-hearted man who
would not wish to inflict blows on us unless we ask
for them.
Teacher: I ask you to tell me what work you do. I am a
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monk by profession. I sing seven psalms during
the day, and spend my time in reading and singing;
but, however, I should like you, in the meanwhile,
to learn to converse in the Latin language. What
skills do your work mates possess?
Pupils: Some are ploughmen, some are shepherds,others
are oxherds, hunters, fishermen, fowlers,
merchants, leather workers, salters and bakers.
Teacher: Can you tell us, ploughman, how you do your
work?
Ploughman: Master, I have to work so very hard. I go out at the
crack of dawn to drive the oxen to the field and
yoke them to the plough. For not even in the bitter
winter would I dare to stay at home for fear of my
lord; but, when I have yoked up the oxen and
fastened the plough and the ploughshare to the
plough, then I must plough a whole field or more
for the whole day.
Teacher: Have you any mates?
Ploughman: Yes, I have one boy who drives the oxen with a
goad. He is hoarse from shouting and the cold.
Teacher: Do you do anything more during the day?
Ploughman: Yes, indeed, I do very much more. I have to fill the
stable with hay for the oxen, water them and take
their dung outside. Alas, I have to endure such
hard work since I am not a free man.
Teacher: Tell us, shepherd, what work do you do?
Shepherd: Yes, my teacher, I have much work to do. As soon
as it is light, I drive the ewes to the pastures and
guard them with dogs through heat and cold, so
that the wolves do not devour them. I drive them
to the folds, where I milk them twice a day. I move
their folds and I make butter and cheese as well,
and I am faithful to my lord.
Teacher: What did you do, oxherd?
Oxherd: I work very hard for my lord. When the ploughman
has unyoked his oxen, I take them out to pasture
and stand over them all night to guard them
against thieves and again, at dawn, I give them
back to the ploughman well-fed and watered.
Teacher: Is this man, here, one of your comrades?
Oxherd: Oh, yes he is.
Teacher: Do you have any skill?
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Hunter: Yes, I have one skill.
Teacher: What is that?
Hunter: I am a hunter.
Teacher: In whose service?
Hunter: The King’s.
Teacher: How do you perform your skills?
Hunter: I take my nets with me and set them in a suitable
place, and set my hounds to pursue the beasts so
that they reach the nets unexpectedly and are
ensnared. Then, while they are still trapped in the
nets, I cut their throats.
Teacher: Do you have any other method of hunting instead
of nets?
Hunter: Yes, indeed, I hunt without using nets.
Teacher: How?
Hunter: I chase the wild beasts with very swift hounds.
Teacher: What sort of beasts do you catch mainly?
Hunter: I catch harts, bears, does, goats and some hares.
Teacher: Did you go out hunting today?
Hunter: No, I did not, because I had to spend today on my
lord’s estate, but I went out hunting yesterday.
Teacher: What did you catch?
Hunter: I caught two harts and a boar.
Teacher: How did you catch them?
Hunter: I caught the harts in the nets and I cut the boar’s
throat.
Teacher: How did you dare to cut the boar’s throat?
Hunter: My dogs drove him towards me, and I stood against
him and suddenly slew him.
Teacher: You must have been very brave indeed.
Hunter: A hunter must be very brave, since all kinds of
beasts lurk in the woods.
Teacher: What do you get from your hunting?
Hunter: Whatever I capture I give to the King, since I am his
huntsman.
Teacher: What does he give you?
Hunter: He feeds me and clothes me, and gives me a horse
and armour, so that I can perform my duties as a
hunter freely.
What does this passage tell us about life of Anglo-Saxon people and their
values?
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English Literature in the Middle Ages
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Historical Context
In the year 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, crossed the Channel and defeated the English in
a great battle at Hastings. Within five years he became the complete master of England. The
new king managed to crush the remaining Anglo-Saxon resistance and distributed the land
among his Norman nobles, organizing the country according to the new feudal system: land
was held in return for duty or service to one’s lord (military duty, as a rule). All land belonged
to the king, but he gave it to the nobles in exchange for a part of the goods and a promise to
serve him in war for a certain period each year. The nobles, in turn, gave part of their lands to
the knights or other freemen, who contributed military service or rent. Serfs who worked on
the land, but were not free to leave it, were the last link in the chain. They paid goods and
services to the lord in return for the land they farmed and were little more than slaves.
This system of organizing men into specific classes was accepted by medieval people because
they believed that full equality could not exist on earth. In this mortal life each man assumed the
place in society for which God destined him.
Feudal society was essentially a war-oriented society. Disputes arose not only between
countries, but between rival barons in the same land. National unity did not exist. A man
thought of himself as first the subject of the lord from whom he held his lands, and then as a
subject of the king.
Medieval life was softened by the institution of chivalry. The word “chivalry” evolved from
chevalier, the French word for the mounted soldier. A symbol of chivalry was the knight. The
training of a knight began in early childhood. At the age of seven the well-born boy left his
home for service first as a page, then as a squire at some lord’s castle. The lady of the castle
taught him the elaborate code of courtesy and manners that a knight must follow. With other
pages he was trained in horsemanship and the use of the shield and sword. When he became
squire, he went to battles with his lord.
The squire, who had served his term of apprenticeship, was able to become a knight. After a
ritual bath, a night’s wake, and sacramental confession, a squire was ceremonially dubbed
knight by his lord. The knight swore an oath of loyalty to his lord and pledged himself to
revere women, protect the weak, to right wrongs, and to defend the Christian faith (especially
by participation in Crusades against the advances of Muslim infidels).
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The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with
the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem. The crusaders
comprised military units from all over western Europe, and were not under unified command. The
main series of Crusades occurred between 1095 and 1291. The Crusades were fought by Roman
Catholics primarily against Muslims. After some early successes, the later crusades failed and the crusaders were
defeated and forced to return home.
The chivalry brightened the life of only a relatively small number of upper-middle class, while
the mass of people –serfs and poor townsfolk – lived a different life. People worked all the
hours of sunlight and survived on a diet of cereals and vegetables. The serfs could not leave
their land without their lord’s permission.
The only link between all classes of the Anglo-Norman society was the Church. In a world of
war, plague, death, man clang to the Church teaching of eternal life, which is everything
compared to earthly life. Membership in the Church also secured a place in society. For some
serious transgression the man could be excommunicated, thus losing his status and rights.
In Norman England education was also the province of the Church. It is there that manuscripts
were copied by hand. Monks and priests passed the culture of Greek and Roman scholars to
young people who flocked to monasteries to learn. From such beginnings in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries came the formal organization of Oxford and Cambridge as universities.
The Church was also bound with political affairs. In medieval thought Church and King were
necessary instruments for maintaining order in society. The question of who was greater
caused dispute between them. The most famous quarrel between Church and King in
Medieval England was that of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry II. It was
Henry’s believed that certain rights exercised by the Church belonged to the King. He
appointed Thomas Becket, his counsellor and close friend, Archbishop of Canterbury. But
once he had become Archbishop, Becket strongly defended the rights of the Church. So, once
in a burst of anger, Henry II exclaimed to a group of his followers: “Will not one of you
avenge me of this turbulent priest?” So, the four of his knights went to Canterbury, found the
Archbishop and killed him with their daggers. The Christian world was shocked. Henry II
himself deplored the killing of his friend.
Since then the tomb of Thomas Becket became the favourite place of pilgrimage for
Englishmen of all classes. The story of pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine later became central in
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Middle Ages witnessed a lot of tragic events in the British history.
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For many years there was hatred and resentment between the Saxon population and their new
Norman masters, who did not consider themselves as English, but as French. Political and
economic situations in the Late Middle Ages were aggravated by the epidemics of Black
Death (bubonic plague) and a long series of wars.
The plague broke out in 1348–49 and was followed by minor epidemics. Once infected, a
person barely lived 24 hours. Over the whole of the 14th century, the population fell from
about four million to less than two million. Serfs, left without masters, escaped to a freer life in
the growing towns and became vagabonds.
The overseas possessions of the English kings were the root cause of the tensions between
England and France. The kings of England were the mightiest of the king of France’s vassals,
and the inevitable friction between them repeatedly escalated into open hostilities. The
Hundred Years’ War grew out of these hostilities. It lasted from 1337 to 1453 and had many
ups and downs. The result was that England lost all its possessions in France apart from the
port of Calais.
Epidemics and wars led to the decrease in population, which favored the poor laborers. The
shortage of manpower meant that they could sell their services at a higher price. The king and
Parliament tried unsuccessfully and repeatedly to control increases in the cost of labor, and the
larger landowners were eventually forced to rent their land for longer and longer leases. By the
end of the Middle Ages the great landlords had almost disappeared, and a new class, the
yeomen, or smaller farmers, had become the backbone of the English society.
The Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 was the result of an ill-advised poll-tax to be paid by everyone
in the kingdom. The leader of the rebellion, Wat Tyler, called for better treatment of the poor:
“We are men formed in Christ’s likeness and we are kept like animals”, he said. The revolt
lasted four weeks, and peasants took control of much of London. Richard II confronted the
crowd and promised to satisfy all the demands and abolish serfdom, but as the crowd
dispersed, he changed his mind and executed the leaders, breaking all the promises he had
made.
The people were also increasingly dissatisfied with the Church, which was corrupt, greedy and
cruel. The appearance of religious works in English threatened the Church authority, since it
allowed people to think and pray independently.
A long series of struggles for power culminated in the so-called Wars of the Roses. The
conflict resulted from social and financial troubles that followed the Hundred Years' War.
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England was then ruled by King Henry VI, who was mentally ill. The nobility were divided
between those who supported the Duke of York (white rose), and those who stood for the
King, the House of Lancaster (red rose). The wars ended in the battle of Bosworth Field in
1485 when Richard III was defeated by Henry Tudor, Duke of Richmond (Lancastrian party),
who was immediately crowned King Henry VII.
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Literary Context
In the Early Middle Ages there developed a lot of new genres in the English literature.
Chivalric romances and ballads were the kind of literature that reflected the values and
manners of the upper classes. Fables and fabliaux were less noble stories admired by
townsfolk.
Fabliaux (singular: Fabliau) were funny metrical poems, full of indecent jokes, about cunning
humbugs, silly old merchants and their unfaithful wives. Together with fables fabliaux represented the
literature of the town which did not idealize characters as romances did.
Fables are usually short narratives making an edifying or cautionary point and often employing as
characters animals that speak and act like humans.
It was Geoffrey Chaucer who dominated the period and was called the Father of English
poetry. His genius enabled him to unite the various trends of medieval European literature. He
brought together the Old English and French influences and brightened them with an expressive
individual style.
The 14ht century also saw the so-called alliterative revival: the two main examples are Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight (author unknown) and Piers Plowman by William Langland.
Both are the products of a provincial, perhaps rather conservative culture, whereas Chaucer is
distinctly modern in tone and idiom.
One extremely important development was the rise of mystery and morality plays. They
originated as didactic spectacles designed to instruct the illiterate in religious matters, and their
content encompassed the whole of the Bible, from Genesis to the Day of Judgement. They
soon assumed the independent existence, revealing many original features.
Finally, the period closes with William Caxton and the first printing press in England. Caxton
strove towards the standardization of English in a refined and universal form. One of the books
he printed, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, which is a massive prose version of the Arthurian cycle
of legends, is a fitting conclusion to the period in which the values of an aristocratic, chivalric
social systems were already in decline and new influences from Europe were beginning to take
place, culminating in the Renaissance, one of the richest periods in the history of English
literature.
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Chivalric Romances
The history of the English romances started at the beginning of the 13th century when the
French literature began to dominate the whole Europe. Troubadours, composed an abundance
of romances of chivalry, and sang them at the courts of the Norman kings of England. The
English admired those stories for their adventures: slaughter of Saracens, fights with dragons
and giants, enchanted princesses in the enchanted castles. The English writers adapted from
the French what suited them best, and what was liked and admired by the public.
Troubadours, or trouveres (English: minstrels), were a class of musicians and poets who wrote
poems and music about chivalry and love. They were medieval traveling entertainers who would
sing and recite poetry to make a living. Troubadour poetry became popular in Europe during the
twelfth century. It was most prominent between 1100 and 1350.
Chivalric romances introduced the ideas of knighthood and courtly love. Courtly love was a
medieval European conception of noble and chivalrous expression of love and admiration. It
was a parallel between the feudal service of a knight to his lord and the service of a lover to an
adored and honoured lady. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the
nobility. It was a school of thought in which courtiers could learn how to be charming and
graceful. Courtly love was also generally not practiced between husband and wife.
The French and English romances began to place a new emphasis on the dignity of a woman
who emerged as an equal partner in love, fidelity, wit, and courage. Worship and devotion to
womanhood originated in the Cult of Virgin Mary in the late Middle Ages. As the mother of
Jesus Christ, Mary has a central role in the life of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman
Catholic veneration of her as the Blessed Virgin Mary has grown over time not only in prayer
but in art, poetry and music.
The Virgin Mary served as an ideal subject of love poetry because she was viewed as
paradoxically accessible and unattainable Mary could be sought, but never captured;
passionately loved, but never possessed. Love was always restless, always seeking, and never
fully satisfied.
According to the model of courtly love, love was important as a catalyst for growth and
transformation. The Virgin Mary came to be seen as a lady worthy of devotion, and as people
drew closer to her, they felt that their love for her made them bolder, braver, and more faithful.
Arthurian stories belong to a genre of chivalric romances. In the twelfth century Geoffrey of
Monmouth, the author of Historia Regum Britanniae, or History of Britons (1137), used
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both historical and legendary material to develop the story of King Arthur.
Content
In this narrative Arthur becomes king of Britain at the age of fifteen and wages wars against
Scots and Saxons. He conquers Scotland, Ireland, and Iceland, and many lands on the
continent. Arthur marries Guanhamara, a lady of the noble Roman family. Arthur is
summoned to pay tribute to the Emperor of Rome. Guanhamara is left in Arthur’s kingdom
in charge of his nephew Mordred. On his way to Rome Arthur slays the giant of St Michael
Mount. He is about to enter Rome when he receives a warning that Mordred has seized
Guanhamara and the kingdom. He returns to fight Mordred. Mordred and all his knights
are killed, and Arthur is mortally wounded, and taken to the island of Avalon for the healing
of his wounds. Guanhamara goes to a nunnery.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s book was great success with readers, and made Arthur and Merlin
the romantic property of literary Europe.
The story of Arthur was developed by a Norman writer Wace, who added many details. The
Round Table around which the knights settled their disputes was first mentioned in his work.
The wounded king returns from Avalon and resumes his kingdom. Wace’s story was written in
English, in lightly rhyming verse, and was very popular. Wace’s work served as the basis of
the Brut (The Chronicle of Britain) of Layamon, the first English record of the “noble deeds
of England”, which adds many romantic and fairy details to the story. Elves are present at
Arthur’s birth to bestow on him long life, riches, and virtues. His sword and spear are magic,
after the final battle Arthur leaves for Avalon in a magic boat.
The remarkable fact about the story of King Arthur is its rapid development as the collection of
stories about Merlin, Gawain, Lancelot, Tristram, and the Grail. So Merlin, a Welsh wizardbard, and Gawain, a British knight, pass into French romances and are later transferred back to
English stories. The love of Lancelot for Guinevere is now a central episode of the Arthurian
tragedy, and Lancelot comes into the legend from a French story. The Grail story is another
complicated addition to the Arthurian cycle. The Grail is identified with the cup of the Last
Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea treasured the blood that flowed from the wounds of
Christ.
The Last Supper is the final meal that, in the Gospel accounts, Jesus shared with his Apostles in
Jerusalem before his crucifixion.
Despite the variety of Arthurian romances, none of them seriously challenges the
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remarkable poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, probably written in the
fourteenth century. The authorship of the poem is unknown, and the poet goes under the name
of Gawain-poet.
The poem opens by introducing Arthur as the greatest of the line if British kings which
descended from Brutus.
Content
It is a New Year at King Arthur’s court at Camelot. There is feasting and merriment, but the
king declares that he will not eat until a marvel occurs. Suddenly a huge knight dressed all
in green enters the hall, mounted on a green horse and armed with an enormous axe. He
challenges anyone in the hall to strike him with the axe, but whoever accepts he challenge
must also accept a return blow at the Green Chapel in a year’s time. Gawain accepts and
cuts off the Green Knight’s head. The Green Knight picks up his head, bids farewell, and
rides away.
The following Christmas, Gawain sets out for the Green Chapel. Arriving at a magnificent
castle, he accepts the offer to rest there. During the next three days the lord of the castle goes
hunting, leaving Gawain alone with his wife. Gawain and the lord agree that at the end of
each day they will exchange everything the other has received hunting or otherwise. For
three days the lady has tried to seduce Gawain, but succeeds in giving him just kisses. She
also gives him a magic girdle, assuring him that it will protect him from injury. Gawain
gives the lord the kisses, but hides the girdle away. On the New Year’s Day Gawain goes to
the Green Chapel and meets the Green Knight. He is wounded, and the knight reveals that
he is the lord of the castle, and he and his wife have agreed to tempt Gawain. No harm
would have befallen Gawain if he had not hidden the girdle. Gawain is ashamed. But in the
generous knightly world of Camelot, his imperfection is excused as human folly, not as a
crime against chivalry. The Arthur’s knights agree from now on to wear green girdles. The
girdle becomes an emblem of untruth and shame, and a new badge of honour.
Sir Thomas Malory (d. 1471) was attracted by the adventurous content of the French
Arthurian material. He worked on a considerable variety of English and French sources in both
verse and prose, and translated them all into a prose epic. He summarized the popular stories
about King Arthur in his book Le Morte D’Arthur (Arthur’s Death) which he wrote in French.
Le Morte D’Arthur is divided into eight tales in 21 books, but is usually taken as a single work.
It is the greatest of the medieval prose romances. Malory felt that the aristocratic chivalry was
dying, the authority of medieval aristocracy was breaking up forever, destroyed by the
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madness of the Wars of the Roses.
In Malory’s story Arthur’s world is crashed. His faithful “brother” Lancelot becomes his rival,
because he and Arthur’s wife Guinevere fail the king and become lovers. Arthur fathers an
illegitimate son Mordred who will eventually kill Arthur in the great battle at Salisbury which will
finish off the Round Table. Mordred seizes the power and tries to make Guinevere marry him.
Lancelot desperate to rescue the queen kills by mischance Gareth, the knight who used to be
his friend.
What matters most in Le Morte D’Arthur is that the king is made to see the destruction of his
own achievements before he dies. His grief nearly overwhelms him when he considers how the
loss of Guinevere and the deaths of his knights are to be weighted.
Text
from Le Morte d'Arthur
The death of them, said Arthur, will cause the
greatest mortal war that ever was; I am sure, wist Sir
Gawaine that Sir Gareth were slain, I should never have
rest of him till I had destroyed Sir Launcelot's kin and
himself both, outher else he to destroy me. And therefore,
said the king, wit you well my heart was never so
heavy as it is now, and much more I am sorrier for my
good knights' loss than for the loss of my fair queen;
for queens I might have enow, but such a fellowship of
good knights shall never be together in no company.
And now I dare say, said King Arthur, there was never
Christian king held such a fellowship together; and alas
that ever Sir Launcelot and I should be at debate. Ah
Agravaine, Agravaine, said the king, Jesu forgive it thy soul,
for thine evil will, that thou and thy brother Sir Mordred
hadst unto Sir Launcelot, hath caused all this sorrow: and
ever among these complaints the king wept and swooned.
Link
English Literature of later periods:
• "The Faerie Queene"by Edmund Spenser (16-th century)
• "The Lady of Shalott", "Idylls of the King"by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (19-th century)
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American Literature and Cinematograph:
• "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"by Mark Twain (19-th century)
• "Merlin's Mirror"by Andre Norton (20-th century)
• “First Knight” by Jerry Zucker (20-th century)
• “King Arthur” by Antoine Fuqua (21-st century)
French Literature and Animation:
•
“Arthur and the Minimoys” by Luc Besson (21-st century)
Are you familiar with the books or films from the list?
How can you explain the unceasing interest of the public in Arthurian theme?
What inspires modern authors and audiences in the legends about Arthur?
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Ballads
Ballad (Latin: ballare – to dance) is a songlike poem that was a popular verse form which
flourished mainly on the border between England and Scotland. Ballads belonged to no
particular author, but like all folklore they were handled freely by minstrels and ballad reciters
who changed and modernized the ballad texts.
Ballads told different types of stories. There were ballads about the supernatural: stories of
ghosts and demons or people who returned from the dead to haunt the living. There were
romantic tragedies usually dealing with the separation of lovers through misunderstanding or
the opposition of family. Many ballads were about crime and punishment, and often told the
stories of convicted criminals who were about to be executed and repented for their sins.
The most popular ballads were the stories about the good outlaw Robin Hood. Robin Hood is
a national character. He had the English love for fair play, generosity, wit and quickness. He
was a mighty archer armed with the national weapon of the bow and arrows. He tricked with
the legal authority in the person of a proud Sheriff of Nottingam. Robin Hood was praised for
his adventurous spirit, his sense of humour and his concern for the poor.
Finally, there were ballads recounting historical events, such as battles between the English and
the Scots (The Border Ballads) or natural disasters such as shipwrecks and plagues.
According to the circumstances of their origin and purpose we can define three basic types of
ballads: the folk ballad; the minstrel ballad; and the coronach.
Folk ballads, the oldest of these types, were probably composed by a local singer to
commemorate some event of importance to the community. As generations of singers passed
on the song, a word was changed here and there, and differing versions of the same ballad
often appeared. Certain basic characteristics also developed. Because the listeners were most
interested in rapid and dramatic action, story is more important than characters or setting. The
introductory material is sketched in briefly, and the action moves swiftly to its climax. The
general tone is usually very tragic. The ballads often end in death by accident, murder or
suicide, or with the return of the dead. In them death is viewed impersonally. Tragedy was part
of the pattern of medieval life.
The minstrel ballad takes its name from the fact that its originators were often minstrels.
Minstrels often created their own ballads but they were also famous for memorising long
poems based on myths and legends. Although they used the same themes as the community
bards had sung in their folk ballads, they were more conscious artists in the handling of these
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themes. Often they added a description of the country-side or an account of a character’s
thoughts and feelings. Minstrel ballads are often longer and less direct than the older folk
ballads and have a more literary flavour.
The coronach, or lament is the most personal type of ballad. To the narrative tradition of the
folk ballad and the descriptive touches of the minstrel ballad it adds a lyric tone – a personal
reaction to tragedy.
Style
All English ballads are divided into four- or six-line stanzas.
Stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in
popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a verse. A stanza consists of a grouping of two
or more lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set pattern of meter and rhyme. The stanza in poetry
is analogous with the paragraph that is seen in prose, related thoughts are grouped into units. In
traditional English-language poems, stanzas can be identified and grouped together because they share a rhyme
scheme or a fixed number of lines (as in couplet, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sestet).
Most ballads are written in in quatrains of alternating lines of iambic tetrametre and iambic
trimeter. The usual rhyme is abcb. When read, the meter of ballads often seems crude and
irregular. This is because ballads were meant to be sung, and the rhythms of song differ from
speech rhythms.
Defining poetic metre
Metre is the regular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Foot is the basic unit of metre which consists of one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed
syllables.
Iamb (adj.: iambic) – one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (da/DUM):
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
(from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare)
Trochee (adj.: trochaic) – one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable (DUM/da):
Should you ask me, whence these stories?
Whence these legends and traditions,
With the odours of the forest,
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With the dew and damp of meadows,…
(from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Longfellow)
Anapest (adj.: anapestic) – two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable (da/da/DUM):
Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.
(from A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Moore)
Dactyl (adj.: dactylic) – one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables(DUM/da/da):
Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
(from Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by The Beatles)
Amphibrach (adj.: amphibrachic) – one stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables (da/DUM/da):
How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood,
When fond recollection presents them to view!
The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wild-wood,
And every loved spot which my infancy knew!
(from The Old Oaken Bucket by Samuel Woodworth)
The number of feet in the line determines its metrical length:
monometre – one foot
dimetre – two feet
trimetre – three feet
tetrameter – four feet
pentameter – five feet
hexameter – six feet
heptameter – seven feet
octametre – eight feet
In the folk ballad the repetition of various types adds to the melody, provides emphasis, and
heightens the emotional effect. Incremental repetition, or the repetition of the lines containing
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some small addition or increment, is used to build a climax. The repetition of a complete line
within a poem may be used regularly at the end of each stanza as a refrain.
Incremental repetition is the repetition of a line in a changed context or with minor changes in the
repeated part.
Refrain is a phrase, verse, or group of verses repeated at intervals throughout a song or poem,
especially at the end of each stanza.
Text
Edward
Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid,
Edward, Edward,
Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid,
And why sae sad gang yee O?
O I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
Mither, mither,
O I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
And I had пае mair bot hee O.
Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
Edward, Edward,
Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
My deir son I tell theee O.
O I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
Mither, mither,
O I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
That erst was sae fair and frie O.
Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Edward, Edward.
Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Sum other dule ye drie O.
O I hae killed my fadir deir,
Mither, mither,
O I hae killed my fadir deir,
Alas, and wae is mee O!
And whatten penance wul ye drie, for that,
Edward, Edward?
And whatten penance will ye drie for that?
My deir son, now tell me O.
I’le set my feit in yonder boat,
Mither, mither,
I’le set my feit in yonder boat,
And He fare ovir the sea O.
And what wul ye doe wi your towirs and your ha,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye doe wi your towirs and your ha,
That were sae fair to see O?
I’le let thame stand tul they doun fa,
Mither, mither,
I’le let thame stand tul they doun fa,
For here nevir mair maun I bee O.
And what wul ye leive to your bairns and your wife,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to your bairns and your wife,
Whan ye gang ovir the sea O?
The warldis room, late them beg thrae life,
Mither, mither,
The warldis room, late them beg thrae life,
For thame nevir mair wul I see O.
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And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to your ain mither deir?
My deir son, now tell me O.
The curse of hell frae me sail ye beir,
Mither, mither,
The curse of hell frae me sail ye beir,
Sic counseils ye gave to me O.
Translate the ballad into Modern English or Russian.
What effect is produced by the last lines of the ballad?
The Dae mon Love r
"O WHERE have you been, my long, long love,
This long seven years and more?"
"O I'm come to seek my former vows
Ye granted me before."
"O hold your tongue of your former vows,
For they will breed sad strife;
O hold your tongue of your former vows,
For I am become a wife."
He turn'd him right and round about,
And the tear blinded his ee;
I wad never hae trodden on Irish ground,
If it had not been for thee.
"I might hae had a king's daughter,
Far, far beyond the sea;
I might have had a king's daughter,
Had it not been for love o' thee."
"If ye might have had a king's daughter,Yer sell ye had to blame;
Ye might have taken the king's daughter,
For ye kend that I was nane."
"faulse are the vows of womankind,
But fair is their faulse bodie;
I never wad hae trodden on Irish ground,
Had it not been for love o' thee."
Демон-любовник
перевод С. Я. Маршака
– О где ты был, мой старый друг,
Семь долгих, долгих лет?
– Я вновь с тобой, моя любовь,
И помню твой обет.
– Молчи о клятвах прежних лет,
Мой старый, старый друг.
Пускай о клятвах прежних лет
Не знает мой супруг.
Он поспешил смахнуть слезу
И скрыть свои черты.
– Я б не вернулся в край родной,
Когда бы не ты, не ты.
Богаче нашей стороны
Заморская земля.
Себе там в жены мог бы взять
Я дочку короля!
– Ты взял бы дочку короля!
Зачем спешил ко мне?
Ты взял бы дочку короля
В заморской стороне.
�"If I was to leave my husband dear,
And my two babes also,
O what have you to take me to,
If with you I should go? "
"I hae seven ships upon the sea,
The eighth brought me to land;
"With four-and-twenty bold mariners,
And music on every hand."
She has taken up her two little babes,
Kiss'd them baith cheek and chin;
"fair ye weel, my ain two babes,
For I'll never see you again."
She set her foot upon the ship,
No mariners could she behold;
But the sails were o' the taffetie,
And the masts o' the beaten gold.
She had not said a league, a league,
A league but barely three,
When dismal grew his countenance,
And drumlie grew his ee.
The masts that were like the beaten gold,
Bent not on the heaving seas;
But the sails, that were o' the taffetie,
Filed not in the east land breeze.
They had not sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three, so
Until she espied his cloven foot,
And she wept right bitterlie.
"O hold your tongue of your weeping," says he,
"Of your weeping now let me be;
I will show you how the lilies grow
On the banks of Italy."
"what hills are yon, yon pleasant hills.
That the sun shines sweetly on? "
" O yon are the hills of heaven," he said,
" Where you will never win." eo
"O whaten a mountain is yon,"she said,
"All so dreary wi' frost and snow? "
"O yon is the mountain of hell," he cried,
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– О, лживы клятвы нежных дев,
Хоть вид их сердцу мил.
Я не спешил бы в край родной,
Когда бы не любил.
– Но если бросить я должна
Детей и мирный кров, –
Как убежать нам, милый друг,
От наших берегов?
– Семь кораблей есть у меня,
Восьмой приплыл к земле,
Отборных тридцать моряков
Со мной на корабле.
Двух малых деток мать взяла
И стала целовать.
Прощайте, детки! Больше вам
Не видеть вашу мать.
Корабль их ждал у берегов,
Безмолвный и пустой.
Был поднят парус из тафты
На мачте золотой.
Но только выплыли они,
Качаясь, на простор,
Сверкнул зловещим огоньком
Его угрюмый взор.
Не гнулись мачты корабля,
Качаясь на волнах,
И вольный ветер не шумел
В раскрытых парусах.
– О, что за светлые холмы
В лазури голубой?
–- Холмы небес, – ответил он, –
Где нам не быть с тобой.
– Скажи: какие там встают
Угрюмые хребты?
– То горы ада! – крикнул он, -
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"Where you and I will go."
Где буду я – и ты!
And aye when she turn'd her round about, eо
Aye taller he seem'd for to be;
Until that the tops o' that gallant ship
Nae taller were than he.
Он стал расти, расти, расти
И мачты перерос
И руку, яростно грозя,
Над мачтами занес.
The clouds grew dark, and the wind grew loud.
And the levin fill'd her ee;
And waesome waiFd the snaw-white sprites
Upon the gurlie sea.
Сверкнула молния из туч,
Слепя тревожный взор,
И бледных духов скорбный рой
Покрыл морской простор.
He strack the tap-mast wi' his hand,
The fore-mast wi' his knee;
And he brake that gallant ship in twain,
And sank her in the sea.
Две мачты сбил он кулаком,
Ногой еще одну,
Он судно надвое разбил
И все пустил ко дну.
Link
The Demon Lover (1945) by Elisabeth Bowen is perhaps her most acclaimed and widely
anthologized short story. Set in London during World War II, it revolves around the haunting
of a married middle-aged woman by the ghost of a sweetheart from her youth, a man presumed
to have been killed in the First World War twenty-five years earlier. To Bowen's credit, she
controls the language, atmosphere, and events of the story so successfully as to create a
disturbing ambiguity, leaving the reader to wonder whether the haunting is truly an instance of
the supernatural or a nightmarish delusion suffered by the protagonist.
The essential plot elements of Bowen's story derive from medieval legends about a demon
lover. Such tales often tell of a young woman who, having pledged eternal love to a soldier
departing for war, marries another when her lover does not return. However, he eventually does
come back, as a ghost or a corpse, to avenge this infidelity, usually by abducting her.
In The Demon Lover the protagonist, Mrs. Drover, returns to her London home, which had
been vacated during the bombing of the city by Germany. There Mrs. Drover discovers a
letter, dated the present day, composed by a lover from the past who was presumed to have
been killed in the previous world war. As a young woman, she had sworn to love him
forever, but eventually married another man. The letter recalls a meeting that they had
arranged long ago for this very evening. Overcome with dread at the thought of confronting
her former lover (alive or otherwise), Mrs. Drover leaves the house to hail a taxi. As the cab
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pulls away with Mrs. Drover, the driver looks her in the eye, throwing Mrs. Drover into
hysteria. Bowen does not reveal exactly what Mrs. Drover saw, but many readers are inclined
to believe it was the visage of her dead lover.
The Demon Lover conveys a simple moralistic message: no bad deed goes unpunished.
Unfaithful to her lover, Mrs. Drover suffered the consequences of her action.
Text
Lord Randal
“O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son?
And where ha you been, my handsome young man?”
“I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie down.”
“An wha met ye there, Lord Randal, my son?
An wha met you there, my handsome young man?”
“O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi huntin, an fain wad lie down.”
“And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?
And what did she give you, my handsome young man?”
“Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied with huntin, and fain wad lie down.”
“And wha gat your leavins, Lord Randal, my son?
And what gat your leavins, my handsom young man?”
“My hawks and my hounds; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi huntin, and fain wad lie down.”
“And what becam of them, Lord Randall, my son?
And what became of them, my handsome young man?”
“They stretched their legs out an died; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m wearied wi huntin, and fain wad lie down.”
“O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son!
I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man!”
“O yes, I am poisoned; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ ye leave to your mother, Lord Randal, my son?
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What d’ye leave to your mother, my handsome young man?”
“Four and twenty milk kye; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ ye leave to your sister, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ ye leave to your sister, my handsome young man?”
“My gold and my silver; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, an I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ ye leave to your brother, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ ye leave to your brother, my handsome young man?”
“My house and my lands; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
“What d’ ye leave to your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?
What d’ ye leave to your true-love, my handsome young man?”
“I leave her hell and fire; mother, mak my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie down.”
Find the examples of different types of repetition in the texts of ballads.
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William Langland: Piers Plowman
Another poet contemporary with Chaucer was William Langland (1330?–1400?), a figure
almost as shadowy as the Pearl Poet. He took minor orders but never became a priest. His
masterpiece is The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman is an allegorical dream
poem in unrhymed alliterative verse, regarded as the greatest Middle English poem prior to
Chaucer. The author devoted the last 25 years of his life to the book’s composition and
revision.
The work is a vast allegory of the human condition, in which Piers Plowman sets out to
discover the value of life and Christian salvation. In the book Vice and Virtue are spoken of as
if they were human beings. Truth is a young maiden, Greed is an old witch. Piers Plowman is
both a social satire and a vision of the simple Christian life.
The content runs as follows. On a fine May day the poet William went to the Malvern Hills.
After a time he fell asleep in the open. Piers the Plowman is a peasant who appears in the
dream of the poet. Piers tells him of the hard life of the people. It is the peasants alone who
work and keep the monks and the lords in comfort, and the Church is corrupt all through.
Langland’s attacks on the evils of the church are the most outspoken of his time. Before the
peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the poem was used to formulate proclamations which easily spread
among people.
The poem consists of three dream visions:
1. The poet falls asleep in the Malvern Hills and dreams that in a wilderness he comes upon the
tower of Truth (God) set on a hill, with the dungeon of Wrong (the Devil) in the deep valley
below, and a "fair field full of folk" (the world of living men) between them. Holy Church
rebukes the dreamer for sleeping and explains the meaning of all he sees. Further characters
(Conscience, Liar, Reason and so on) enter the action; Conscience finally persuades many of
the people to turn away from the Seven Deadly Sins and go in search of St. Truth, but they
need a guide.
2. A simple Plowman appears and says that because of his common sense and clean
conscience he knows the way and will show them if they help him plow his half acre. Some of
the company help, but some evade the work; and Piers tries to get men to work and find the
path of salvation.
3. The dreamer goes on a long-winded but unsuccessful summer-long quest, aided by
Thought, Wit, and Study, in search of the men who are Do-Well (the practice of virtues), Do-
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Bet (Piers becomes the Good Samaritan)and Do-Best (Piers becomes identified with Christ).
Interpret the allegory of Do-Well, Do-Bet, Do-Best. Think of other images to
represent different stages on the path of Salvation.
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Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
In his own lifetime Chaucer was called the greatest English poet, and the centuries have not
deemed his reputation. His unfinished masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, ranks as one of the
world’s finest works of literature. It also provides the best contemporary picture we have of
14-th century England. At the time when the educated people read and spoke only NormanFrench, Chaucer wrote in English.
The Canterbury Tales is a narrative poem written in the form of a frame story, or a story that
includes, or frames, another story or stories. Chaucer borrowed this idea from Boccaccio’s
Decameron.
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) is an Italian novelist. Boccaccio shares with Petrarch the
honor of being the earliest humanist. In their time there were not a dozen men in Italy who could
read the works of the Greek authors in the original. The book with which Boccaccio's name is
inseparably linked is the Decameron. The Decameron opens with a masterly description of the
terrors of the Black Death, and we are then introduced to a gay company of seven ladies and
three young men who have come together at a villa outside Naples to while away the time and to escape the
epidemic. Each in turn presides for a day over the company and on each of the ten days each of the company tells a
story, so that at the end one hundred stories have been told. The great charm of the Decameron lies in the wonderful
richness and variety of the adventures which he relates, in the many types of character and the close analysis of all
shades of feeling and passion, from the basest to the noblest.
Black Death is the name used for the very serious infectious disease (called bubonic plague), which killed millions
of people in Europe and Asia in the 14th century.
Chaucer's frame is the pilgrimage, which he originally planned as a round trip but which remained incomplete at his death. People in medieval England sometimes made pilgrimages to
sacred shrines. One such shrine was the cathedral in Canterbury, a town near London, where
Archbishop Thomas Becket had been murdered in 1170.
Thomas Becket was a 12th century chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury whose murder
resulted in his canonisation. He was born in around 1120, the son of a prosperous London
merchant. He was well educated and quickly became an agent to Theobald, Archbishop of
Canterbury, who sent him on several missions to Rome. Becket's talents were noticed by Henry
II, who made him his chancellor and the two became close friends. When Theobald died in 1161, Henry made
Becket archbishop. Becket transformed himself from a pleasure-loving courtier into a serious, simply-dressed cleric.
The king and his archbishop's friendship was put under strain when it became clear that Becket would now stand up
for the church in its disagreements with the king. On the 29 December 1170, four knights, believing the king wanted
Becket out of the way, confronted and murdered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket was made a saint in 1173
and his shrine in Canterbury Cathedral became an important focus for pilgrimage.
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The pilgrims often travelled in groups for the sake of companionship and protection.
Chaucer’s pilgrims meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a suburb of London on the south
bank of the Thames River. The inn, which stood near the southern end of London Bridge, was
a customary point at which to rest and eat before setting out on a fifty-nine-mile journey to
Canterbury. Harry Bailey, host of the Tabard, is so take with the lively company that he offers
to join their pilgrimage and to act as a guide and master of ceremonies. For entertainment along
the way he suggests a program of storytelling, the prize for the best to be a dinner, at the
expense of the group, back at his inn. The original plan was for two tales on the way to
Canterbury and two on the way back by all thirty pilgrims (including the host), instead only
twenty-four were completed.
The Canterbury Tales shows Chaucer’s absolute mastery of the storyteller’s art. Perhaps even
more impressive than the stories are the storytellers. Chaucer’s pilgrims, all of whom are
introduced briefly in his Prologue, are memorable, vividly drawn individuals whose
personalities are unique, but whose character traits are universal. The Canterbury Tales
introduces a group of "nine and twenty” pilgrims, one of whom is Chaucer himself. The
Prologue presents them to us according to their rank and social position. The Knight, the topranking member of the party, goes first as all people of a fourteenth-century audience
expected.
The Knight is followed by his son the Squire, and by his attendant Yeoman.
The Knight is duly succeeded by representatives of the Church: the fastidious Prioress with an
accompanying Nun, personal chaplain, and three other priests; the Monk who holds the office
of outrider in his monastery (and who therefore appears to enjoy extra-mural luxuries more than
the disciplined life of his order); and the equally worldly and mercenary Friar.
The third group is presented by a greater variety of figures, rich, middling, and poor, beginning
with a somewhat shifty Merchant, a bookish Oxford Clerk, a Man of Law, and a Franklin.
Further we move downwards socially to the urban guildsmen (Haberdasher, Carpenter,
Weaver, Dyer), to the skilled tradesmen (Cook, Shipman, Doctor of Physic), and to a well-off
widow with a trade of her own (the Wife of Bath).
Chaucer places a Parson, a Ploughman, a Manciple and the reprobates (the Reeve, the
Miller, the Summoner, and the Pardoner) to the end of the line (though he also modestly
includes himself, a high ranking royal official, at the end of the list). It is with this last group
that he seems to want to surprise his readers by contrasting the paragons of virtue (Parson and
Ploughman) with those who periodically fall from grace (the Reeve strikes fear into his
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master’s tenants while feathering his own nest; the Miller steals corn and overcharges his
clients; the Summoner makes a parade of his limited learning; and the Pardoner trades
profitably in false relics and pardons).
In medieval times Pardoners were people who sold pardons or indulgences as a way for people to
lessen their time in purgatory for the sins they had committed. These pardons were certificates from
the Pope, and pardoners themselves were sanctioned to sell these items. Pardoners became
unpopular because many of them were seen as little more than frauds disguised as men of God.
Chaucer’s favorites are the Knight, the Parson and the Ploughman who fit for their social
roles. If the Knight at the top of the social scale seems ‘a worthy man’, loyal to his knightly
vows and embodying the spirit chivalry, so, in their respective callings, the Parson stands for
the true mission of the Church and the Ploughman is the picture of the blessedness of holy
poverty.
Chaucer arranges stories to fit into the whole work shaped by prologues, interjections, or
disputes between characters. They are loosely fitted to their tellers’ tastes and professions. The
stories range from the courtly (the Knight’s Tale) to the downright vulgar (the Miller’s Tale),
are particularly vigorous in their telling and offer an unprecedented variety of styles and
material.
The Knight tells a romance. The Nun’s Priest offers a lively story of a wily cock caught by a
fox, a story which he rounds off with the clerical insistence that listeners grasp ‘the moralite’.
The Pardoner too tells an exemplum.
Exemplum is a short tale used as an example to illustrate a moral point, usually in a sermon or other
didactic work. The form was cultivated in the late Middle Ages, for instance in Geoffrey Chaucer's
Pardoner's Tale and Nun's Priest's Tale.
The Prioress also tells a short, devotional tale of a pious Christian child whose throat is cut by
Jews but who miraculously manages to continue singing a Marian hymn after his death.
Elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales tellers seem to have far less inclination to be moralizing.
The Merchant prompted by the Clerk’s adaptation of Boccaccio's story of the trials of patient
Griselda, offers a mischievous tale of an old husband (January) and his young bride (May), an
impatiently frisky wife who, exploiting her husband’s sudden blindness, is seduced in a pear
tree by her lover.
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Griselda (Decameron) is the character of the 10-th story of the 10-th day. The story tells about
The Marquis of Saluzzo, who was persuaded by his vassals to take a wife. Being minded to
please himself in the choice of her, takes a peasant's daughter. He has two children by her, both of
whom he makes her believe that he has put to death. Afterward, feigning to be tired of her, and to
have taken another wife, he turns her out of doors in her shirt, and brings his daughter into the
house in guise of his bride; but, finding her patient under it all, he brings her home again, and shows her her children,
now grown up, and honours her, and causes her to be honoured, as Marchioness.
When the Host proposes that the Knight’s “noble story” should be succeeded by something
equally decorous from the Monk, the Miller drunkenly intrudes himself and tells a fabliaux
about a dull-witted carpenter, his unfaithful wife, and her two suitors.
The Miller’s Tale presents a diametrically opposed view of courtship to that offered by the
Knight. It also serves to provoke the Reeve (who is a carpenter by profession) into recounting
an anecdote about a cuckolded miller. In the same manner, the Friar tells a story about a
greedy summoner who is carried off to hell by the Devil, and the enraged Summoner responds
with the history of an ingenious friar obliged to share out the unexpected legacy amongst his
brethren.
Chaucer modestly placed himself last in the list of the pilgrims presenting himself in the role of
an incompetent story-teller. He tells the story so terribly dull, that the Host stops him in the
middle of it. By diminishing himself Chaucer makes other stories shine with wit and humour.
The importance of Geoffrey Chaucer’s contribution to the development of English literature is
unquestionable. The Canterbury Tales is an overview of human nature and the encyclopedia of
medieval literary styles.
Language and Style
Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the greatest English poets during the Middle Ages. He will
forever be known as the leading author in English writing before the time of William
Shakespeare. The Canterbury Tales is written in a period when all serious writing had to be
done in Latin or French. Chaucer wrote in the East Midland dialect of English that was spoken
in London. This dialect was limited in vocabulary, so Chaucer enriched it with French
borrowings. When great changes started to take place in English pronunciation, and the final e
was no longer sounded, Chaucer’s poems were regarded as crude and primitive. They were
rewritten and polished.
Chaucer experiments with rhyme and rhythm patterns greatly affected the literature that
followed. Chaucer’s introduction of the rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter revolutionized
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rhythm in English poetry. It later would be called the heroic or closed couplet.
Couplet is a verse form with lines rhyming in pairs (aa). Each pair is usually self-contained in
grammatical structure and meaning.
Tone is a literary technique that encompasses the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience
implied in a literary work. Tone may be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious,
ironic, condescending, or many other possible attitudes.
The Prologue is the demonstration of Chaucer’s power of characterization. The author’s tone
is largely ironic. His method is to use irony to let the characters condemn themselves through
their own words and behavior. He pretends to be a mere innocent observer, supplying details
about each pilgrim in haphazard manner, yet these seemingly random details have a telling
ironic force.
There was a brave knight who loved truth, honor and generosity. He had been in armed
expeditions in the Mediterranean, had traveled in the North and had even been to Russia. His
son was a young squire with curled hair. His clothes were “as gay as a meadow with white
and red flowers” and he had long white sleeves. He had been on cavalry raids to France and
had fought well “in hope to win his Lady’s grace”. Their servant was a yeoman dressed in the
clothes of a forester.
They were followed by two nuns and three priests. One of the nuns was a prioress, the head of
the nunnery. She had a long face and a small mouth and wept easily. She could sing all that
was sung in churches and spoke French as it was spoken in England (for the French of Paris
she did not know). She had very good manners at table. She never let a crumb fall from her
lips and never dipped her fingers deep in the sauce.
There was a fat monk who loved hunting and a good dinner better than prayers. His hood and
his sleeves were decorated with fine fur and his greyhounds and horse were of the best.
Another monk, though not so rich, also likes to have a good time: “He knew the taverns well
in every town and every innkeeper and barmaid too.”
A student of Oxford in a shabby cloak rode a lean horse. He was thin and pale. He spent all his
money on books and learning.
There was another woman in the company, the wife of a merchant. She was merry and strong,
though no longer young, and a little hard of hearing. She had red cheeks and red stockings on
her fat legs, and her hat was as broad as a shield. She came from the town of Bath and was
mounted on a good horse. She liked to talk of her youth and her five husbands.
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There we see other townsfolk: a merchant with a forked beard “always talking about his
profits but telling nobody of his debts”; a man of law “who was less busy than he seemed to
be”.
Then came a poor priest and his brother, a ploughman, riding a mare. The ploughman was a
hard worker with a true heart, and the priest was one of those who never talked much and who
did all he could to help the needy and the poor. He was “the doer of the Word before he
taught it”.
A very stout fellow with red hair and a broad red beard trotted beside them. “His mighty
mouth was like a furnace door”. This disagreeable man was a miller. His language was very
rude. Dishonest in his trade, “his was a master-hand at stealing grain”.
Not far behind them rode some other servants of the Church. One of them, the Padroner , had
greedy eyes and yellow hair “that thinly fell like rat tails one by one”. He sold relics:
pigbones in small glass cases, which he said were the bones of saints. He also sold pardons,
“hot from the court of Rome”.
Text
The Monk
modern English Translation of the Prologue
перевод И. Кашкина и О. Румера
There was a Monk. Here was a rising man;
All the estates of his abbey he ran,
He loved to hunt, was forceful and well able
to be an abbot. There were in his stable
Fine horses. When he rode out you could hear
Their bridles jingling on the wind as clear
And quite as loudly as did the chapel bell
At that priory where he had charge as well.
The rules of Saints Maurus and Benedict,
Because they were quite old and somewhat strict
This modern monk he let these old things pass,
The new world held the key to true success.
He didn't give a jot for that old saw
Which said that hunting broke the holy law.
Or that a monk who ignored his first duty,
Like a fish out of water, was no beauty.
Монах был монастырский ревизор.
Наездник страстный, он любил охоту
И богомолье – только не работу.
И хоть таких монахов и корят,
Но превосходный был бы он аббат:
Его конюшню вся округа знала,
Его уздечка пряжками бренчала,
Как колокольчики часовни той,
Доход с которой тратил он, как свой.
Он не дал бы и ломаной полушки
За жизнь без дам, без псарни, без пирушки.
Веселый нравом, он терпеть не мог
Монашеский томительный острог,
Устав Маврикия и Бенедикта
И всякие прескрипты и эдикты.
А в самом деле, ведь монах-то прав,
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In other words, a monk out of his cloister.
But this saying too was not worth an oyster.
As I have shown his views were not muddy.
Why should he drive himself mad with study
Pouring over a dull book in his cell?
And as for working with his hands as well –
– Augustine's way - how would that serve the world's good?
Let Augustine do his labour if he would.
To spur his horse, to hunt, was his delight.
He had greyhounds as swift as birds in flight.
To follow a trail and hunt for the hair
Was his great love – and no cost would he spare.
I saw that his sleeves were trimmed at the hand
With soft grey fur, the finest in the land;
And to fasten his hood under his chin,
Of clever design, he had a gold pin,
With its head shaped into a lovers knot.
His bald head shone like a mirror on top.
His face did too, as though all smeared with cream.
This was a weighty man, broad in the beam.
His bulging eyes which rolled around his head,
Shone like a glowing furnace smelting lead.
His boots were supple, his horse in fine fettle
He was truly a prelate of great mettle:
Nor was he pale like a suffering ghost,
A fat swan he loved best of any roast!
His palfrey was as brown as a berry.
И устарел суровый сей устав:
Охоту запрещает он к чему-то
И поучает нас не в меру круто:
Монах без кельи – рыба без воды.
А я большой не вижу в том беды.
В конце концов монах – не рак-отшельник,
Что на спине несет свою молельню.
Он устрицы не даст за весь тот вздор,
Который проповедует приор.
Зачем корпеть средь книг иль в огороде,
Зачем тощать наперекор природе?
Труды, посты, лишения, молитвы На что они, коль есть любовь и битвы?
Пусть Августин печется о спасенье,
А братии оставит прегрешенья.
Был наш монах лихой боец, охотник.
Держал борзых на псарне он две сотни:
Без травли псовой нету в жизни смысла.
Он лебедя любил с подливкой кислой.
Был лучшей белкой плащ его подбит,
Богато вышит и отлично сшит.
Застежку он, как подобает франтам,
Украсил золотым "любовным бантом".
Зеркальным шаром лоснилась тонзура,
Свисали щеки, и его фигура
Вся оплыла; проворные глаза
Запухли, и текла из них слеза.
Вокруг его раскормленного тела
Испарина, что облако, висела.
Ему завидовал и сам аббат –
Так представителен был наш прелат.
И сам лицом упитанный, румяный,
И сапожки из лучшего сафьяна,
И конь гнедой, артачливый на вид.
What is the author’s attitude to Church people as revealed in the description of
the Monk?
The Oxford Clerk
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A Fellow of Oxford, was there also,
Who had started his studies long ago.
His horse was as thin as a rake I swear
And as for him there was little fat there.
He had a hollow, grave look about him.
His over-cloak was all threadbare and thin
Since he hadn't yet found a curacy,
And in worldly affairs was all at sea.
For he would much rather have by his bed,
Twenty good books, all bound in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy,
Than rich robes, or fiddle, or gay psaltery.
A metaphysician not alchemist,
With not much gold to be seen in his chest,
Since all that he was given by his friends
He spent on books, on paper and on pens
And then would earnestly begin to pray
For those who helped him on his learned way.
Nothing was more important than learning.
His speech was a short and elegant thing,
For he used as few words as would suffice
Being brief and pithy and always wise.
His discourse was filled with moral virtue,
He loved to study, and loved teaching too.
Прервав над логикой усердный труд,
Студент Оксфордский с нами рядом плелся.
Едва ль беднее нищий бы нашелся:
Не конь под ним, а щипаная галка,
И самого студента было жалко Такой он был обтрепанный, убогий,
Худой, измученный плохой дорогой.
Он ни прихода не сумел добыть,
Ни службы канцелярской. Выносить
Нужду и голод приучился стойко.
Полено клал он в изголовье койки.
Ему милее двадцать книг иметь,
Чем платье дорогое, лютню, снедь.
Он негу презирал сокровищ тленных,
Но Аристотель – кладезь мыслей ценных
Не мог прибавить денег ни гроша,
И клерк их клянчил, грешная душа,
У всех друзей и тратил на ученье
И ревностно молился о спасенье
Тех, щедрости которых был обязан.
К науке был он горячо привязан.
Но философия не помогала
И золота ни унца не давала.
Он слова лишнего не говорил
И слог высокий мудрости любил Короткий, быстрый, искренний, правдивый;
Он сыт был жатвой с этой тучной нивы.
И, бедняком предпочитая жить,
Хотел учиться и других учить.
Compare the given portrait with the modern stereotype of a student.
The Wife of Bath
A housewife came from Bath, from near that city,
And she was somewhat deaf, which was a pity.
But for cloth making she had such a bent,
Her skills exceeded those of Ypres and Ghent.
А с ним болтала Батская Ткачиха,
На иноходце восседая лихо;
Но и развязностью не скрыть греха Она была порядочно глуха.
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The good wives in church must always forebear
To make offerings before hers was there,
For if they did, she then became so cross
That sad to say all charity was lost.
And kerchiefs, of the finest texture found,
(Set on their frames they must have weighed ten pound)
She proudly wore each Sunday, on her head.
Her stockings were coloured bright scarlet red
Tightly bound; her shoes were supple and new.
Her face was bold and fair and red of hue.
She had always been most respectable;
In turn had married five husbands in all,
With further company in youth I fear,
Which there's no need for me to speak of here.
She had been to Jerusalem three times,
Had crossed many a stream by foreign shrines.
She had been to Boulogne and also Rome,
St. James' at Galicia and Cologne.
She knew well how to wander by the way,
And was gap-toothed, all open you might say.
She rode easily on a saddle horse
Wearing a wimple and a hat of course
As broad as a shield is from tip to tip.
A long skirt hung down from her ample hip
The spurs at her feet were sharp as a nail,
In company she loved to laugh and rail.
В тканье была большая мастерица Ткачихам гентским впору подивиться.
Благотворить ей нравилось, но в храм
Пред ней протиснись кто-нибудь из дам,
Вмиг забывала, в яростной гордыне,
О благодушии и благостыне.
Платков на голову могла навесить,
К обедне снаряжаясь, сразу десять,
И все из шелка иль из полотна;
Чулки носила красные она
И башмачки из мягкого сафьяна.
Лицом бойка, пригожа и румяна,
Жена завидная она была
И пятерых мужей пережила,
Гурьбы дружков девичьих не считая
(Вокруг нее их увивалась стая).
Булонь и в Бари, в Кельн, в Сантьяго, в Рим
И трижды в град святой - Иерусалим Ходила на поклон святым мощам,
Чтобы утешиться от горя там.
Она носила чистую косынку;
Большая шляпа, формой что корзинка,
Была парадна, как и весь наряд.
Дорожный плащ обтягивал ей зад.
На башмачках она носила шпоры,
Любила шутки, смех и разговоры
И знала все приманки и коварства
И от любви надежные лекарства.
She knew most cures for love by fortunes chance
For she was well versed, in that ancient dance.
The Miller
The Miller seemed a tough sort for our journey,
He was heavy built, strong sinewed and brawny,
As was well proved by his always throwing down
All rivals at wrestling, to bear off the crown.
He was hunch-shouldered, broad, solid all round;
He could heave any door onto the ground
Or smash clean through by ramming with his head.
И Мельник ехал с ними – ражий малый,
Костистый, узловатый и бывалый.
В кулачных схватках всех он побеждал
И приз всегда – барана – получал.
Был крепок он и коренаст, плечом
Мог ставню высадить, вломиться в дом.
Лишь подзадорь – и, разъярясь, как зверь,
Сшибить он с петель мог любую дверь.
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His beard like any sow or fox was red
And was so broad that it looked like a spade.
At the top of his nose there stood displayed
A wart, on which there grew a tuft of hairs,
As red as those bristles a sow's ear bears.
His nostrils were enormous, black and wide.
He wore a sword and shield by his side.
His mouth was huge, just like a great boiler.
Лопатой борода его росла
И рыжая, что лисий мех, была.
А на носу, из самой середины,
На бородавке вырос пук щетины
Такого цвета, как в ушах свиньи;
Чернели ноздри, будто полыньи;
Дыханьем грудь натужно раздувалась,
И пасть, как устье печки, разевалась.
Он бабник, балагур был и вояка,
Кощун, охальник, яростный гуляка.
Он слыл отчаянным лгуном и вором:
В мещок муки умел подсыпать сора
И за помол тройную плату взять.
Но мельник честный – где его сыскать?
Взял в путь он меч и щит для обороны;
В плаще был белом с синим капюшоном.
Он на волынке громко заиграл,
Когда поутру город покидал.
He was noisy and full of coarse humour,
And tales filled with lasciviousness and crimes.
He stole enough to grind the corn three times,
Yet had a gold thumb, as a good miller should.
He was dressed in a white coat and blue hood.
He blew and played the bagpipes well I'd say,
And with his piping got us underway.
Find the passages that reveal Chaucer’s irony?
Is it expressed directly or indirectly?
Content
The Miller’s Tale
An impoverished student named Nicholas, who persuades his landlord’s young wife,
Alisoun, to spend the night with him. He convinces his landlord, a carpenter named John,
that the second flood is coming, and tricks him into spending the night in a tub hanging
from the ceiling of his barn. Absolon, a young parish clerk who is also in love with Alisoun,
appears outside the window of the room where Nicholas and Alisoun lie together. When
Absolon begs Alisoun for a kiss, she sticks her rear end out the window in the dark and lets
him kiss it. Absolon runs and gets a red-hot poker, returns to the window, and asks for
another kiss; when Nicholas sticks his bottom out the window and farts, Absolon brands him
on the buttocks. Nicholas’s cries for water make the carpenter think that the flood has come,
so the carpenter cuts the rope connecting his tub to the ceiling, falls down, and breaks his
arm.
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The Man of Law’s Tale
In the tale, the Muslim sultan of Syria converts his entire sultanate (including himself) to
Christianity in order to persuade the emperor of Rome to give him his daughter, Custance,
in marriage. The sultan’s mother and her attendants remain secretly faithful to Islam. The
mother tells her son she wishes to hold a banquet for him and all the Christians. At the
banquet, she massacres her son and all the Christians except for Custance, whom she sets
adrift in a rudderless ship. After years of floating, Custance runs ashore in Northumberland,
where a constable and his wife, Hermengyld, offer her shelter. She converts them to
Christianity.
One night, Satan makes a young knight sneak into Hermengyld’s chamber and murder
Hermengyld. He places the bloody knife next to Custance, who sleeps in the same chamber.
When the constable returns home, accompanied by Alla, the king of Northumberland, he
finds his slain wife. He tells Alla the story of how Custance was found, and Alla begins to
pity the girl. He decides to look more deeply into the murder. Just as the knight who
murdered Hermengyld is swearing that Custance is the true murderer, he is struck down and
his eyes burst out of his face, proving his guilt to Alla and the crowd. The knight is executed,
Alla and many others convert to Christianity, and Custance and Alla marry.
While Alla is away in Scotland, Custance gives birth to a boy named Mauricius. Alla’s
mother, Donegild, intercepts a letter from Custance to Alla and substitutes a counterfeit one
that claims that the child is disfigured and bewitched. She then intercepts Alla’s reply, which
claims that the child should be kept and loved no matter how malformed. Donegild
substitutes a letter saying that Custance and her son are banished and should be sent away
on the same ship on which Custance arrived. Alla returns home, finds out what has
happened, and kills Donegild.
After many adventures at sea, including an attempted rape, Custance ends up back in
Rome, where she reunites with Alla, who has made a pilgrimage there to atone for killing his
mother. She also reunites with her father, the emperor. Alla and Custance return to
England, but Alla dies after a year, so Custance returns, once more, to Rome. Mauricius
becomes the next Roman emperor.
Do you recognize the plot of the Man of Law’s story?
Does any episode seem to be familiar to you?
If so, what other story contains the similar characters and setting?
Wife of Bath’s Tale
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A young knight of King Arthur’s court rapes a maiden; to atone for his crime, Arthur’s
queen sends him on a quest to discover what women want most. An ugly old woman
promises the knight that she will tell him the secret if he promises to do whatever she wants
for saving his life. He agrees, and she tells him women want control of their husbands and
their own lives. They go together to Arthur’s queen, and the old woman’s answer turns out to
be correct. The old woman then tells the knight that he must marry her. When the knight
confesses later that he is repulsed by her appearance, she gives him a choice: she can either
be ugly and faithful, or beautiful and unfaithful. The knight tells her to make the choice
herself, and she rewards him for giving her control of the marriage by rendering herself both
beautiful and faithful.
The Pardoner’s Tale
Three riotous youths go looking for Death, thinking that they can kill him. An old man tells
them that they will find Death under a tree. Instead, they find eight bushels of gold, which
they plot to sneak into town under cover of darkness. The youngest goes into town to fetch
food and drink, but brings back poison, hoping to have the gold all to himself. His
companions kill him to enrich their own shares, then drink the poison and die under the tree.
Chaucer’s characters present all the classes of English people and present a
broad panorama of the views and values of Middle Ages English society.
Imagine a similar book that could provide an illustration of our times.
Think of the representatives of modern society that could be the characters of
such a book.
Create a frame that could justify the variety of characters and serve a unifying
context for all their stories.
Chose some character and make up a story he(or she) would tell.
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The Development of English Drama
English drama has its origins in the fusion of two theatrical traditions which were popular in the
Middle Ages: street performances and religious dramatisations.
From the time of the Anglo-Saxon scop street performers had travelled around Britain
entertaining people. They included singers, dancers, mime artists, storytellers, acrobats and
clowns. They performed in market squares for the common people or in stately halls for the
nobles. Throughout the medieval period this tradition of popular drama flourished in Britain.
Meanwhile, in the church, a more formal type of theatre began to appear. The congregation of
the church in the Middle Ages was largely illiterate and had little religious education. In an
attempt to attract its followers the church added elements of drama to religious services.
Two types of religious plays developed out of these traditions: Mystery plays and Miracle
plays.
The Mystery plays were based on stories from the Bible. Each Mystery play was a single
episode such as the Fall of Lucifer, Noah's Flood or the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Together they formed The Mystery Cycle, which told the story of Christianity from Creation to
the Last Judgement.
Miracle plays were dramatisations of the lives of the saints, and were performed to celebrate
the great Christian events of the Nativity and the Resurrection during the festivals of Christmas
and Easter.
As liturgical drama became more popular, the churches grew more crowded, and eventually
religious performances had to move outside. Latin was replaced by English and ordinary
people performed instead of priests.
With time the Miracle and Mystery plays became more elaborate and incorporated elements of
street theatre such as humour and parody. The characters and settings were typically English.
Initially the performances were supervised by the clergy but later responsibility for their
production was entrusted to guilds of Tradesmen.
It would seem that the greatest stimulus to non-liturgical religious drama was provided by the
institution of the feast of Corpus Christi in the Western Church in 1264. The new feast,
generally observed in England from 1318, required that the Blessed Sacrament be
ceremoniously carried round the streets of the parish. In greater towns the procession would
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have been accompanied by guildsmen, representative of various established trades, dressed in
livery and bearing the banners of their craft.
The Feast of Corpus Christi (Latin for Body of Christ), also known as Corpus Domini, is a
Latin Rite celebrating the tradition and belief in the body and blood of Jesus Christ and his Real
Presence in the Eucharist. It emphasizes the joy of the institution of the Eucharist, which was
observed on Holy Thursday (Thursday before Easter) in the somber atmosphere of the nearness of
Good Friday.
The Blessed Sacrament, or the Body and Blood of Christ, is a devotional name used to refer to the Host or
prosphora and Eucharistic wine after it has been consecrated in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
In England, as in other European countries, this summer feast-day also became the focus of
urban street theatre organized under the auspices of the tradeguilds. Each play was repeated
several times in different locations around town, then the company would move on to another
town.
Records survive of the annual productions of the cycles in many British cities, from Aberdeen
to Canterbury, but the complete texts of the plays exist only for York (consisting of 48 plays),
Chester (24 plays), Wakefield (42 plays), and for an unknown Midlands town (42 plays).
In some instances particular guilds would perform a play appropriate to their trade. At Chester,
for example, the scene of Noah’s Flood was presented by the Water-leaders and Drawers in
Dee (that is, those who supplied the city with water drawn from the river Dee); the Crucifixion
was re-enacted by the Ironmongers (men who sold nails) and, somewhat less appropriately,
the Harrowing of Hell was performed through the good offices of the Cooks and Innkeepers.
At York the Fishers and Mariners presented the story of Noah, the Pinners and Painters the
Crucifixion, and the Bakers the Last Supper.
The guilds added to their prestige not only by commissioning and maintaining the texts of the
plays that they engaged to perform, but also by making and storing the costumes, the stage
properties and, above all, the movable platforms which the performances required. The shows
were performed on movable 'stage carriages' called pageants which were drawn by horses.
The pageant had two rooms: a lower room where the actors got ready and an upper room,
which had no walls, where the performance took place.
The actors did not always remain on the stage. Herod could ride on horseback among the
people, boasting of his riches. The Devil could jump from the stage into the audience. The
tricks of this kind added to the excitement and the success of the performance. With the time
the plays were getting more and more artistic. The biblical episodes were made into rhymed
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dialogues with comic elements that made the audience laugh. The biblical figures were given
names and individual characters.
For example, in the story about Noah’s Ark Noah’s wife is shown as an obstinate quarrelsome
woman, who refuses to board the Ark, despite Noah’s warning that the flood is about to begin.
She wants to bring her women friends on board, too, and if Noah does not let her, she
promises, flood or no flood, she will stay with them. Noah and his sons get her on board.
Noah sarcastically says, “Welcome, wife, into the boat,” to which his wife replies, “And have
then that for thy note,” accompanying the words with a slap on his face. Then she attacks him
with blows until he calls her to stop since his back is nearly broken.
In the Bible there is an episode in which shepherds were told by the Angel to go and worship
baby Christ. This is how this story was made into a play which is known as The Second
Shepherds’ Play of the Wakefield cycle.
Content
Among the shepherds there is one, Mak by name, whose reputation for honesty isn’t very
good. When the shepherds go to sleep they make Mak lie within their circle, for fear that he
steels a sheep. But when he hears the snores Mak rises, takes a sheep and hurries home. His
wife is alarmed, because at that time the theft of a sheep was punished by death. She wraps
the animal into the blanket and puts it into a cradle. If the shepherds come to search the
house, she will pretend having a child, but she won’t let them come up to the cradle. When
the shepherds wake, they miss the sheep, suspect Mak, and hurry to his home to look for the
sheep. His wife allows them to look around, but keeps them away from the cradle. The
shepherds leave ashamed of their suspicion. In the doorway they stop and decide to give the
baby a sixpence. So they get back to the cradle, lift up the covering and discover the sheep.
Mak and his wife declare that an elf has changed their baby into a sheep, but the angry
shepherds threaten them with death sentence. They seize Mak, throw him on the canvas, and
toss him into the air until they are exhausted. When they lie down to rest, the Angel comes
and tells them to go and worship the new God.
While there are no character studies, no suspense and no great poetry in miracle plays, there is
energy, simplicity and a powerful emotional impact.
During the fourteenth century another type of play, the Morality play, became extremely
popular. Morality plays were not religious: their main purpose was to teach a moral lesson, to
instruct the people what is good and what is bad. They were allegorical tales in which the
characters were personifications of abstract concepts. Instead of characters of saints appeared
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allegorical personifications of virtues and vices: Charity, Truth, Wisdom, Flesh, Greed,
Mischief, Pleasure, Folly, Indignation, Revenge. They acted like real people in everyday life.
The most famous Morality play was written around 1500 and is called Everyman.
Content
The character Everyman, who represents mankind, angers God because he is obsessed with
material goods. God orders Death to take him. Everyman wishes to have company on his
last journey so he asks Fellowship (friendship), Kindred and Cousin (family) and Goods
(wealth) if they will go with him, but they all refuse. The only characters who help Everyman
in his hour of need are Knowledge and Good Deeds: only spiritual strength can help him in
his last hour.
Text
Fe llowship.
Whether ye have loved me or no,
By Saint John, I will not with thee go!
Kindre d.
Ah, sir, come! Ye be a merry man!
Pluck up heart and make no moan.
But one thing I warn you, by Saint Anne,
As for me, ye shall go alone!
Cousin.
No, by our Lady! I have the cramp in my toe.
Trust not to me, for, so God me speed,
I will deceive you in your utmost need.
Goods.
Nay, Everyman, I say no.
Just for a while I was lent to thee,
A season thou hast had me in prosperity.
My nature it is man’s soul to kill,
If I save one, a thousand I do spill.
Thinkest thou that I will follow thee?
Nay, from this world not, verily!
Good De e ds.
Everyman, I have understanding
That ye be summoned your account to make
Before Messias, of Jerusalem King.
If you do my counsel, that journey with you will I take.
Knowle dge .
Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide,
In thy utmost need to go by thy side.
Confe ssion.
I know your sorrow well, Everyman,
Because with Knowledge ye come to me.
I will you comfort as well as I can,
And a precious stone will I give thee,
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Called penance, voice-voider of adversity.
Therewith shall your body chastened be
Through abstinence and perseverance in God’s service.
Here shall you receive that scourge of me
That is penance stronge, that ye must endure,
To remember thy Saviour was scourged for thee
With sharp scourges, and suffered it patiently–
So must thou ere thou escape from that painful pilgrimage.
Knowledge, do thou sustain him on this voyage,
And by that time Good Deeds will be with thee.
But in any case be sure of mercy,
For your time draweth on fast, if ye will saved be.
Ask God mercy, and he will grant it truly.
When with the scourge of penance man doth him bind,
The oil of forgiveness then shall he find.
The final passage from the play:
Stre ngth.
Everyman, we will not from you go,
Till ye have gone this voyage long.
Discre tion.
I, Discretion, will abide by you also.
Knowle dge .
And though of this pilgrimage the hardships be never so strong,
No turning backward in me shall you know.
Everyman, I will be as sure by thee,
As ever I was by Judas Maccabee.
Eve ryman.
Alas! I am so faint I may not stand,
My limbs under me do fold.
Friends, let us not turn again to this land,
Not for all the world’s gold,
For into this cave must I creep,
And turn to the earth, and there sleep.
Be auty.
What – into this grave! Alas! Woe is me!
Eve ryman.
Yea, there shall ye consume utterly.
Be auty.
And what, – must I smother here?
Eve ryman.
Yea, by my faith, and never more appear!
In this world we shall live no more at all,
But in heaven before the highest lord of all.
Be auty.
I cross out all this! Adieu, by Saint John!
I take “my tap in my lap” and am gone.
Eve ryman.
What, Beauty! – whither go ye ?
Be auty.
Peace! I am deaf, I look not behind me,
Not if thou wouldest give me all the gold in thy chest.
[Beauty goes, followed by the others, as they speak in turn.
Eve ryman.
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Alas! in whom may I trust!
Beauty fast away from me doth hie.
She promised with me to live and die.
Stre ngth.
Everyman, I will thee also forsake and deny,
Thy game liketh me not at all!
Eve ryman.
Why, then ye will forsake me all!
Sweet Strength, tarry a little space.
Stre ngth.
Nay, Sir, by the rood of grace,
I haste me fast my way from thee to take,
Though thou weep till thy heart do break.
Eve ryman.
Ye would ever abide by me, ye said.
Stre ngth.
Yea, I have you far enough conveyed.
Ye be old enough, I understand,
Your pilgrimage to take in hand.
I repent me that I thither came.
Eve ryman.
Strength, for displeasing you I am to blame.
Will ye break “promise that is debt"?
Stre ngth.
In faith, I care not!
Thou art but a fool to complain,
You spend your speech and waste your brain.
Go, thrust thyself into the ground!
Eve ryman.
I had thought more sure I should you have found,
But I see well, who trusteth in his Strength,
She him deceiveth at length.
Both Strength and Beauty have forsaken me,
Yet they promised me fair and lovingly.
Discre tion.
Everyman, I will after Strength be gone –
As for me, I will leave you alone.
Eve ryman.
Why, Discretion, will ye forsake me!
Discre tion.
Yea, in faith, I will go from thee,
For when Strength goeth before
I follow after, evermore.
Eve ryman.
Yet, I pray thee, for love of the Trinity
Look in my grave once in pity of me.
Discre tion.
Nay, so nigh will I not come, trust me well!
Now I bid you each farewell.
Eve ryman.
Oh, all things fail save God alone –
Beauty, Strength, and Discretion!
For when Death bloweth his blast,
They all run from me full fast.
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Five Wits.
Everyman, my leave now of thee I take.
I will follow the others, for here I thee forsake.
Eve ryman.
Alas! then may I wail and weep,
For I took you for my best friend.
Five Wits.
I will thee no longer keep.
Now farewell, and here’s an end!
Eve ryman.
O Jesu, help! All have forsaken me.
Good De e ds.
Nay, Everyman, I will abide by thee,
I will not forsake thee indeed!
Thou wilt find me a good friend at need.
Eve ryman.
Gramercy, Good Deeds, now may I true friends see.
They have forsaken me everyone,
I loved them better than my Good Deeds alone.
Knowledge, will ye forsake me also?
Knowle dge .
Yea, Everyman, when ye to death shall go,
But not yet, for no manner of danger.
Eve ryman.
Gramercy, Knowledge, with all my heart!
Knowle dge .
Nay, yet will I not from hence depart,
Till whereunto ye shall come, I shall see and know.
Eve ryman.
Methinketh, alas! that I must now go
To make my reckoning, and my debts pay,
For I see my time is nigh spent away.
Take example, all ye that this do hear or see,
How they that I love best do forsake me,
Except my Good Deeds that abideth faithfully.
Good De e ds.
All earthly things are but vanity.
Beauty, Strength and Discretion do man forsake,
Foolish friends and kinsmen that fair spake,
All flee away save Good Deeds, and that am I!
Eve ryman.
Have mercy on me, God most mighty,
And stand by me, thou Mother and Maid, holy Mary!
Good De e ds.
Fear not, I will speak for thee.
Eve ryman.
Here I cry God mercy!
Good De e ds.
Shorten our end and minish our pain,
Let us go and never come again.
Eve ryman.
Into thy hands, Lord, my soul I commend –
Receive it, Lord, that it be not lost!
As thou didst me buy, so do thou me defend,
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And save me from the fiend’s boast
That I may appear with that blessed host
That shall be saved at the day of doom.
In manus tuas, of mights the most,
Forever commendo spiritum meum.
[Everyman goes into the grave.
Knowle dge .
Now that he hath suffered that we all shall endure,
The Good Deeds shall make all sure;
Now that he hath made ending,
Methinketh that I hear angels sing,
And make great joy and melody,
Where Everyman’s soul shall received be!
The Ange l.
Come, excellent elect spouse to Jesus!
Here above shalt thou go,
Because of thy singular virtue.
Now thy soul from thy body is taken, lo!
Thy reckoning is crystal clear.
Now shalt thou into the heavenly sphere,
Unto which ye all shall come
That live well before the day of doom.
[The Angel goes and the Doctor enters.
Doctor.
This moral men may have in mind, –
Ye hearers, take it as of worth, both young and old,
And forsake Pride, for he deceiveth you in the end, as ye will find,
And remember Beauty, Five Wits, Strength, and Discretion, all told,
They all at the last do Everyman forsake
Save that his Good Deeds there doth he take.
But beware, if they be small,
Before God he hath no help at all,
None excuse for Everyman may there then be there.
Alas, how shall he then do and fare!
For after death amends may no man make,
For then Mercy and Pity do him forsake.
If his reckoning be not clear when he doth come,
God will say, Ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum.
And he that hath his account whole and sound,
High in heaven he shall be crowned,
Unto which place God bring us all thither
That we may live, body and soul, together!
Thereto their aid vouchsafe the Trinity –
Amen, say ye, for holy Charity!
Finis.
What is the main message of the play?
What effect do you think it could have produced upon the 15th century audience?
Is it the same as the effect produced upon the 21st century mind?
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English Literature in the Time of Renaissance
Cultural Context
Historical Context
Renaissance Poetry
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547)
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
Shakespeare's Sonnets
John Donne (1572–1631) – the Father of Metaphysical poetry
Renaissance Prose
Thomas More: Utopia
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Renaissance Drama
The University Wits
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
Late Elizabethan Drama
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Cultural Context
In the Middle Ages, people forgot the Greek language and debased the Latin; in the time of
Renaissance people learned to read Greek once more and reformed the Latin that they read,
wrote, and spoke. The term renaissance itself is a French word meaning “rebirth,” and it refers
to renewed interest in classical learning, the writings of ancient Greece and Rome.
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks. The Greek refugees who fled to Italy brought with
them masterpieces of Greek literature, science, physics, mathematics, astronomy and medicine.
From Italy, classical knowledge spread to other countries where it was embraced by great men
of learning.
The dissemination of classical knowledge was enhanced by printing which rapidly replaced the
laborious reproduction of books by hand.
The inventor of printing is a German named Johann Gutenberg (1400–1468), who was
responsible for the first printed book, an immense Latin Bible produced at Mainz in Germany.
The re-awakening of interest in classical knowledge affected all aspects of
culture. People became more curious about themselves and their world than
people in general had been in the Middle Ages. Gradually there took place a rebirth of the
human spirit. New energy seemed to be available for creating beautiful things and thinking new
thoughts.
The optimistic view of human nature was expressed by the philosopher Pico della
Mirandola, who said the following in his speech entitled On the Dignity of Humanity:
God made man and woman at the close of the creation, to know the laws of the universe, to love its beauty,
and to admire its greatness. He bound his human creatures to no fixed place, to no prescribed form of work,
and by no iron necessity, but gave them freedom to will and to love. "I have set thee,” says the Creator, "in the
midst of the world, that thou mayst the more easily behold and see all that is therein. I created thee a being
neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal only, that thou mightest be free to shape and to
overcome thyself. Thou mayest sink into a beast or be born anew to the divine likeness. To thee alone is given
a growth and a development depending on thine own free will.”
Authors like Pico Della Mirandola, Petrarch, Dante are representative of an intellectual
movement known as humanism, a movement that attempted to derive from the Latin and
Greek classics answers to such questions as, “What is a human being?”, “What is a good
life?” and “How does one lead a good life?”
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The main subject of Humanism was human nature in all its manifestations and achievements.
Humanism looked forward to a rebirth of a lost human spirit and wisdom. The effect of
Humanism was to help man break free from the mental structures imposed by medieval
religious orthodoxy, according to which the earthly life was given to man as penance and
preparation for the afterlife.
Humanism was a radical departure from the principles that governed medieval art and literature.
The focus of attention was no longer God but Man. Love of this world was underlined rather
than preparation for the next. For the first time man was explored as an individual, and the idea
that a man could shape his own destiny was widely accepted.
Humanism inspired a new confidence in the possibilities of human thought and activity.
According to the new outlook man was created ideal physically and mentally. The classic
Greek statement of “A sound mind in a sound body” became popular.
The humanist outlook shaped the thinking of all great artists, writers, and scientists of the
Renaissance. Just mentioning a few of the geniuses who flourished in this period – Raphael, da
Vinci, Galileo, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Columbus—reminds us how remarkably rich this
civilization was, and how much we owe to it.
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Historical Context
The establishment of the English Church
While the Renaissance was going on in Europe, there occurred in some countries another
important series of events known as the Reformation. In England these two vast movements
were closely related. Although the exact nature of the reformation varied from country to
country, there was one feature common to all Reformers: they denied the authority of the Pope
and the Roman Catholic Church.
New religious ideas were coming into England from the Continent, especially from Germany,
where Martin Luther had founded a new kind of Christianity based on his understanding of
the Bible rather than on the authoritative teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Strong
feelings of patriotism and national identity made the English people resent the financial burdens
imposed on them by the Vatican.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German friar, priest and professor of theology who was a key
figure in the Protestant Reformation. He rejected several teachings and practices of the Roman
Catholic Church and strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could
be purchased with money. His theology challenged the authority and office of the Pope by teaching
that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge from God. His translation of the Bible into the
vernacular (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, which had a tremendous impact on the church and on German
culture.
Those who support Luther’s views are called Lutherans. Today, Lutheranism constitutes a major branch of Protestant
Christianity.
Matters came to a climax when Henry VIII, the second of the Tudor Kings, asked Pope
Clement to declare that he was not properly married to his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon,
because she had previously been the wife of his older brother Arthur, now dead. Henry had
two motives: first, Catherine didn’t give him the male heir that he thought he must have. What
is more, he was in love with, and wanted to marry, another woman, Anne Boleyn. The Pope
did not allow Henry to divorce his wife. In 1531, upon receiving the Pope’s refusal, Henry
declared himself head of the English Church. He appointed a new Archbishop of Canterbury,
who declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine invalid.
At the very beginning many were dissatisfied with the English Church. They felt that it was not
reformed enough, that it was merely a compromise between Protestantism and Catholicism.
These dissidents, who were soon to become known as Puritans, Baptists, Presbyterians,
Dissenters, Nonconformists, and so on, wanted to get rid of many different things they called
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“Popish," such as the bishops, the prayer book, the priest’s vestments, and even the bell on
the church. Some of them said that religion was solely a matter between the individual and
God. This idea, which is still frequently expressed, is directly traceable to the teachings of
those Renaissance humanists who emphasized the freedom and self-sufficiency of all human
beings.
The Tudor Monarchs (1485–1603)
The five Tudor rulers are easy to remember: they consist of a grandfather, a father, and three
children. The grandfather was Henry VII, a Welsh nobleman named Henry Tudor who seized
the throne after England was totally exhausted by the long and bloody struggle of the Wars of
the Roses. Henry VII was a shrewd, patient, and stingy man who restored peace and order to
the kingdom.
His son Henry VIII (1509–1547) had six wives: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane
Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. Their fates are summarized
in a jingle: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” Despite his messy
home life, Henry VIII was very important. He created the Royal Navy, which effectively put a
stop to foreign invasions and allowed to spread English political power, language, and literature
all over the globe. Henry VIII himself deserves the title “Renaissance man.” He wrote poetry,
performed well on many different musical instruments, was a champion athlete and a mighty
hunter.
Henry VIII had three children: Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon; Elizabeth, daughter of
Anne Boleyn; and Edward, son of Jane Seymour. According to the laws of succession the son
had to be crowned first, and so at age nine he became Edward VI (1547–1553). An intelligent
but sickly boy, he ruled in name only while his relatives had the actual power. He died and was
followed by his half-sister Mary (1553–1558), a strong-willed woman determined to avenge
her mother and restore the Pope’s power in England. Bloody Mary burned at the stake about
three hundred of her subjects, and then lost the support of her people entirely when she
married Philip II, king of Spain, the country England was beginning to fear and hate. When
Mary was overthrown, Elizabeth came to the throne.
Mary Tudor was given the title Bloody Mary by her opponents for her brutal persecution of
Protestants. She had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake.
Elizabeth I (1558–1603) was one of the most brilliant and successful
monarchs in history. She inherited a kingdom torn by fierce religious feuds,
and her first task was to restore law and order. She reestablished the Church of England and
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again renounced the Pope, who promptly excommunicated her. To keep Spain pacified, she
pretended that she just might marry her widowed brother-in-law King Philip, who was the first
of a long procession of eligible noblemen, both foreign and English, who wanted to marry her.
But she resisted marriage her whole life (thereby giving the American colony Virginia its name)
because she knew that her strength lay in her independence and her ability to play one suitor
off against another.
A truly heroic person, Elizabeth survived many plots against her. Several of them were in
support of her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Mary was Elizabeth’s heir because she
also was a direct descendant of Henry VII. She was deposed from her throne in Scotland and
lived as an exile in England. Elizabeth beheaded Mary. King Philip used this act as an excuse to
invade England. In 1588, the Royal Navy, assisted greatly by the weather, destroyed the
Invincible Armada. It was a great turning point in history and the brightest period of Elizabeth's
reign.
After the defeat of the Armada, Elizabeth became a beloved symbol of peace, security and
prosperity to her people. Many English authors represented her mythologically in poetry,
drama, and fiction. Literary works that did not directly represent her were dedicated to her
because authors knew that she was a connoisseur of literature and a person of remarkably wide
learning. She was fluent in Latin, Spanish, French and Italian. Like her father, she was skilled in
music, dancing, and religious argument, and also vain, headstrong, and clever. But her reign far
surpassed her father’s in the production of literary works.
Under the reign of Elizabeth I the Renaissance flourished. That was a period of unprecedented
prosperity, and both the court and the emerging middle classes dedicated a lot of time to art
and literature.
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Renaissance Poetry
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Most poetry and other literature in the Renaissance tended to be aristocratic in tone. Poets
were themselves aristocrats, who did not publish their works but gave them to their friends,
who circulated them in manuscript. Unless they also wrote plays, English poets could not
expect to make much money from their writings. So they asked aristocratic patrons for
support and dedicated their books to them.
In the Renaissance people wrote poetry in figurative language fitted into formal patterns. The
poets of Renaissance England were very conscious of their predecessors, who wrote not only
in English but in Italian and Latin, Spanish, French and Greek. English poets depended on
tradition. They wrote a particular kind of poem. There were epithalamia (wedding songs),
epigrams (brief poems sometimes praising but more often making fun of either real or
fictitious people), epitaphs (brief poems on dead people), and songs (lyrics suitable for setting
to music). Poems were often set to music and sung to the accompaniment of an instrument.
These songs expressed a great variety of moods and covered a great variety of subjects, from
love to religion.
The most popular genre of poetry was the sonnet. The English sonneteers followed the Italian
poet Petrarch who had used the sonnet to address a woman identified only as Laura, a proud
woman of ideal virtue and beauty who remains totally indifferent to the poet. The poet-lover is
a humble figure, who burns with desire for the lady and freezes from her disdain of him.
Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Francis Petrarch (1304— 1374) was a scholar and
poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch's sonnets were admired and
imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry.
The language of Renaissance poetry was elaborate and stylised. Some of the
metaphors seem inconceivable to us: as when two lovers were called a geometer’s compass.
Extended metaphors of this kind, bringing together things totally unlike each other, are called
conceits, and they may distract us because we have been taught to visualize the images in
poetry.
Conceit is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By
juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader
into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison. Extended conceits in English are
part of the poetic idiom of Mannerism, during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
Renaissance readers apparently did not try to picture conceits in their minds; instead, they
admired them for their boldness and ingenuity. As time passed, the practice of writing conceits
intensified and reached a peak in the followers of John Donne.
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Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–
1547)
Wyatt and Surrey have much in common: they were courtiers of Henry VIII, they admired and
imitated foreign – especially Italian – poetry, and they were literary innovators. Wyatt spent
much of his life traveling abroad as an ambassador for King Henry. Twice Henry had him
imprisoned on charges that were probably false, and twice Wyatt managed to regain his favor.
Surrey was not so lucky. He was a brilliant soldier and both his parents were descended from
English kings. Thus he had two qualifications for being a king himself. Henry didn’t like it and
had Surrey executed when he was only thirty years old.
Both Wyatt and Surrey helped to change the nature of English poetry, which up to their time
was still essentially medieval in matter and manner, subject and form. Wyatt brought a new kind
of poem, the love sonnet, to England from Italy. His English sonnets are adaptations of Italian
sonnets.
Wyatt's sonnets were mainly translations or imitations of those of Petrarch. He changed the
structure of Petrarchan sonnet to create what became known as the Elizabethan sonnet.
In the original Italian sonnet the first eight lines – the octave – introduced the problem, while
the last six lines – the sextet – provided an answer or comment and expressed the personal
feelings of the poet. The rhyming scheme was usually ABBA-ABBA-CDC-DCD. Wyatt
changed the rhyming scheme of the sestet to CDDC-EE thus creating a quatrain (four lines)
and a couplet (two lines). The Earl of Surrey developed the sestet even further, separating the
couplet from the quatrain and using it to comment on the previous twelve lines. The final
pattern for the Elizabethan sonnet comprised therefore three quatrains (twelve lines) and a
couplet (two lines) with the scheme ABAB-CDCD-EFEF-GG.
Wyatt and Surrey introduced a new method of writing sonnets in the form of sonnet sequence,
a collection of sonnets telling a story of love, like that of Petrarch for his Laura.
Surrey was the first to use the blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) in English poetry.
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and many other later poets used blank verse, and this
poetic form now seems the most natural of all English meters.
Aside from their sonnets and Surrey’s blank verse, both poets produced a variety of other
kinds of works. But neither of these poets had any of his works printed and publicly
distributed, except for one poem that Surrey wrote on Wyatt’s death. They had no ambition to
be known as “clerks,” or men of letters, the sort of people who published books. As courtiers
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they were expected to compose songs and verses, just as they were expected to do battle for
their king, compete in tournaments, dance, and carry on intrigues with the ladies. And so they
circulated their poems privately, in handwritten copies, amongst their friends. Not until ten
years after Surrey’s death did most of their poems appear in print. In 1557 an anthology called
Songs and Sonnets was published. It contained ninety-seven of Wyatt’s poems and forty of
Surrey’s.
The book Wyatt’s and Surrey’s poems is commonly known as Tottel’s Miscellany (after the
name of the printer Richard Tottel). It has a rather bad reputation today because Tottel
“improved” the poems by changing their words so that they seemed smoother to his ears.To make
certain that we read Wyatt’s and Surrey’s words scholars have searched out the handwritten
copies of the poems that predate their publication.
Text
According to traditional gossip, this poem by Wyatt is about the attraction he felt for Anne Boleyn, a beautiful
young woman at court. When he noticed that no less a person than King Henry was also attracted to Anne, he
gave up the pursuit (as he says in line 1) to whoever else wanted to “hunt” her. No one knows whether this
story is true or not, but Henry did make Anne the second of his six queens.
Whoso List to Hunt
перевод Е. Фельдман
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Whoso list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
Добычи ищешь? Я скажу, где лань!
Увы, моя закончена охота.
Измучен, как чумой, пустой работой,
Плетусь я позади, чуть жив от ран.
Порыв ловца я сдерживал, как мог,
Но лишь промчалось нежное виденье –
Я ринулся в погоню вслед за тенью,
А в сети только лёгкий ветер лёг.
Не верь тому, что говорит молва, Охота эта страстная напрасна.
На шее горделивой и атласной
Горят алмазной россыпью слова:
«Не тронь меня, сетей не ставь упорно!
Я одному лишь Цезарю покорна».
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Who is referred to as Caesar in the poem?
Why does the poet refuse to “hunt”?
What does the poem reveal about the position of women in Wyatt’s time?
In the poem love is described in terms of “hunting”.
Make up your own metaphors that could reveal the nature of “love”.
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Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)
Edmund Spenser, unlike such gentlemanly writers as Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney, regarded
himself primarily as a poet. Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries he became known
as “the poet’s poet” because so many young writers learned the art and craft of poetry by
studying him. Spenser began publishing poetry about the time he graduated from the Merchant
Taylors’ School and went to Cambridge University, from which he received the B.A. and M.A.
degrees. Upon leaving the university, he served as a personal secretary to the Earl of Leicester,
Queen Elizabeth’s favorite.
Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, (1532 or 1533–1588) was an English nobleman and
the favourite and close friend of Elizabeth I from her first year on the throne until his death. The
Queen giving him reason to hope, he was a suitor for her hand for many years.
Leicester, a great patron of scholars and writers, surrounded himself with
brilliant people, and in his household Spenser became acquainted with many poets, among
them Sir Philip Sidney. He dedicated to Sidney his first book, The Shepherds’ Calendar
(1579). This is a set of twelve pastoral poems, one for each month, written in a variety of
meter. Some of them are experimental, and all of them are original and interesting. Literary
historians have long recognized 1579 as the date when the great age of Elizabethan literature
began.
Pastoral, as an adjective, refers to the lifestyle of shepherds and pastoralists, moving livestock around
larger areas of land according to seasons and availability of water and feed. "Pastoral" also describes
literature, art and music which depicts the life of shepherds, often in a highly idealised manner. It may
also be used as a noun (a pastoral) to describe a single work of pastoral poetry, music or drama. An
alternative name for the literary "pastoral" (both as an adjective and a noun) is "bucolic", from the Greek βουκóλος,
meaning a "cowherd". This reflects the Greek origin of the pastoral tradition.
In 1580, Spenser and his wife went to Ireland in the service of the Lord Deputy of Ireland.
Except for two or three visits to England, he was to spend the rest of his life in that war-torn
country. English troops had invaded and conquered Ireland, but the Irish did not regard
themselves as conquered. They particularly resented people like Spenser, who was given an
Irish castle and a vast estate.
The conditions remained very unsettled and dangerous, but Spenser managed to work on The
Faerie Queene and other poems. After the death of his first wife he courted and married
Elizabeth Boyle, an Anglo-Irish lady living in Cork. His sonnet sequence Amoretti (1595) and
his marriage hymn Epithalamion (1595) reveal Spencer’s intense devotion to his wife.
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The Irish intensified their efforts to expel the English from their land. During one of their raids,
Spenser’s castle was burned and his infant son killed. Spenser himself took refuge in Cork
City, and from there he went over to London, carrying messages to the government and some
poems in manuscript. He died suddenly, in 1599, and was given a splendid funeral and burial in
the Poet's Corner. He lies near Chaucer, a poet who provided much of his inspiration.
Spenser's masterpiece The Faerie Queene was published in 1590. It was dedicated to the
Queen: “To the Most Mighty and Magnificent Empress Elizabeth, by the Grace of God
Queen of England, France, and Ireland.” The Queen, notoriously stingy, rewarded him with
the unusually large pension of fifty pounds annually, and Spenser was generally recognized as
the leading poet of the day.
The Faerie Queene is a religious and political allegory that despite its unfinished state runs
about 33,000 lines. It has an open form, with many characters and many different plots
developing in all directions. Their knights, ladies, battles, tournaments, enchantments, dragons,
giants, dwarfs, and demons are derived from the medieval romances of chivalry.
Spencer intended to write twelve books, but only half of the work was completed. Each book
recounts the adventures of a knight, who represents one of the twelve virtues that make a
perfect gentleman. The first six books have heroes or heroines who embody holiness,
temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy.
The main theme of the work is the glorification of Queen Elizabeth and her court. At the end of
the story, Prince Arthur, the most important knight, is to marry the Faerie Queene Gloriana,
who represented Queen Elizabeth.
Style
The Faerie Queene shows Spenser's great gift for creating refined and vivid poetry. He
introduced a new metre into English poetry called the Spenserian stanza. Each stanza
contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'alexandrine'
line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is ABABBCBCC:
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
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Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.
(From Faerie Queene)
Spenser's belief that poetry should deal with subjects far removed from everyday life and
should be written in refined language became the basic principle for Elizabethan.
Text
SONNET XXX from Amoretty
Перевод Д. Смирнова
My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How come it then that this her cold is so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which is congealed with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.
Любимая, как лёд, а я, как пламя –
какой мороз ей сердце остудил,
что не расплавить жаркими кострами? –
оно твердеет – тщетно я молил.
Какой пожар мне сердце распалил
таким огнём, что не боится льда,
а только пуще пламенеет пыл,
и страсть моя вскипает, как руда?
Но чудо совершится лишь тогда,
когда огонь пылающий поймёт,
что растопить он может холода,
cам превратившись в безразличный лёд.
Сильна любовь, и может в час тревожный
cменить свой курс на противоположный.
What feelings stand behind the images of “fire” and “ice”?
What determines the temperature in a lover’s heart?
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Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
Sir Philip Sidney was a soldier and a statesman. He was connected with many important
people. His father was Sir Henry Sidney, for many years Lord Governor of Ireland, his uncle
was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a handsome and talented courtier whom Queen
Elizabeth loved passionately but never married. As a boy Sidney first met Queen Elizabeth
when his uncle Leicester put on a spectacular entertainment for her at Kenilworth. Elizabeth
later made Sidney her cupbearer.
In 1585 Queen Elizabeth appointed Sidney governor of Flushing, an important English fortress
in the Netherlands. He had long sympathized with the Dutch in their struggle to remain independent of Spain. In November of 1586 Sidney was wounded and died. His body was brought
back to England and given a hero’s burial in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The English idolized Sidney, and held him up as the embodiment of perfect knighthood. As a
writer and poet Sidney is best remembered for his three works. The long chivalric pastoral
romance called The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590, 1593) is full of adventure and
moralizing. Many literary historians regard it as the most important piece of English prose
fiction before the eighteenth century. A collection of poems entitled Astrophel and Stella
(1591) consisting of 108 sonnets and 11 songs is the first of many Elizabethan sonnet
sequences. Finally, An Apology for Poetry (1595), also known as The Defense of Poesy, is the
first substantial critical essay in the English literature. It is a defense of imaginative literature
against its detractors, who were saying that poets lie. Sidney replied that poets can't lie because
they don't pretend to be giving factual information. “The poet nothing affirmeth,” he argued.
Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella has two purposes: to praise Stella (“Star”) and to explore and
express the feelings of Astrophel (“Star Lover”). Sidney pays much more attention to the
second purpose than to the first. Compared with Petrarch’s Laura, Stella is a rather dim figure.
Text
In the following sonnet, Astrophel plans to express his love for Stella in poems that will make her love him in
return.
"Loving in truth..."
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:
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Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."
How does the lover try to impress his beloved?
Are his attempts effective?
What is the message of the poem?
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The first examples of sonnets in English were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt, and the form was
then developed by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. If these poets had not lived, Shakespeare
might never have written any sonnets at all.
The rhyme scheme of most sonnets in English, including Shakespeare's is generally
ababcdcdefefgg – this is called the Elizabethan scheme, and is different from the original
Petrarchan scheme.
While his contemporaries were dealing exclusively with love Shakespeare used the sonnet form
not only for the description of the beauty of the woman and of his passions, but also for the
expression of his ideas. Shakespeare's 154 sonnets cover a wide range of subjects: they are
poems of love and loss, of loneliness, infidelity, "devouring time", death, and ruthless age. But
there are two major themes: the force of love, and the battle between the power of time and the
timelessness of poetry. The sonnets reveal that their writer was a playwright. They often have
the structure of a little drama. The octave introduces some kind of conflict. In the following
quatrain the conflict is developed in some way: it can be disputed or accepted, denied or
affirmed. In the last two lines a solution is presented that is often clever and unexpected. This
final couplet works like the last scene in a play in which all the difficulties of the plot are
resolved.
Sometimes Shakespeare expressed the same idea through several sonnets. Shakespeare's
sequence of sonnets suggests "a story", though the story itself is elusive and mysterious.
The sequence of his sonnets is traditionally divided into two parts. The first part (sonnets 1 –
126) is dedicated to a young man, the second part (127 – 154) – to a lady.
There are many opinions about the connection of addressees of the sonnets with
Shakespeare's life. The most accepted view is that the young man is Shakespeare's friend Sir
William Herbert, “Mr. W.H.”. Lord Herbert possessed all the external characteristics
mentioned in the sonnets. Physically the young man is the embodiment of beauty. But
Shakespeare is concerned not only with the physical but also with the moral beauty of his hero.
He describes not only merits, but also shortcomings and vices of the man's character, though
in his time it was fashionable to speak about the coincidence of moral and physical beauty.
Shakespeare hints at his friend's arrogance, selfishness and egoism. The young man has no
love for anybody, and therefore remains single. Shakespeare's strong advice is to get married
and have children who will inherit his beauty and justify his existence.
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The woman to whom the second part of the sequence is dedicated to is not identified by the
biographers. She is known under the name of the Dark Lady. The character of the Dark Lady
is an innovation in Elizabethan literature, because the image in pre-shakespearean love poetry is
blond. The sonnets reveal the story of the Dark Lady as well as the story of Shakespeare's love
for her. She is in her early twenties, married, faithless to her husband in her love for other men.
Shakespeare admires her beauty, suffers from his passionate love for her, and at the same time
despises himself for loving such a worthless woman. He stresses the darkness of her hair,
eyes, and heart.
Text
XVIII.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
XIX.
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
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Yet, do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
LXVI.
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
CXXIX.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
CXXX.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
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Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Learn one of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart.
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John Donne (1572–1631) – the Father of Metaphysical poetry
The term "metaphysical," as applied to English and continental European poets of the
seventeenth century, was used by the literary critic Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century to
reprove those poets for their “unnaturalness.” Therefore it may be considered misleading
because metaphysical poetry did not deal with philosophical speculation but with the themes of
religion and love. The metaphysical poets were not widely appreciated in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries by romantic and Victorian poets, but their reputation grew at the beginning
of the twentieth century with the rise of the interest in dramatic and passionate poetry.
John Donne, along with similar but distinct poets such as George Herbert, Andrew Marvell,
and Henry Vaughn, developed a poetic style in which philosophical and spiritual subjects were
approached with reason and often concluded in paradox. This group of writers established
meditation as a poetic mode.
John Donne (1572–1631) was the most influential metaphysical poet. He was born into a
Roman Catholic family at a time when members of that faith were under increasing pressure to
conform to the teaching of the newly established Church of England. Donne was not allowed
to take a degree at Oxford because of his religion. Throughout his youth he was tormented by
the question of his religion. If he remained loyal to the Roman Catholic faith, he would have to
give up any hope of a successful career. Finally in 1593 Donne decided to convert to the
Protestant faith. He became a diplomat and in 1601 was elected Member of Parliament. By the
secret marriage to his patron’s young niece Donne destroyed his bright prospects. After some
unsuccessful attempts to regain his career in politics and diplomacy, Donne turned his attention
to the Church. In 1615 he was ordained into the Church of England. When he was elected the
Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral he made a series of memorable sermons which earned him the
reputation of being the greatest preacher of his generation.
While his sermons won him public acclaim, Donne wrote poetry exclusively for personal
pleasure. During his lifetime his poems were read only by his circle of friends in manuscript
form. It was not until two years after his death that they were published. His literary production
includes:
Satires written in his early years and targeted to the social evils of the day;
Songs and Sonnets, a collection of love poems;
Holy Sonnets, a collection of religious poetry;
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Sermons and meditations, which include Donne’s weekly sermons.
Style
Much of the poetry written in the period in which he lived was musical, ornate and respectful:
he rejected these standards and wrote poems which were original, striking and irreverent. His
use of religious imagery in love poems and images of physical love in religious poetry shocked
his contemporaries.
In Songs and Sonnets Donne deals with the theme of love in a way that strongly contrasts with
the Elizabethan tradition. Love is presented as an intensely intimate and physical experience.
The poems are addressed to a very real lover, often the poet’s wife. The rhythm of the poem is
the rhythm of natural speech and the language is dramatic. The poet often tries to persuade his
lover to share his point of view through poetry which appeals both to the intellect and the
emotion.
His Holy Sonnets, which contains many of Donne’s most enduring poems, was released
shortly after his wife died in childbirth. The poet addresses God in a tone that often borders on
the irreverent, and uses the language of physical suffering and love to describe his spiritual
crises and devotion.
Donne was a great literary innovator. The literary techniques he used in his poetry became the
features of metaphysical poetry:
the dramatic quality of the language, which often seems to be one side of a dialogue
between the poet and his lover, or God, or himself;
the wide range of areas from which the poet draws his images (science, travel,
medicine, alchemy and philosophy);
the use of wit in paradoxes, epigrams, puns and conceits.
A paradox is an argument that produces an inconsistency, typically within logic or common sense.
An epigram is a concise, clever, often paradoxical statement.
Pun is a play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar
sense or sound of different words.
Text
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A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Прощание, запрещающее печаль
перевод С. Козлова
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
– Whose soul is sense – cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assuredиd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.
Как праведники, отходя,
Неслышно шепчутся с душой,
Друзей в сомнение вводя:
"Уже не дышит". – "Нет, живой".
Так распадемся мы сейчас:
Без бури вздохов, ливня слез;
Спасем от нечестивых глаз
То, что изведать довелось.
Сдвиг почвы - бедствия пример:
Он порождает страх и крик;
Но тихий сдвиг небесных сфер
Всегда невинен, хоть велик.
Любовь земная оттого
Разлук не терпит, что они
Разъединяют вещество,
Составившее суть любви.
Но мы, кто чувством утончен
До несказуемых границ,
Легко снесем такой урон,
Как расставанье тел и лиц.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Ведь наши две души – одна;
Ей страх разъятья незнаком;
Уйду – растянется она,
Как золото под молотком.
А если две – то две их так,
Как две у циркуля ноги:
Вращенье той, что в центре - знак
Единства с той, что вьет круги.
Центральная, наклонена,
Следит за странствием другой
И выпрямляется она,
Лишь если та пришла домой.
Мы как они: ведь ты тверда,
И путь мой станет образцом
Окружности: у нас всегда
Начало совпадет с концом.
Analyze the image used in the poem to describe two lovers.
What is the message of the poem?
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from Holy Sonne ts
DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
Compare Elizabethan sonnets with metaphysical poetry of John Donne.
Which of them appeal to you most and why?
A Lecture Upon the Shadow
Лекция о тени
перевод Г. М. Кружкова
Stand still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, Love, in Love's philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent,
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produced.
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread,
And to brave clearness all things are reduced.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Постой – и краткой лекции внемли,
Любовь моя, о логике любви.
Вообрази: пока мы тут, гуляя,
С тобой беседовали, дорогая,
За нашею спиной
Ползли две тени, вроде привидений;
Но полдень воссиял над головой Мы попираем эти тени!
Вот так, пока любовь еще росла,
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Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us and our cares ; but now 'tis not so.
Она невольно за собой влекла
Оглядку, страх; а ныне – тень ушла.
That love hath not attain'd the highest degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.
То чувство не достигло апогея,
Что кроется, чужих очей робея.
Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, and westerwardly decline,
To me thou, falsely, thine
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day ;
But O ! love's day is short, if love decay.
Но если вдруг любовь с таких высот,
Не удержавшись, к западу сойдет,
От нас потянутся иные тени,
Склоняющие душу к перемене.
Те, прежние, других
Морочили, а эти, как туманом
Сгустившимся, нас облекут самих
Взаимной ложью и обманом.
Когда любовь клонится на закат,
Все дальше тени от нее скользят И скоро, слишком скоро день затмят.
Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his short minute, after noon, is night.
Любовь растет, пока в зенит не станет,
Но минет полдень - сразу ночь нагрянет.
How does the poet present different stages of love?
What do shadows represent at the beginning and at the end of the poem?
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Renaissance Prose
Thomas More: Utopia
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
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Thomas More: Utopia
Thomas More (1477–1535) was born in London in 1478 and followed his father's profession
as a lawyer, eventually becoming an MP. Then in 1529 he became Lord Chancellor to Henry
VIII. However, his firm allegiance to Church tradition made him oppose his king's attempts to
obtain a divorce and to reform the church. By December 1533 Moore had been forbidden to
publish his writings and the next year found him imprisoned in the Tower of London. On July
6th 1535 he was beheaded and in 1935 More was canonized by Pope Pius XI.
More published Utopia in 1516 and since that time the word has become the name for a whole
genre of speculative writing and ideology, also being retrospectively applied to works like
Plato's Republic, upon which Utopia is largely based.
A utopia (/juːˈtoʊpiə/) is a community or society possessing highly desirable or near perfect
qualities. The word was coined by Sir Thomas More in Greek for his 1516 book Utopia (in
Latin), describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to
describe both intentional communities that attempt to create an ideal society, and imagined
societies portrayed in fiction. It has produced other concepts, most prominently dystopia.
The word Utopia is constructed from two Greek words: TOPOS meaning PLACE and OU
meaning NO. Thus Utopia is “nowhere”, or an imaginary place. It is also a pun on the word
EU meaning good or perfect. So Utopia can also be a perfect place that is non-existent. Some
commentators interpret Moore's Utopia as a proposal for an ideal society that would be
desirable to achieve. Others think it is simply an indirect criticism of contemporary European
society.
Content
Book I
More tells how, when he was in the Low Countries on government business, he was
introduced by his friend Peter Giles to Raphael Hythloday, a veteran traveler. The long
day's conversation among the three men constitutes the substance of the book.
When More and Giles discover how widely Hythloday has traveled and realize the depth of
his understanding of the governments of many nations, they propose that his knowledge is
too valuable to waste and that he ought to enter the service of some monarch as a councilor
in order to employ his knowledge in the service of mankind. Hythloday is reluctant to
undertake such employment. First, he does not believe that, his advice would be accepted.
The people sitting in royal councils practice a system of flattery toward their superiors. They
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would surely outweigh his idealistic and philosophical proposals. In support of these views,
he relates experiences during an earlier visit to England.
In pursuit of the argument, Hythloday proceeds to a critical analysis of the patterns of law,
government, economics among European nations and, most particularly, in England. His
criticism is directed specifically at the severity of the laws, the unjust distribution of wealth,
the unequal participation in productive labor, and the appropriation of farm lands for sheep
grazing.
Book I represents the negative side of the picture which More intends to create, the statement
of what is wrong with "civilization"in his time. A few incidental references comparing the state
of affairs in contemporary Europe with the manners and government of a nation on a remote
island called Utopia leads into the discussion in the second book.
Book II
Hythloday gives an account of the whole life pattern of the Utopians.
Utopia is an Island and so has no problems with borders.
Utopians have no interest in territorial expansion and make no alliances with other nations.
They are basically pacifist but they will fight in defensive conflicts if necessary.
Utopia is a rationally structured society. It is peaceful and harmonious.
Towns are well planned and there are no slums. Everyone has an adequate housing with a
garden in which to grow vegetables for the family. And everyone is well trained in farming.
Utopian society is well-ordered with traditional family structure and elders, who are much
respected heads of households. The family is the unit of their society, and the oldest member
is the governor of the family. Thirty families band together about a great hall where they eat
together, their food being well prepared by women well qualified for that work.
Divorce is permissible, but only under special circumstances.
Women do not marry before 18 and men marry at 22. Pre-marital sex is severely punished.
All children are given a good education and adults give up spare time to assist in education.
Government is done by delegates being elected to represent local communities.
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All Utopians work willingly and only need to work 6 hours a day. Everyone does some
farming and so is a food producer. They have no interest in luxury, fashion, gold or jewels
and no interest in accumulating wealth. Greed is not known among them.
The country has slaves but these are either condemned criminals or hostages from other
lands.
The economy of the Utopians is of particular interest. Their markets are nothing more than
supply houses where everyone is free to go and take what he needs without payment. They
are able to produce an abundance of food, so that they can export their surplus to foreign
countries.
There is no private property among the Utopians and they have no money. The wealth which
they acquire by foreign trade is used only in time of war. The citizens are educated to despise
jewels and precious metals.
Utopians define virtue as life according to nature and they condemn hunting as a pastime.
Pre-marital sex, prostitution, adultery, gambling, theft and drunkenness, are outlawed and
severely punished.
The sick are well looked-after but if someone is terminally ill the priests advise suicide.
However, while suicide in the context of illness is acceptable, euthanasia by the doctors is
not.
There is not a single religion throughout the nation, but a considerable variety of doctrines is
permitted. Some Utopians worship the sun, some the moon or some worship virtuous men –
but all believe that there is one God and that the soul is immortal. However, there is no
compulsion in belief. Citizens are free in matters of religion. They have persons whose
dedication to a life of service and sacrifice corresponds to the religious orders in the
Christian church. Their priests are men of exceptional character and dignity. Their churches
are large and very beautiful. The services are interdenominational in character. When
Hythloday and his companions instructed the Utopians in the teachings of Christianity,
many of them became converts and were baptized.
In a short passage, Hythloday sums up his views on the Utopian system, declaring it to be
the best and only true commonwealth. It insures justice for all of its citizens, and because
there is no private property, everybody owns a share in everything. The result is a nation of
happy people.
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At the conclusion of Hythloday's discourse, More offers some remarks of his own indicating
that he was not wholly converted to the Utopian system but that he regarded some of its
features as commendable and wished they might be adopted in Europe.
Link
The word Utopia overtook More's short work and has been used ever since to describe this
kind of imaginary society with many unusual ideas being contemplated. Although he may not
have founded the genre of Utopian and dystopian fiction, More certainly popularised it and
some of the early works which owe something to Utopia include:
The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella, Description of the Republic of
Christianopolis by Johannes Valentinus Andreae, New Atlantis by Francis Bacon and
Candide by Voltaire.
Chronologically, the first recorded utopian proposal is Plato's Republic, written by Plato around
380 BC. It concerns the definition of justice and the order and character of the just city-state and
the just man.
The 20th century witnessed the rise of dystopian, or anti-utopian novel.
A dystopia, or anti-utopia, is a community or society, usually fictional, that is in some important
way undesirable or frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia. Such societies appear in many
works of fiction, particularly in stories set in a speculative future. Dystopias are often characterized
by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics
associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Elements of dystopias may vary from
environmental to political and social issues. Dystopian societies have culminated in a broad series of sub-genres of
fiction and are often used to raise real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, religion, psychology,
spirituality, or technology that may become present in the future. For this reason, dystopias have taken the form of a
multitude of speculations, such as pollution, poverty, societal collapse, political repression, or totalitarianism.
The 1921 novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin predicts a post-apocalyptic future in which society
is entirely based on logic and modeled after mechanical systems.
Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World is a more subtle and more threatening dystopia
because he projected into the year 2540 industrial and social changes he perceived in 1931,
leading to a fascist hierarchy of society, industrially successful by exploiting a slave class
conditioned and drugged to obey and enjoy their servitude.
George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel about a coercive and
impoverished totalitarian society, conditioning its population through propaganda rather than
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drugs.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury describes a hedonistic future America devoid of critical
thinking or literature.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale describes a future North America governed by
strict religious rules which only the privileged dare defy.
Are you familiar with any of these novels?
How can you explain the change of philosophic and literary focus: from utopian
to anti-utopian?
Do you think there is a possibility for any future utopian project for humanity?
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Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
In the 17 century people’s taste changed from being emotional to philosophical and scientific.
The reasons for these changes were great scientific discoveries as the theory of Galileo or
Gabriel Harvey, who stated the circulation of blood, or the invention of telescopes. As for the
developments in literature, the 17 century becomes the time for essay to establish itself as a
popular genre. It was borrowed from the French essay writer Michel de Montaigne. Francis
Bacon was the one who brought it to English literature and got the central role in developing
English essay and prose. He actually influenced the intellectual history of the early 17 century
because he emphasized learning through experience.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was an influential French Renaissance writer, generally
considered to be the inventor of the personal essay.
Bacon's great claim to fame is not that he entered Trinity College, Cambridge,
at the age of 12, not that he was Lord Chancellor of England under James I,
nor even that he has been reputed the real writer of Shakespeare's plays, but that he was a
philosopher of the first rank and the effective founder of the modern, experimental, scientific,
approach to understanding. Before Bacon, 'learning' largely meant memorizing the classics,
especially Aristotle, and acceding to every dictate of established religion.
Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of
Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry,
theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together
with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in
Western philosophy.
In The Advancement of Learning (1605), he argued that the only knowledge of importance
was that which could be discovered by observation – 'empirical' knowledge rooted in the
natural world. Empiricism itself emphasizes that experience, evidence, especially sensory
perception are important in the formation of ideas. In scientific method it is necessary that all
hypothesis and theories be tested against the observations of natural world. Therefore,
according to this scientific view science should be empirical in nature.
Bacon championed the idea of state funding for experimental science and the creation of an
encyclopedia. In New Organon (1620), he redefined the task of natural science, as a way of
increasing human power over nature, and in The New Atlantis(1626), describing a Utopian
state exploiting scientific knowledge. The expression "Knowledge is power" is his. In 1621
Bacon was evicted from office for taking a bribe and died four years later after catching a cold
while stuffing a chicken with snow in an early experiment in refrigeration.
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Text
Of Studies
Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for
ornament is in discourse; and for ability is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute,
and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come
best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is
affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected
by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning, by study; and studies themselves, do give
forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men condemn studies, simple men
admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above
them, won by observation.
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh
and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that
is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and
with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that
would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common
distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And
therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit:
and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise;
poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt
studia in mores [“practices zealously pursued pass into habits”].
Nay, there is no ston[e] or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body,
may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle
walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the
mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to
distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores ["splitters of hairs”]. If he be
not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers’ cases.
So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt.
Об учении
Науками занимаются ради удовольствия, ради украшения и ради умения. Удовольствие обнаруживается
всего более в уединении, украшение – в беседе, а умение – в распоряжениях и руководстве делом. Ибо
людям опыта можно поручить выполнение да еще, пожалуй, суждение об отдельных подробностях; но
общего руководства и совета лучше искать у людей ученых. Отдавать наукам все время означает
неумение применить их к делу; превращать их целиком в украшение – жеманство; а всецело полагаться
на них в суждениях – ученое чудачество. Наука совершенствует природу, но сама совершенствуется
опытом, ибо прирожденные дарования подобны диким растениям и нуждаются в выращивании с
помощью ученых занятий, а ученость сама по себе дает указания чересчур общие, если их не уточнить
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опытом. Люди хитроумные презирают ученость, простодушные дивятся ей, мудрые ею пользуются.
Ибо сама по себе ученость не научает, как применять ее: на то есть мудрость особая, высшая, которую
приобрести можно только опытом.
Читай не затем, чтобы противоречить и опровергать; не затем, чтобы принимать на веру, и не затем,
чтобы найти предмет для беседы; но чтобы мыслить и рассуждать. Есть книги, которые надо только
отведать, есть такие, которые лучше всего проглотить, и лишь немногие стоит разжевать и переварить.
Иначе говоря, одни книги следует прочесть лишь частично, другие – без особого прилежания и лишь
немногие – целиком и внимательно. Есть и такие, которые можно поручить прочесть другому и
воспользоваться сделанными им извлечениями; но так можно поступать лишь с маловажными
предметами и посредственными авторами, ибо перегонка книг, как перегонка воды, убивает всякий
вкус. Чтение делает человека знающим, беседа – находчивым, а привычка записывать – точным.
Поэтому, кто мало пишет, тому нужна хорошая память; кто мало упражняется в беседе, должен быть
находчив; а кто мало читает, должен быть весьма хитер, чтобы казаться более знающим, чем есть на
самом деле.
В истории черпаем мы мудрость; в поэзии – остроумие; в математике – проницательность; в
естественной философии – глубину; в нравственной философии – серьезность; в логике и риторике –
умение спорить. "Abeunt studia in mores" («занятия налагают отпечаток на характер»). Скажем более: нет
такого умственного изъяна, который не мог бы быть исправлен надлежащими занятиями, подобно
тому как недостатки телесные устраняются соответствующими упражнениями. Так, игра в шары
полезна при каменной болезни и для почек; стрельба – для легких и груди; ходьба – для желудка;
верховая езда – для головы и так далее. А кто рассеян, тот пусть займется математикой, ибо при
доказательстве теорем малейшая рассеянность вынуждает все начинать сызнова. Кто неспособен
усматривать различия, пусть изучает схоластиков, ибо они "cymini sectores" («расщепляющие тминные
зёрна» (о вдающихся в излишние тонкости). Кто не умеет быстро осваиваться с предметом и быстро
припоминать все нужное для доказательства, пусть изучает судебные дела. И такие средства имеются
против каждого умственного изъяна.
Find interesting ideas expressed in the essay.Do you agree with Bacon’s recipe for
the treatment of various defects of mind?
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Renaissance Drama
The medieval tradition of Mystery and Miracle plays continued under the reign of Henry VII.
However, after the Reformation, Henry VIII put an end to medieval religious drama. Humanism
revived interest in classical drama and the plays of Plautus, Terence and Seneca were
translated into English.
Titus Maccius Plautus (254?–184 BC), commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman
playwright of the Old Latin period.
Publius Terentius Afer (195/185–159 BC), better known in English as Terence, was a
playwright of the Roman Republic, of North African descent. His comedies were performed for
the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave,
educated him and later on, impressed by his abilities, freed him. All of the six plays Terence wrote have survived. One
famous quotation by Terence reads: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", or "I am a human being, I
consider nothing that is human alien to me."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca; 4? BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher,
statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to
emperor Nero.
Senecan tragedies were very popular and created a taste for horror and bloodshed. An
example of Seneca's influence on English drama can be seen in the works of Thomas Kyd
(1558–1594). His highly popular play about bloody revenge called The Spanish Tragedy
(1587) has many Senecan elements including horror, villains, corruption, intrigue and the
supernatural.
Content
Don Andrea, a Spanish nobleman, has been killed in battle with the Portuguese. After his
soul arrives in the underworld, Pluto sends it and the Spirit of Revenge back to the world of
the living to learn what happened after Don Andrea’s death. At the Spanish court, Don
Andrea’s ghost hears that the Portuguese have been defeated in war and that Balthazar,
prince of Portugal, has been taken prisoner. Balthazar, Don Andrea learns, is the man who
killed him. A quarrel has developed between Lorenzo and Horatio, each claiming the honor
of capturing Balthazar.
Balthazar, while a prisoner, falls in love with Bel-Imperia, who had been the fiancé of Don
Andrea. The king of Spain plans to make diplomatic use of Bel-Imperia, who is his niece, by
marrying her to the Portuguese prince, Balthazar, thus cementing the friendship of the two
countries. The king warns her that she must do as he commands. However, Bel-Imperia falls
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in love with Horatio.
Balthazar, aided by Lorenzo, plans to win the love of Bel-Imperia. Lorenzo and Balthazar
plot Horatio’s death. One night, when Bel-Imperia and Horatio meet in the garden, Horatio
is set upon by Balthazar and Lorenzo. They kill Horatio by hanging and then take BelImperia away.
When Horatio’s body is discovered, Hieronimo, Horatio’s father, goes mad, as does his wife.
Seeing these events, Don Andrea’s ghost becomes angry, but the Spirit of Revenge tells him
to be patient.
The marriage between Bel-Imperia and Balthazar is set. Hieronimo is given responsibility
over the entertainment for the marriage ceremony, and he uses it to take revenge. He devises
a play, a tragedy, to be performed at the ceremonies, and convinces Lorenzo and Balthazar
to act in it. Bel-Imperia, by now an associate in Hieronimo's plot for revenge, also acts in the
play.
The plot of the tragedy mirrors the plot of the play as a whole. Hieronimo casts himself in the
role of the hired murderer. During the action of the play, Hieronimo's character stabs
Lorenzo's character and Bel-Imperia's character stabs Balthazar's character, before killing
herself. But after the play is over, Hieronimo reveals to the horrified wedding guests that all
the stabbings in the play were done with real knives, and that Lorenzo, Balthazar, and BelImperia are now all dead. He then tries to kill himself, but the King and Duke of Castile stop
him. In order to keep himself from talking, he bites out his own tongue. Tricking the Duke
into giving him a knife, he then stabs the Duke and himself and then dies.
Revenge and Andrea then have the final words of the play. Andrea assigns each of the play's
"good" characters (Hieronimo, Bel-Imperia, Horatio) to happy eternities. The rest of the
characters are assigned to the various tortures and punishments of Hell.
The main concern of the tragedy was to tell a story and to emphasize its moral significance.
The religious and moral themes of medieval drama, under the influence of Renaissance humanism, began to give way to closer attention to ordinary human characters. During the earliest
part of the sixteenth century the abstract characters in the plays were substituted by characters
of real human beings. It was realized that a man with a name and a real human nature could
more easily win the attention of the public than a symbolic allegorical character.
Down to the sixteenth century there were neither theatres nor professional actors in England.
The nobility kept their own players, their servants, to perform at great celebrations. They
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staged magnificent masques – spectacular entertainments which combined music, song,
dance, and splendid costuming. Masques were written by professional playwrights. The
scenery and stage machinery were designed by the best architects of the time. The plot
introduced mythological and allegorical elements. The play ended with a dance when players
removed their masks and took members of the audience as partners.
Other plays that became fashionable in the sixteenth century were interludes, short one-act
plays usually performed as part of an evening’s entertainment at a rich man’s house.
In towns players were looking for the protection of a rich man because after a performance the
bailiff of the town could arrest them. The authorities passed the law in 1572, which made
actors punishable for vagrancy. Actors who were allowed to perform were those belonging to
a nobleman's company.
In 1574 the Earl of Leicester was the first to give his protection to a group of actors, and since
then they were called the Earl of Leicester's Men. After that two other great companies of
actors were formed: Lord Chamberlain's Men, and Lord Admiral's.
From time to time the actors went touring the country. They moved from town to town
spending nights in the inns. In the morning they set up their stages in the inn yards, took money
after their performances, and, finding that the audiences in the inns shifted frequently,
considered giving daily performances in the same place instead of moving on to new places
and fresh audiences. New audiences came to see their performances in the same inns. The rich
people usually sat in verandas, leading into inn bedrooms and overlooking the inn yard, while
the common people used to stand in the yard itself.
When acting was a recognized profession it was necessary to build permanent houses for
dramatic performances. The first playhouse in London, called the Theatre, was built by James
Burbage, the chief man of Leicester's company in 1576. It was built outside London, because
the City Council had banned the construction of theatres within the City of London itself.
Soon came another playhouse – the Curtain, in 1587 the Rose was built, which was followed
by the Swan in 1594. Shakespeare's Globe was built in 1598, out of the timbers of the old
Theatre.
Elizabethan theatres were built with the inn yard model in mind. They were open polygonal or
circular three-storied constructions. The stage in the theatre was elevated. There was a room
under the stage called cellar or hell. Actors in 'hell', who played the parts of ghosts, demons or
fairies, would make dramatic appearances through trap doors onto the stage. The back wall
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had two doors over which was a gallery. The gallery was used for seating as well as for
musicians or as a balcony if it was needed by the play. Between the two doors was a space
that could be closed off by a curtain. Part of the stage was covered by a roof, called the
heavens because from there the gods or angels could be lowered on the stage. There were two
rows of seats on the stage, and the actors were playing between them.
As acting was considered immoral, there were no women in the companies: female parts were
played by boys whose voices had not yet changed.
Many special effects were used in the theatre. Death scenes were violent and realistic, animal
organs and blood were often used to make battle scenes more impressive. The audiences
became very involved in the play, particularly the spectators in the yard, who were very close
to the action.
Theatres had entrances for admission. The price was low for the people who were prepared to
stand in the open air near the stage. For a higher price people could get a seat in one of the
galleries. The theatres were large: they could hold as many as three thousand spectators. The
plays lasted for hours.
The structure of the Elizabethan theatre had a great influence on form and technique in plays. In
contrast to the modern theatre, where there is a curtain separating the actor from the audience,
the Elizabethan actor was in much closer contact with the spectators. It was quite natural for
the actors to exchange words with the spectators. The immediate contact between the audience
and the players in Elizabethan theatres was lost a century later, in the Restoration period, after a
great reformation of the playhouses.
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The University Wits
The wits, or as they are usually called the University Wits were university graduates, the men
with learning and talent, but with no money. They led bohemian life, and were often seen in
pubs and taverns.
Before the time of Henry VIII penniless scholars used to live in monasteries where they
devoted themselves to reading manuscripts, learning and writing. After the foundation of the
Anglican Church, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and the scholars had to look for the
places to earn their living. The most popular occupations were those of a tutor or a secretary.
But the most gifted men turned to more creative professions, like writing poems and plays for
the new London theatres.
The most famous University Wits were John Lyly (1554?–1606), Robert Greene (1558–
1592), Thomas Kyd (1558–1594), George Peele (1558?–1597), and Christopher Marlowe
(1564–1593). Each of them gave something to the dramatic literature of the time. Lyly
produced wonderful dialogues, Greene wrote comedies with charm and humour, Peele made
the first attempt at a dramatic satire. The man who rose above his contemporaries in dramatic
gift and was considered to be almost equal to Shakespeare was Christopher Marlowe.
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Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
Christopher Marlowe was the son of a prosperous shoemaker. He was an exceptional student
and when he was fifteen he was awarded a scholarship to King's School in Canterbury, one of
the oldest schools in Britain. He continued his studies at Cambridge University, where he took
his Bachelor of Arts in 1583. Three years later he received his Master of Arts degree in spite of
the opposition by the University authorities. They suspected him of converting to Roman
Catholicism during a secret journey to France. Marlowe at this time was probably working for
the government in Her Majesty's Secret Service, spying on Catholic conspirators. Thus the
government authorities intervened on his behalf and the degree was granted.
He moved to London, where he met other graduates who were involved in the literary life of
London. Together they formed a circle of young writers known as the University Wits. Like all
of the members of the University Wits, Marlowe had a wild reputation – he was believed to be
an atheist who kept mistresses and fought the police. Yet his reputation might have been a
disguise for a man who was not at all wild and irresponsible. At the age of twenty-nine,
Marlowe was stabbed to death in a tavern. It is widely believed that he was deliberately
assassinated for political reasons.
Marlowe’s works were highly successful and had a major influence on other playwrights of the
period including Shakespeare.
During his short life Marlowe wrote eight plays. The most popular are Tamburlaine, The Jew
of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus. His tragedies are extravagant and full of imagination.
Each of his plays revolves around a protagonist who is obsessed by a ruling passion:
Tamburlaine wishes to conquer the world; the Jew of Malta is obsessed by his love for gold;
Doctor Faustus aspires to unlimited knowledge. However, his works are far more sophisticated
than the medieval morality plays which told simple tales of wickedness and well-deserved
punishment. Marlowe created tragedies in which men make difficult decisions being aware of
the potentially catastrophic consequences.
The play that shows all the greatness of Marlowe's genius is The Tragic History of Doctor
Faustus.
Content
Faustus becomes dissatisfied with his studies of medicine, law, logic and theology; therefore,
he decides to turn to the dangerous practice of necromancy, or magic.
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Faustus begins experimenting with magical incantations, and suddenly Mephistophilis
appears, in the form of an ugly devil. Faustus sends Mephistophilis back to hell with the
bargain that if Faustus is given twenty-four years of absolute power, he will then sell his
soul to Lucifer.
Later, in his study, when Faustus begins to despair, a Good Angel and a Bad Angel appear
to him; each encourages Faustus to follow his advice. Mephistophilis appears and Faust
agrees to sign a contract in blood with the devil even though several omens appear which
warn him not to make this bond. Faustus begins to repent of his bargain as the voice of the
Good Angel continues to urge him to repent. To divert Faustus, Mephistophilis and Lucifer
both appear and parade the seven deadly sins before Faustus. After this, Mephistophilis
takes Faustus to Rome and leads him into the pope's private chambers, where the two
become invisible and play pranks on the Pope and some unsuspecting friars.
Faustus and Mephistophilis go to the German emperor's court, where they conjure up
Alexander the Great. At this time, Faustus makes a pair of horns suddenly appear on one of
the knights who had been skeptical about Faustus' powers.
Faustus is next seen selling his horse to a horse-courser with the advice that the man must
not ride the horse into the water. Later, the horse-courser enters Faustus' study and accuses
Faustus of false dealings because the horse had turned into a bundle of hay in the middle of
a pond.
After performing other magical tricks such as bringing forth fresh grapes in the dead of
winter, Faustus returns to his study, where at the request of his fellow scholars, he conjures
up the apparition of Helen of Troy. An old man appears and tries to get Faustus to hope for
salvation and yet Faustus cannot. He knows it is now too late to turn away from the evil and
ask for forgiveness. When the scholars leave, the clock strikes eleven and Faustus realizes
that he must give up his soul within an hour.
As the clock marks each passing segment of time, Faustus sinks deeper and deeper into
despair. When the clock strikes twelve, devils appear amid thunder and lightning and carry
Faustus off to his eternal damnation.
Text
Act V, Scene 2
перевод Н. Н. Амосовой
[The clock strikes eleven.]
(Часы бьют одиннадцать)
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Фауст
Faustus
Ах, Фауст!
Ah, Faustus,
Один лишь час тебе осталось жизни.
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
Он истечет - и будешь ввергнут в ад!
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!
О, станьте же недвижны, звезды неба,
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
Чтоб навсегда остановилось время.
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Чтоб никогда не наступала полночь!
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Взойди опять, златое око мира.
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
Заставь сиять здесь вековечный день!
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
Иль пусть мой час последний длится год.
Иль месяц хоть, неделю или сутки,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
Чтоб вымолил себе прощенье Фауст!
O lente, lente curite, noctis equi!
О,
lente, lente currite noctis equi *!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
[О, медленно, медленно бегите, кони ночи!
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.
(лат.; Овидий, Amores, I, 13).]
O, I'll leap up to my God! – Who pulls me down? –
Но вечное движенье звезд все то же...
See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
Мгновения бегут, часы пробьют,
One drop would save my soul--half a drop: O my
И дьяволы придут, и сгинет Фауст!
Christ! –
Я дотянусь до бога! Кто-то тянет,
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ;
Неведомый, меня упорно вниз...
Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer! –
Вон кровь Христа, смотри, струится в небе!
Лишь капля, нет, хотя б всего полкапли
Where is it now? 'Tis gone; and see where God
Мне душу бы спасли, о мой Христос!..
Strecheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
За то, что я зову Христа, мне сердце
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
Не
раздирай, о сжалься, Люцифер!..
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
Взывать к нему я все не перестану!
No! no!
Где он теперь? Исчез!.. О, вон, смотри,
Then will I headlong run into the earth:
Бог в вышине десницу простирает
Earth gape! O, no, it will not harbour me!
И гневный лик склоняет надо мной.
You stars that reign'd at my nativity,
Громады гор, обрушьтесь на меня,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Укройте же меня от гнева бога!
Нет? Нет?
Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,
Тогда стремглав я кинусь в глубь земли.
Into the entrails of yon labouring clouds,
Разверзнись же, земля! Она не хочет
That, when you vomit forth into the air,
Мне дать приют, о нет!.. Вы, звезды неба,
My limbs may issue from their smoky mouths;
Что над моим царили гороскопом,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven!
[The clock strikes the half hour.]
Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon!
O God!
If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet for Christ's sake whose blood hath ransom'd me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd!
Чья власть дала мне в долю смерть и ад,
Втяните же меня туманной дымкой
В плывущую далеко в небе тучу!
Когда ж меня извергнете вы снова,
Пусть упадет на землю только тело
Из вашего курящегося зева,
Но пусть душа взлетит на небеса!..
(Бьют часы).
Ах, полчаса прошло... Вмиг минет час...
О боже!
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O, no end is limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd
Into some brutish beast! all beasts are happy,
For, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell.
Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer
That hath depriv'd thee of the joys of heaven.
[The clock striketh twelve.]
O, it strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!
[Thunder and lightning.]
O soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!
My God, my God! look not so fierce on me!
[Enter DEVILS.]
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while!
Ugly hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books!--Ah Mephistophilis!
[Exeunt DEVILS with Faustus.]
Коль надо мной не смилуешься ты,
Хоть ради всех святых страстей Христа,
Чья кровь мой грех когда-то искупила,
Назначь конец моим страданьям вечным!
Пусть тысячу в аду томлюсь я лет,
Сто тысяч лет, но наконец спасусь!..
Но нет конца мученьям грешных душ!
Зачем же ты бездушной тварью не был?
Иль почему душа твоя бессмертна?
Ах, если б прав был мудрый Пифагор
И если бы метампсихоз был правдой,
Душа моя могла б переселиться
В животное! Животные блаженны!
Их души смерть бесследно растворяет.
Моя ж должна для муки адской жить.
Будь прокляты родители мои!..
Нет, самого себя кляни, о Фауст!
Кляни, кляни убийцу Люцифера,
Лишившего тебя блаженства рая!
(Часы бьют полночь).
Бьют, бьют часы! Стань воздухом ты, тело,
Иль Люцифер тебя утащит в ад!
(Гром и молния).
Душа моя, стань каплей водяною
И, в океан упав, в нем затеряйся!
Мой бог, мой бог, так гневно не взирай!
(Появляются дьяволы).
О, дайте мне вздохнуть, ехидны, змеи!
О, не зияй так страшно, черный ад!
Не подходи же, Люцифер! Я книги
Свои сожгу! Прочь, прочь! О, Мефистофель!
(Дьяволы увлекают его).
(Входит Хор).
Хор
Обломана жестоко эта ветвь.
Которая расти могла б так пышно.
Сожжен побег лавровый Аполлона,
Что некогда в сем муже мудром цвел.
Нет Фауста. Его конец ужасный
Пускай вас всех заставит убедиться,
Как смелый ум бывает побежден,
Когда небес преступит он закон.
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Develop the last lines of the Russian translation into your own story illustrating
the massages of the play: the limits of human nature, the cost for extraordinary
powers, the ambition punished, the victory of morality over human passions, etc.
Style
Perhaps Marlowe's main contribution to the English drama was the elaboration of blank verse
(non-rhyming lines of iambic pentameter). Marlowe established blank verse as the principal
verse form of Elizabethan drama. It had been used before, but he made it more flexible by
varying the length of sentences. For instance, he wrote sentences longer than one line; these
"run-on" lines sound like the rhythm of natural speech. Marlowe avoided monotony by varying
stresses and breaking up the lines with pauses, exclamations and shortened sentences, and the
use of syntax to reflect the state of the character’s mind. Marlowe’s early death undoubtedly
deprived literature of even greater and more developed works.
Link
The Faust legend first flourished in medieval Europe and is thought to have its earliest roots in
the New Testament story of the magician Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-24). During the superstitious
Middle Ages, the story of the man who sold his soul to the devil to obtain supernatural powers
captured the popular imagination and spread rapidly. At some point the name of Faust was
definitely attached to this figure. A cycle of legends, including some from ancient and medieval
sources that were originally told about other magicians, began to collect around him. One of
the most widely-read magic texts of the period was attributed to Faust and many others
referred to him as an authority.
A famous German sage and adventurer born in 1480 was thought by many of his
contemporaries to be a magician and probably did practice some sort of black magic. Few
details of his life are certain, but it is known that he exploited the situation by calling himself
Faust the Younger, thus acquiring the reputation of the legendary character.
After a sensational career, this Faust died during a mysterious demonstration of flying which he
put on for a royal audience in 1525. It was generally believed that he had been carried away by
the devil. One of the scenes of Goethe's tragedy is set in Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig, the city
of this fatal exhibition, because the walls of the old tavern were decorated with representations
of Faust's exploits, and the place was traditionally connected with him.
A biography of Faust, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, based upon the shadowy life of
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Faust the Younger, but including many legendary stories, was published in Frankfurt in 1587.
That same year it was translated into English as The Historie of the damnable life and
deserved death of Doctor John Faustus. In both these popular editions of the "Faust-Book,"
the magician's deeds, his pact with the devil and final damnation are depicted. In this version
the legend took a permanent form.
When the Renaissance came to northern Europe, Faust was made into a symbol of free
thought and the opposition to the Church doctrine.
Marlowe used the English translation of the 1587 Faust-Book as his main source, but
transformed the legendary magician into a tragic figure and made his story a powerful
expression of the main subject of the Renaissance thought.
In the seventeenth century English strolling actors brought Marlowe's Faustus to Germany
where the play was translated and transformed into a puppet play. Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe saw its performance, and was inspired to write his version of Doctor Faustus.
Goethe's "Faust" is a tragic play. It was published in two parts. The play is meant to be read
rather than performed. It is Goethe's most famous work and considered by many to be one of
the greatest works of German literature.
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" aust Part One"is a complex story. It takes place in multiple settings, the first of which is
F
heaven. Mephistopheles makes a bet with God: he says that he can deflect God's favorite
human being (Faust), who is striving to learn everything that can be known, away from
righteous pursuits. The next scene takes place in Faust's study where Faust, despairing at
the vanity of scientific, humanitarian and religious learning, turns to magic for the
showering of infinite knowledge. He suspects, however, that his attempts are failing.
Frustrated, he ponders suicide, but rejects it as he hears the echo of nearby Easter
celebrations begin. He goes for a walk with his assistant Wagner and is followed home by a
stray poodle.
In Faust’s study, the poodle transforms into the devil (Mephistopheles). Faust makes an
arrangement with the devil: the devil will do everything that Faust wants while he is here on
earth, and in exchange Faust will serve the devil in hell. Faust's arrangement is that if
during the time while Mephistopheles is serving Faust, Faust is so pleased with anything the
devil gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, he will die in that instant.
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After the Devil wants Faust to sign the pact with blood, Faust complains that the devil does
not trust Faust's word of honor. In the end, Mephisto wins the argument, and Faust signs
the contract with a drop of his own blood. Faust has a few excursions and then meets
Margaret (also known as Gretchen). He is attracted to her and with jewelry and help from a
neighbor, Martha, the devil draws Gretchen into Faust's arms. Faust seduces Gretchen and
they sleep together. Gretchen’s mother dies from a sleeping potion, administered by Gretchen
to obtain privacy so that Faust could visit her. Gretchen discovers she is pregnant.
Gretchen’s brother condemns Faust, challenges him and falls dead at the hands of Faust
and the devil. Gretchen drowns her illegitimate child and is convicted of the murder. Faust
tries to save Gretchen from death by attempting to free her from prison. Finding that they
cannot free her, Faust and the devil flee the dungeon, while voices from heaven announce
that Gretchen shall be saved.
The first part represents the "small world"and takes place in Faust's own local, temporal
milieu. In contrast, P
" art Two"takes place in the w
" ide world"or "macrocosmos".Rich in classical
allusion, in "Faust Part Two", the romantic story of the first Faust is forgotten, and Faust
wakes in a field of fairies to initiate a new cycle of adventures and purpose.
The piece consists of five acts – relatively isolated episodes – each representing a different
theme. Ultimately, Faust goes to heaven, for he loses only half of the bet. Angels, who arrive
as messengers of divine mercy, declare at the end of Act V, "He who strives on and lives to
strive/ Can earn redemption still".
Goethe's great tragedy reinforced the new interest in the Faust story. Since his time it has
stimulated many creative thinkers and has been the central theme of notable works in all fields
of expression. In art, for instance, the Faust legend has provided fruitful subjects for such
painters as Ferdinand Delacroix (1798–1863). Musical works based on the Faust story
include Hector Berlioz's cantata, The Damnation of Faust (1846), Charles Gounod's
opera, Faust (1859), Arrigo Boito's opera, Mefistofele (1868), and the Faust Symphony
(1857) of Franz Lizt. Even the newest of art forms, the motion picture, has made use of the
ancient story, for a film version of Goethe's Faust was produced in Germany in 1925. But
most important, the legend has continued to be the subject of many poems, novels, and
dramatic works. Among the more recent of these are the novel, Doctor Faustus (1948) by
Thomas Mann and the poetic morality play, An Irish Faustus (1964) by Lawrence Durrell.
Each succeeding artist has modified the legend according to of his own time, and over the past
few centuries this tale has grown into an archetypal myth of man's aspirations and the dilemmas
he faces in the effort to understand his place in the universe. The history of the legend's
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development and its expansion into broader moral and philosophical spheres is also an
intellectual history of mankind.
Although today many of the classical and Central European themes may be hard for the
modern reader to grasp, the work remains a resonant parable on scientific learning and religion,
passion and seduction, independence and love, as well as other subjects.
Think of the books or films that present super-characters, scientists, or
extraordinary people who defy commonsense and demonstrate abilities beyond
human limit.
What is the outcome of such a challenge? Is it always punished by God?
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William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Shakespeare is the author of more than three dozen remarkable plays and more than 150
poems. Over the centuries, these literary works have made such a deep impression on the
human race that all sorts of legends and theories have been invented about their author. There
are even those who say that somebody other than Shakespeare wrote the works that bear his
name. Such speculation is based on the wrong assumption that little is known about
Shakespeare's life; in fact, Shakespeare's life is better documented than the life of any other
dramatist of the time except perhaps for Ben Jonson, a writer who seems almost modern in the
way he publicized himself. Jonson was an honest, blunt, and outspoken man who knew
Shakespeare well; for a time the two dramatists wrote for the same theatrical company, and
Shakespeare even acted in Jonson's plays. Jonson published a poem praising Shakespeare,
asserting that he was superior to all Greek, Roman, and English dramatists, and predicting that
he would be "not of an age, but for all time."Jonson's judgment is now commonly accepted,
and his prophecy has come true.
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, probably on April 23rd. He
was christened in the parish church there on April 26th. His father, a glover by trade, was a
prominent local figure who held important positions in the government of the town. His mother
came from a prosperous local family.
William Shakespeare probably attended Stratford grammar school, but he did not go on to
study at university. After leaving school, he may have been apprenticed to a butcher, but
because he shows in his plays very detailed knowledge of many different crafts and trades,
speculators have proposed a number of different occupations that he could have followed.
When he was eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior, and six
months later his first child Susanna was born, followed three years later by twins Hamnet and
Judith. We don't know how the young Shakespeare supported his family, but according to
tradition he taught school for a few years. The two daughters grew up and married; the son
died when he was eleven. It is commonly believed that Shakespeare left Stratford to avoid
being arrested for poaching.
He went to London where he did a series of jobs, including holding theatre-goers' horses
outside playhouses. He eventually became an actor, and by 1592 he was sufficiently wellknown as a dramatist to be the subject of an attack by the playwright Robert Greene (1558–
1592). Greene wrote a pamphlet in which he complained that uneducated dramatists were
becoming more popular than university men like himself. In it he called Shakespeare “an
upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”.
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In 1595 Shakespeare joined an important company of actors called The Lord Chamberlain's
Men (later changed to The King's Men) and performed at court. His success as a dramatist
grew. He mixed in high social circles and the Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicated his
sonnets, became his patron and friend. By 1596 Shakespeare was beginning to prosper. His
improved financial standing allowed him to invest in the building of the Globe Theatre and in
1597 he bought New Place, the finest house in Stratford. He had his father apply to the
Heralds' College for a coat of arms that the family could display, signifying that they were
"gentlefolks." On Shakespeare's family crest a falcon is shown, shaking a spear. To support
this claim to gentility, Shakespeare bought New Place, a handsome house and grounds in
Stratford, a place so commodious and elegant that the Queen of England once stayed there
after Shakespeare's daughter Susanna inherited it.
By 1600 Shakespeare was regularly associating with members of the aristocracy, and six of his
plays had been given command performances at the court of Queen Elizabeth.
Shakespeare indeed prospered under Queen Elizabeth; according to an old tradition, she asked
him to write The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600–1601) because she wanted to see the merry,
fat old knight Sir John Falstaff (of the "Henry plays") in love.
Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare. In
the two Henry IV plays, he is a companion to Prince Hal, the future King Henry V. A fat, vain,
boastful, and cowardly knight, Falstaff leads the apparently wayward Prince Hal into trouble, and
is ultimately repudiated after Hal becomes king. Falstaff does at times seem to be mainly a funmaker, a character whom we both laugh with and laugh at, and almost in the same breath. Even
his name invites humor, as it is a sort of pun on impotence, brought on by the character's excessive consumption of
alcohol.
He prospered even more under Elizabeth's successor, King James of Scotland. Fortunately for
Shakespeare's company, as it turned out, James's royal entry into London in 1603 had to be
postponed for several months because the plague was raging in the city. While waiting for the
epidemic to subside, the royal court stayed in various palaces outside London. Shakespeare's
company took advantage of this situation and, since the city theaters were closed, performed
several plays for the court and the new king. Shakespeare's plays delighted James, for he loved
literature and was starved for pleasure after the grim experience of ruling Scotland for many
years. He immediately took the company under his patronage, renamed them the King's Men,
gave them patents to perform anywhere in the realm, provided them with special clothing for
state occasions, increased their salaries, and appointed their chief members, including
Shakespeare, to be Grooms of the Royal Chamber. All this patronage brought such prosperity
to Shakespeare that he was able to make some very profitable real estate investments in
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Stratford and London.
Shakespeare retired to his hometown in 1611, where he died on April 23rd 1616.
Works
Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays in a period of about twenty years, from 1591 to 1611.
The plots of his plays are not original. Shakespeare took the material from old chronicles of
English history, Italian novels, pastoral romances and older plays and adapted them to his
needs. The stories of Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear may be found in the chronicles of England,
Scotland, and Ireland. But when a comparison is made between Shakespeare's masterpieces
and the old chronicles and tales one can see how Shakespeare's philosophy, imagination, and
artistic expression transformed the plays. Every theme and character got a deeper meaning and
value in his hands.
Shakespeare introduced scenes and characters belonging to Egypt, Rome, and the
Renaissance Italy as though he depicted them from real life. His fairies, ghosts and strange
monsters are lifelike and convincing.
Shakespeare did not publish his plays. Some of his works were put together from notes taken
in the theatres or reconstructed from memory by actors. They are referred to as Bad Quartos.
Quartos are large-sized books made of sheets of folded paper. They are called 'Bad' because
they are full of gaps and mistakes.
In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, two former actors and friends of
Shakespeare's, Heminge and Condell, decided to publish the first collection of his plays. The
so-called First Folio included thirty-five plays that were divided into 'Comedies, Histories and
Tragedies'.
The plays were not dated. However, approximate dates have subsequently been given to them
based on: references to contemporary events in the play; references to the works of other
writers which are dated; style, plot, characterisation and metre used in the play. Shakespeare's
plays are usually divided into four periods.
The first period covers the years from 1590 to 1595 and was a period of learning and
experimentation. In these years Shakespeare wrote very different types of plays: chronicle
plays dealing with the history of England, such as Henry VI and Richard III; comedies which
include A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew; tragedies Titus
Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet.
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During the second period, from 1596 to the turn of the century, Shakespeare focused on
chronicle plays and comedies and it is generally agreed that it was during these years that he
wrote his best comedies, including The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor,
Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, which base their comedy on a
wide range of themes such as the pain and pleasure of love, mistaken identity and the
degrading of materialistic and humourless people.
During the third period, from 1600 to 1608, Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies. These
plays have given world theatre unforgettable characters such as Hamlet, King Lear, Othello
and Macbeth. The comedies that were written in this period no longer have the bright,
optimistic appeal of earlier works. The darker elements that are found in works such as
Measure for Measure seem to suggest that Shakespeare was experiencing difficulties in his
personal life which made his outlook rather pessimistic.
A return to a happier state of mind is reflected in the plays of the fourth period from 1609 to
1612. The Tempest, for example, is set in the ideal world of an enchanted island where an
atmosphere of magic, music, romance and harmony prevails.
Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest dramatists in world literature. The
universal appeal of his work is based on its timeless themes, unforgettable characters and
powerful language. His ability to engage the audience's attention has remained unsurpassed to
the present day. The variety of timeless themes in Shakespeare's works is unsurpassed: the
appeal of an unsophisticated life in harmony with nature (As You Like It); ambition and
jealousy, deception and crime (Macbeth, Othello); greed, corruption and ingratitude (King
Lear); love and politics (Antony and Cleopatra); crime, guilt and punishment (Macbeth,
Richard III); the all-conquering power of love (Much Ado About Nothing); the impatience of
youth (Romeo and Juliet); the pains and pleasures of love (The Merry Wives of Windsor,
Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It).
Shakespeare portrayed an unforgettable gallery of characters: kings, queens, princes, courtiers,
merchants, merchants, sailors, soldiers. They all possess individuality. Shakespeare managed
to create sympathy for his heroes, making them understandable, complex and recognizable.
Comedies
Shakespeare's romantic comedies mostly date from the early period of his life. Light-hearted
plays, mostly on themes relating to love, they feature stock theatrical devices such as mistaken
identity (The Comedy of Errors) and disguise/cross-dressing (The Two Gentlemen of Verona)
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– where the comedy was accentuated by the fact that women's parts were acted by men or
boys. These plays, generally with extremely complicated plots, use situational comedy and
farcical effects (The Taming of the Shrew) as well as wordplay and wit.
The Taming of the Shrew is a well-balanced comedy with brilliant dialogues.
Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, of shrewd wit and hot temper, decides to marry Katarina,
the notorious elder daughter of Baptista, a rich gentleman of Padua. The taming begins.
Katarina is mad, but Petruchio says that he finds her courteous and gentle. In the end
Katarina agrees to marry Petruchio. On the wedding day he humiliates Katarina by keeping her waiting before the wedding ceremony. He refuses to attend the bridal feast, and takes
Katarina to his home. He doesn't let her sleep or eat and distresses her with his mad
behaviour. This treatment makes Katarina tamed, and when she comes to see her father she
surprises everyone with her sweet temper and shyness:
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe,
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks, and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Shakespeare's later comedies, written after 1598, (Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It,
Twelfth Night) display a shift in tone to a greater seriousness. The rollicking heroes still remain
(as for example Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Belch and Aguecheek in Twelfth
Night), but, in keeping with the spirit of the times, there is a growing presence of meditation
and melancholy, as well as romance. The treatment of themes such as the unreliability of love,
and of illusion and self-deception anticipate the great tragedies. In particular, the use of the
clown or fool (Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night) and their bitter-sweet
attitude to life looks forward to their use in King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, where their
seemingly childish words usually conceal a macabre wisdom which the saner characters in the
plays fail to recognize. Some of the plays are so weighty as to hardly seem comedies at all: for
example, The Merchant of Venice, whose plot runs much deeper and treats more complex
themes such as anti-Semitism and greed.
The Merchant of Venice presents a story which is nonsense. A Jewish moneylender Shylock
agrees to lend money to a merchant Antonio who needs the money to help his friend
Bassanio. Bassanio is going to marry beautiful Portia. The money is lent on condition that
Antonio shall pay a pound of his flesh if he fails to repay the debt at the right time. Antonio's
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ships are wrecked, and he fails to repay the money. The case is taken to the court, and
Antonio has no hope. Portia, dressed as a lawyer, makes a speech at the court. She says that
Shylock may take his flesh, but without a drop of blood. There is nothing about blood in the
agreement. Shylock cannot do it, and Antonio is saved.
The play seems to have a happy ending, but it is not what it seems, since it depends on the
tricks of the characters, rather than on natural humanity. Shylock is usually called the first tragic
character in Shakespeare's plays. Shylock addresses the audience and other characters with the
words showing that he is a man just like them. "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same
winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed?"
There is a rather dark atmosphere in Measure for Measure , which is preoccupied with the
themes of justice and mercy. Finally, A Midsummer Night's Dream, within the context of a
comedy about love and marriage, raises questions regarding the nature of reality in general.
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Hermia is ordered by her father to marry Demetrius, but she loves Lysander. Her friend
Helena loves Demetrius and wants to marry him. Under the law of Athens, Hermia is given
four days in which to obey her father. In case she doesn't, she must suffer death or enter a
nunnery. Hermia and Lysander escape from Athens and find themselves in the wood
haunted by fairies. Helena knows about the project and tells Demetrius who decides to
follow the couple Helena goes after him, and soon all four meet in the wood, and are
enchanted by the fairies. The mortal and the supernatural characters are mixed. Hermia's
father appears on the scene, the runaways are forgiven and the couples marry.
In Shakespeare's comedies there is no central figure, but in his tragedies the attention of the
author is concentrated upon a single character. The difference is evident even in the titles of the
tragedies. They take their titles from the names of the heroes, the comedies never do this.
Histories
Shakespeare began his career with a history play (Henry VI) and the last play attributed to him
is also a history (Henry VIII), but most of this category of plays belong to the middle part of
his career, between 1595 and 1600. Writing histories Shakespeare took from chronicles, often
transforming historical events to suit the political climate and tastes of the Elizabethan age. He
produced topical plays dealing with themes of rebellion and kingship at a time when there was
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a real fear of an overthrow. Shakespeare, like the other dramatists of his time, was very
favourably disposed towards the authority of the monarchy. The main examples of the genre
(Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, and Henry V) are a cycle setting out the story of the kings
immediately preceding the Tudor dynasty. One of the greatest of Shakespeare's creations is
undoubtedly the comic character Falstaff, the “man-mountain” whose interests are strictly
limited to eating, drinking and womanizing. He appears in the two parts of Henry IV, and his
hilarious adventures often seem to dominate the historical action of the plays.
The so-called Roman plays (Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra), although not
really belonging to the category of histories, all show a preoccupation with the same themes of
order, rebellion and authority.
Tragedies
Tragedy is a kind of play in which human actions have their inevitable consequences, in which
the characters' bad deeds, errors, mistakes, and crimes are never forgiven or corrected. The
characters in a comedy do not live under this iron law of cause and effect. They can do
whatever they please so long as they amuse their audience, and at the end of the play the funny
mess they have made is easily cleaned up. But in tragedy, a careless action will inevitably lead
to a catastrophe, usually a death or some deaths.
The first of Shakespeare's most well-known tragedies is Romeo and Juliet, known to all parts
of civilized world as the most famous tragedy of love. The plot is based on an old Italian
romance, translated into English.
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The Montegues and the Capulets are the two chief families of Verona, and they are bitter
enemies. Romeo, the son of Lord Montegue, and Juliet, the daughter of Capulet, fall in love
with each other and marry secretly with the help of Friar Laurence. During a street battle
Romeo kills Juliet's brother Tybalt and as a punishment is banished from the city. Romeo
goes to Mantua.
Juliet's parents want her to marry count Paris. On the night before the wedding Friar
Laurence gives Juliet a drink which must render her lifeless for forty hours. Romeo is
supposed to take her from the family vault and bring her to Mantua. But the message sent by
Friar Laurence doesn't reach Romeo, and Romeo hears that Juliet is dead. He gets to the
vault, drinks the poison, kisses Juliet and dies. When Juliet awakens she sees the body of
Romeo with a cup in his hands, guesses what's happened and stabs herself.
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Why do you think Shakespeare suggests that real love is tragic?
Shakespeare's tragedies, written after the death of Queen Elizabeth are more philosophic. They
mark the author's disillusion, hopelessness and disappointment. This period is often called
Shakespeare's black period. In his tragedies, again and again the characters ask, "What is a
man?". This was the question of the age.
Shakespeare's tragedies of this time are the stories of revenge, jealousy, and ambition. They
have in common the idea that mankind is constantly trying to go beyond its limits in order to
achieve perfection and harmony in the world. But mankind itself is not perfect, and so must fail
in these attempts.
The tragic flaw which the main heroes display takes the form of a powerful passion (jealousy in
Othello, ambition in Macbeth, revenge in Hamlet). Darker forces often seem to be at work:
storms or supernatural phenomena in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, as well as the frequent
madness (Lady Macbeth, Ophelia, King Lear). They are indications of the struggle between a
man and his destiny. Shakespeare uses exceptionally vivid images to represent the depths of
the human soul. The great tragedies create their own individual world where normal moral laws
are overturned.
The only way the balance and order must be restored is through the destruction of the hero.
Hamlet is a play, as Anthony Burgess says, "of all the plays ever written, that the world least
willingly be without".
John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–1993), published under the pen name Anthony
Burgess, was an English writer and composer. His best known novel is a dystopian satire A
Clockwork Orange.
The plot of Hamlet was borrowed by Shakespeare from Thomas Kyd's The
Spanish Tragedy, but Shakespeare changed the time of Hamlet from the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance, providing the play with the setting of a contemporary Renaissance court.
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Prince Hamlet suspects that his dead father, King of Denmark, was murdered by his uncle
Claudius, who has married his mother and become king. The Ghost of his father informs
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him about the murder and tells him to revenge. Hamlet promises to revenge, but on second
thought decides to check the words of the Ghost. So it takes him a long time before he
revenges:
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Hamlet is a thinker, whose hesitation and inability to act cause the tragic development of the
play. He kills Claudius, but is badly wounded himself. The queen, his mother, is poisoned by
the drink intended for Hamlet. His love Ophelia is drawn, her brother Laertes and her father
Polonius are killed by Hamlet.
Shakespeare depicts Hamlet in the struggle of one against many:
The time is out of joint;
О cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Macbeth is the gloomiest of Shakespeare's plays. It creates a very bitter, pessimistic and
hopeless vision of life. Macbeth is the only play of Shakespeare that is related to the
contemporary historical situation. Its subject was regicide, commonly regarded as the supreme
crime. The public had been moved by an attempted regicide in November 1605 – the famous
Gunpowder Plot – which the English people, even after three and a half centuries still have not
forgotten.
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or
the Jesuit Treason, was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of
Scotland by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby. The plan was to blow
up the House of Lords during the State Opening of England's Parliament on 5 November 1605.
The plot was revealed to the authorities in an anonymous letter. Most of the conspirators fled from London as they
learnt of the plot's discovery. At their trial on 27 January 1606, eight of the survivors were convicted and sentenced to
be hanged, drawn and quartered.
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The ambitious Scottish general Macbeth is told by the witches that he will become thane,
and later king. Immediately comes the news that Macbeth is made thane. King Duncan is
staying in Macbeth's castle, and Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth kill the king. But
Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain escape. Malcolm brings an army against Macbeth,
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who is killed. Lady Macbeth is already dead. Shakespeare has humanized the two
murderers, by making them husband and wife. To add to it the play is highly poetic. Here
are the words of Macbeth when he hears of his wife's death:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth fascinates the readers because it shows, more clearly than any of Shakespeare's other
tragedies, how a character can change as a result of what he does. Macbeth is trapped as soon
as he understands what the witches in Act I, Scene 3 are saying to him, and his punishment, in
the form of mental anguish, begins even before he commits any crimes. At the start of the play,
the mere thought of committing a murder terrifies Macbeth, makes his hair stand on end and
his heart knock at his ribs, although he is a veteran of many battles and no novice at carving up
men with a sword. But it is one thing to fight openly, quite another thing is to kill stealthily.
Lady Macbeth's deterioration is different from her husband's but just as dramatic. Legally she
is not an actual murderer. But she is the first to decide that Duncan must die. Macbeth hesitates
right up to the last moment. After the first murders, she exerts immense self-control over
herself, while he surrenders to his nerves. But it would be incorrect to think of her as an
unfeminine monster or she-devil, because she does eventually crack under the strain. Both
Macbeth and his wife are moral beings who excite our pity rather than our contempt or disgust.
We see what they do to their king and their country, but more than that, we see what they do to
themselves. Why do they commit their crimes? The customary answer to this question – that
they are ambitious – is a superficial one because it leads only to another question: "Why are
they so ambitious that they are willing to commit such crimes?" These questions are
unanswerable because evil is just as mysterious as it is real. Shakespeare makes no attempt to
solve the mystery of evil. Instead he uses language to make it even more mysterious and
repulsive.
Romances
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This category embraces the later plays written after Shakespeare retired to Stratford, around
1608, and includes Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. The last plays of
Shakespeare Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest express the idea of forgiveness.
The violence and pessimism of his great tragedies are gone. The world is wicked, but the
spectators are given hope.
The Tempest is Shakespeare's magical “swan-song”.
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Prospero, duke of Milan, is ousted from the throne by his brother Antonio, and with his
daughter Miranda put into a boat and sent into the open sea. They reach an island
inhabited by spirits who serve the witch Sycorax. Prospero with the help of the knowledge of
magic releases Ariel, the good spirit, and enslaves the witch's son Caliban, a misshapen
monster, whose character may be interpreted as that of a natural man, instinctively poetic
and brutal, longing for independence and better life.
After Prospero and Miranda have lived in the island for twelve years, a ship earring Antonio
and his son Ferdinand is brought by the magic of Prospero close to the island and wrecked.
Prospero is planning the unity of Naples and Milan through the marriage of his daughter
Miranda and Naples king's son Ferdinand. He makes Ariel bring them together and
watches them fall in love. At the same time Ariel makes Antonio repent his cruelty and restore
relations with Prospero. The ship is magically restored, and all the heroes leave the island.
Caliban is left, as before, the island's sole inhabitant. Miranda and Ferdinand are going to
marry and restore peace between Naples and Milan.
The play may be considered as symbolic. Prospero is an allegory of reason and knowledge,
Caliban is the personification of human nature, Ariel is the symbol of the good spirit. The
happy end of the play contrasts the sins and shortcomings of an older generation with
humanist ideas of the young.
The character of Prospero is often identified with Shakespeare himself. Prospero’s attempts to
bring the events to a happy conclusion are likened to Shakespeare’s aspirations as a dramatist.
In the most important speeches of the play Prospero convinces Miranda and Ferdinand that
what they have been watching is only a play, an illusion that keeps with the nature of everything
in the world:
Like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
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Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The reality of our ordinary life and everyday experience is shown as illusory and shadowy.
Shakespeare balances the "untrue" images of art against the uncertain "truths" of reality. His
last plays deal with the age-old debate on the relations between art and reality:
Our revels now are ended.
These our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air...
Late romances are more lyrical in comparison with the earlier plays and seem to represent a
newly found peace of mind in Shakespeare's art. There is a common thread linking some of the
plays. All of them somehow deal with reconciliation and justice. Through a series of conflicts
they move from a starting point of loss or injustice to a happy and forgiving conclusion. They
expose the corruption of civilization and reassert the value of mercy and love. They also have a
strong supernatural presence and the qualities of a fairy tale. Their tranquility constitutes a
fitting conclusion to Shakespeare's career: the aging playwright, after the great inner conflict
which resulted in the production of the tragedies, finds peace and reconciliation in his own
heart at last.
Text
from As You Like It
All the world's a stage
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
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In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
“Life is theatre” is the most famous metaphor that translates the concept of
human life. What do you think about the illusory, theatrical character of human
existence? Do you agree with Shakespeare?
Think of other metaphors that interpret man’s life.
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Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
Benjamin Jonson was born in London and educated at Westminster School. On leaving school,
he became a bricklayer, following his stepfather's trade until 1597, apart from a short period of
military service in the Netherlands. He was then employed by Philip Henslowe as an actorwriter. The following year disaster struck: he killed the actor Gabriel Spencer, and was
sentenced to death, avoiding execution only on technicality. He was sent to prison, where he
was converted to Roman Catholicism. On his release he began to write plays for various
companies, including the one Shakespeare belonged to. In the Jacobean period he was a
prolific writer of court masques for almost thirty years.
The Jacobean era succeeds the Elizabethan era and refers to the period in English and Scottish
history that coincides with the reign of James VI of Scotland (1567–1625), who also inherited the
crown of England in 1603 as James I.
He was certainly the greatest exponent of the masque: a court entertainment
with music and drama of a mythological nature. His poems which are written in a smooth,
classical style influenced the course of poetry in the seventeenth century. In 1619 he was
awarded an honorary degree by Oxford University, and began to teach rhetoric at Gresham
College in London. In 1628 he was paralyzed by a stroke and remained confined to bed for the
last nine years of his life.
Jonson is a fine writer of Renaissance satirical comedy, in plays such as Volpone (1606), The
Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614).
He is often called Shakespeare's antipode. Jonson disliked Shakespeare’s fantastic comedies,
wide-ranging chronicles, and highly emotional and dramatic tragedies. Jonson was a dramatist
of realism. All his comedies are made out of the situations of his own time, and he was always
contemporary in his themes and settings.
Every Man in his Humour (1598) is a kind of revolt from Shakespearean comedy in matter as
well as in style. Jonson wanted ordinary facts expressed in ordinary speech, nothing unusual.
Jonson's dramatic works begin a new chapter in the history of English drama. While
Shakespeare saw people as strange mixtures of the good and the evil, always surprising, and
full of contradictions, Jonson saw them as simple and almost mechanical combinations of four
elements. He used the medieval idea that the human soul was made of humours – sanguine,
choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic – which, mixed in different proportions, gave different
human types. In each character one quality predominates: amorousness, cowardice,
boastfulness, etc. They know no change or complexity. Once established, they remain as they
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are.
“Some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way.”
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Volpone, or the Fox
Volpone, whose name means ‘Great Fox’, gained his wealth through frauds and deception.
He pretends to be fatally ill to induce people to offer him gold and gifts out of their own free
will. People took wealth to Volpone thinking themselves as the future heirs of Volpone.
The Three Birds of Prey are Voltore, Corbaccio, Corvino
The first to make his appearance is Voltore. The lawyer brings a gold plate for Volpone.
Corbaccio is an elderly man who is the next to hope to outlive Volpone and inherit his
money. He gives a vial of medicine for Volpone, which he refuses fearing it is some sort of
poison to speed up Volpone’s death. Corvino, the merchant, gives Volpone a pearl and a
diamond.
Volpone’s servant Mosca, the fly, manages to convince Corbaccio to make Volpone his sole
heir. Corbaccio disinherits his son Bonario.
Volpone fired by his lust for Corvino’s wife, Celia, enlists Mosca to work on his behalf to woo
Celia. Mosca arranges for Volpone to seduce Celia by telling Corvino that Volpone would
surely choose him as his sole heir if he allows his wife Celia to sleep with him as a
“restorative” for his failing health. Corvino’s desire for material possession is stronger than
his sexual jealousy and he agrees to sacrifice his wife.
Volpone must abandon his disguise to show Celia that he is a far more worthy lover than her
husband. Celia is unmoved and Volpone enraged by her refusal threatens her that if she will
not make love to him wittingly, he will have to take her by force. Celia is rescued by Bonario
and Volpone’s lie is exposed: “I am unmasked, unspirited, undone”.
In the Final Act, Volpone expresses his wish to disclose his lie but not before he indulges
himself in one final prank on his “birds of prey” by pretending he died and left all his
wealth to his servant, Mosca. Volpone has now become totally dependent on Mosca and
Mosca tells the audience: “now I have the keys, and am possessed”.
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With Mosca's betrayal, the cheating is finally revealed and Volpone himself asks for the
punishment that is due to him and Mosca as well as to Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore.
At the end justice is executed to all. Once the lie is discovered, not only are Cecilia and
Bonario declared innocent, but the “birds of prey” along with Mosca and Volpone are
punished in a way that reflects their vices. Volpone must confiscate his ill-gained wealth and
is to be sent to prison:
“Thou are to lie in prison, cramped with irons,
Till thou be’st sick, and lame indeed”.
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Late Elizabethan Drama
There is clearly no sudden change in literary production when a new king or queen comes to
the throne. However, under the early Stuart monarchs, James I and Charles I there was a
definite shift in moral view; Elizabethan confidence began to waver and a rather more cynical
(and realistic!) view of human nature and corruption began to hold sway. The dramatists of the
day began to produce plays with a sharper satirical edge.
Classical settings such as Venice or Rome gave way to portraits of the corruption and
hypocrisy of contemporary London society, as exemplified in the plays of Thomas
Middleton (1580–1627). This desperate world-view culminates in the tragedies of John
Webster (1578–1634) which are unequalled in their gloomy vision of human nature. Gradually
the audience was also changing: Shakespeare's move to the inside and more exclusive
Blackfriars Theatre in 1609 was a sign that the theatre was losing its appeal to the masses, and
despite popular successes by Thomas Dekker (1572–1632), Thomas Heywood (1570–
1641), John Ford (1586-1640), Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–
1625), who wrote some very popular comedies together in the period 1608–1613, and Philip
Massinger (1583–1640); by the time the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642 drama was in
serious decline.
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English Literature in the Time of Puritan Revolution and
Restoration
Historical Context
Literary Context
Cavalier Poets
Restoration Drama
John Milton (1608–1674)
John Bunyan (1628–1688)
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Historical Context
James' son, Charles I (1600–1649) stubbornly pursued his father's policy asserting that the
king’s power is absolute. When the Parliament refused his request for funds, Charles dissolved
it. After 11 years during the war with France and Spain and the rebellion in Scotland, Charles
had to summon the Parliament again. In 1628 the Commons put forward the Petition of Rights
in order to limit the power of the king, according to which there should be no imprisonment
without cause shown, no forced taxes imposed without parliamentary agreement, no martial
law. This policy brought about an open conflict between the Parliament and the king.
The supporters of the king were the members of the House of Lords, royal officers, and
landlords. They were known as Royalists or Cavaliers. The supporters of the king's
opposition were the members of the House of Commons, townsmen and small landlords.
They were known as Roundheads. Their hair was cut close, their dresses were plain and dull in
colouring, unlike curled hair and brightly coloured clothes of the Cavaliers.
In 1642 the Civil War began. At the beginning of the war the Royalists won quickly, but with
the time it became clear that the Roundheads would defeat the king. The king's army was
unpaid, got disorganized, and the soldiers started to run away. The Roundheads got the money
from the rich merchants. The army was headed by Oliver Cromwell, a gifted commander
who made the Parliament army well-trained and disciplined. In 1645 in a decisive battle at
Naseby the Royalists were completely defeated. Charles I was arrested and imprisoned. In
1649 Charles I was brought to the trial, found guilty for treason, and executed. Charles
accepted his death with such dignity and courage that at the time when the monarchy was
restored in England, he was regarded as a martyr.
Most of the king's enemies were Puritans. Therefore the Civil War of 1642–49 is traditionally
called the Puritan Revolution.
After the victory, Oliver Cromwell proclaimed himself to be Lord Protector and started to rule
as a dictator. Cromwell's rule (1653–58) was hard on the people. The Puritans wanted church
and state to become one body and established the government of saints. The Bible became the
book of the law. The church service was made simpler and shorter; confession and music
were eliminated and the architecture of the churches was changed completely: no stain glass,
statues, or beautifully decorated altars. Pleasure was regarded sinful. The Puritans closed
theatres, banned sports and amusements, forbade Christmas and Easter celebrations.
Cromwell's son, Richard Cromwell, tried to carry on his father's regime, but within a year he
was forced to resign. The Houses of Parliament resumed their activity, and in 1660 invited
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Charles II (1630–1685), the son of Charles, from the exile to be their monarch. This
important event marked the beginning of the period of Restoration.
The date 1660 is one of the most significant in the history of English politics. After two
decades of the Civil War and Cromwell dictatorship, on May 29, 1660, Charles II was
triumphantly restored to the throne from which his father had been driven. When Charles was
making his way from Dover to London, he was greeted by the ringing bells and the flying flags
and joyful cries of the crowds, chanting "Long live the king!".
Charles II believed in the divine right of the king and admired the absolute power of Louis
XIV. However, he wanted stability and order for his exhausted country and all his life tried to
avoid an open break with the Parliament.
Louis XIV (1638–1715), known as Louis the Great (Louis le Grand) or the Sun King (le RoiSoleil), was a monarch of the House of Bourbon who ruled as King of France from 1643 until his
death. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest of any monarch of a major country in
European history.
Charles was tolerant to different religious groups, and made attempts to unite Catholics,
Puritans and members of the Anglican Church. The fact that Charles had spent a long time in
Catholic France gave rise to rumours that the king wanted to restore Catholicism in England. In
1673 the Parliamentarians, who were mostly Anglican, passed the Test Act which did not allow
Catholics to take positions of authority in the government. The Act developed the
confrontation between the king and Parliament. The Parliamentarians did all they could to
weaken the monarchy in England. The result was the creation of two political parties, the
Whigs and the Tories.
The Whigs (a rude name for cattle drivers) were merchants, businessmen, and certain lords
who feared the power of the king. The Whigs believed that Parliament should be stronger than
the king, and that he should be guided by the House of Commons. They also believed in religious freedom. Many of the Whigs were Dissenters, Protestants who did not agree with the
doctrines of the Church of England.
A dissenter (from the Latin dissentire, “to disagree”), is one who disagrees in matters of opinion,
belief, etc. In the social and religious history of England it refers to a member of a religious body
who has, for one reason or another, separated from the Established Church. Dissenters were
Protestants who refused to recognise the supremacy of the Established Church (Anglican).
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The Whigs were more democratic than the opposition party nicknamed the Tories (an Irish
name for thieves). The Tories believed in the king's power, but limited by the decisions of
Parliament. They also favoured the authority of the Anglican Church. Many of the Tories came
from the Cavaliers and shared the views of their ancestors. The Tories were favoured by
Charles II and were often given high positions in the Anglican Church and the court.
The restoration brought the change in lifestyle, philosophy, art and literature as well as in
government. The Cromwell dictatorship had been exhausting and difficult. The ideals of
Puritans could appeal to comparatively few. Puritan morality had failed. The sober dresses and
solemn faces of the Puritans had become ridiculous and ugly. The mass of English nation
turned with relief and pleasure to the new mode of life. People of all classes of society were
seeking amusements and entertainments. The May poles were set up again, Christmas and
Easter were celebrated, sports, hunting and gambling were revived. Theatres that had been
closed by the Puritans were opened again.
Charles II had lived at the splendid court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and brought from
Versailles French fashions and styles. Charles, who was called the merry monarch, believed in
exuberant life and extravagances for himself and the court. He was little concerned about how
others managed their lives. His motto was "Live and let others live". The court, following the
example set by the monarch, corrupted the English society. The upper classes lacked such
principles as patriotism, honour and the sense of duty. Bribery became customary in the
government, drunkenness turned into a national vice, crimes were regularly committed in badly
lit London streets. The most obvious characteristic of the period of Restoration is its lowered
moral tone.
By 1660 the population of London had risen up to 500,000. The city was restless and alive.
There were gay boating parties on the Thames, picnics in the beautiful gardens, music and
fireworks at night. On London streets the silks, powdered headdresses, gold coaches of the
rich moved against a background of rags, filth, and general despair. Beaus and belles attended
plays at Drury Lane Theatre, heard Italian operas, sipped wine, watched fireworks and looked
down on the country site with muddy roads and routine life of squires. The smells of the farms
and the wilderness of the woods were considered to be dead and behind the time.
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Literary Context
The great political and social turmoil of the first half of the 17th century was reflected in the
prose writing of the time. The burning issues of religion, education, politics and philosophy
were the subjects of pamphlets, essays and treatises.
A pamphlet is an unbound booklet (that is, without a hard cover or binding). It may consist of a single
sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths (called a leaflet), or
it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and stapled at the crease to make a simple book. In
the centuries when books were expensive and newspapers virtually nonexistent, pamphlets and
broadsheets played an important role as a means of mass communication. During the period of the Reformation
religious dogma and political issues were publicly debated in the form of pamphlets.
An essay is generally a short piece of writing written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a
number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections
prose, but works in verse have been named essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on
Man).
Treatise is a formal and systematic exposition in writing of the principles of a subject, generally longer and more
detailed than an essay.
Robert Burton (1577–1640) wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a huge treatise of
over half a million words. It is an analysis of the causes, symptoms and cures for melancholy,
which was considered an illness.
The genius of John Milton (1608–1674) dominates the age. Although he preferred poetry (he
described writing prose as writing with his left hand), John Milton also produced some
excellent pamphlets, including Areopagitica (1644), a defence of free speech and writing, and
Of Education (1664) in which he expresses his idea of how young people should be educated.
Milton was an adamant supporter of Cromwell and Parliament, and when King Charles I was
executed he wrote a pamphlet in which he voiced his approval, saying it was the people’s right
to kill a Tyrant or Wicket King.
Milton was a very prolific pamphleteer but his masterpiece is the greatest of the 17th century
poems – Paradise Lost.
The writer who most successfully captured the Puritan spirit is undoubtedly John Bunyan
(1628–1688). A firm believer in Parliament, he joined Cromwell’s army at the age of sixteen.
During the Restoration he was imprisoned for twelve years for preaching without a license. He
started writing his great masterpiece The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) during one of his periods in
prison. It is a powerful allegory of man’s quest for salvation that is widely considered to be
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one of the greatest works of religious literature of all time and a forerunner to the 18th century
novel.
It cannot be denied that poetry was in decline after the Restoration. The great Renaissance
works were succeeded by imitations of older models and official verse, celebrating public
figures, which can seem rather affected to modern ears.
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Cavalier Poets
The group of English gentlemen poets who supported Charles I during the English Civil Wars
are known as Cavalier Poets. They were associated with Royalist cause in one way or
another, in contrast to the Metaphysical poets who were mostly attracted to the rational and
intellectual atmosphere of Puritanism. They wrote on classical themes and in classical metres,
and their poetry has a sophisticated charm. The best known are Robert Herrick (1591–1674),
whose celebrated To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time is justly famous, Sir John Suckling
(1609–42) and Richard Lovelace (1618–1657). However, the distinction between Cavaliers
and Metaphysicals is essentially an artificial one and several poets, in particular Andrew
Marvell (1621–1678) and Thomas Carew (1595–1640), combine features of both schools.
Marvell’s style has the elegant sophistication of the Cavaliers while his use of intense imagery
and paradox is reminiscent of the metaphysicals.
Accomplished as soldiers, courtiers, gallants, and wits, Cavalier poets wrote elegant lyrics,
typically on love and flirtation and sometimes on war, honour, and duty to the king. 'Cavalier'
implies more than just 'Royalist'. It implies, for instance, a particular class of man: courtly,
well-educated, genteel. In many ways, these are the cultural heirs of Sir Philip Sydney, moving
in something like the same circles.
In fact the common factor that binds the cavaliers together is their use of direct and colloquial
language expressive of a highly individual personality, and their enjoyment of the casual, the
amateur, the affectionate poem written by the way. They avoid the subject of religion, and
attempt no comprehension of the depths of the soul. The poems must be written in the
intervals of living, and are celebratory of things that are much livelier than mere philosophy or
art. Poetry need not be a matter of earnest emotion or public concern.
The Cavaliers made one great contribution to the English Lyrical Tradition. They showed us
that it was possible for poetry to celebrate the minor pleasures and sadnesses of life in such a
way as to impress us with a sense of ordinary day-to-day humanity.
Text
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
by Robert Herrick
Gather the rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a flying,
And this same flower that smiles to-day
Tomorrow will be dying.
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The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun.
The higher he’s a getting,
The schooner will his race be run
And nearer he’s to setting
That age is best which is the first
When youth and blood are warmer;
Bet being spent, the worst and worst
Times still succeed the former
Then be not coy, but use your time
And, while ye may go marry;
For having lost but once your prime
Ye may forever tarry.
The poem is an expression of carpe diem attitude to the world and life.
Do you agree with Robert Herrick’s message?
Carpe diem is a Latin aphorism, usually translated "seize the day", taken from the Roman poet
Horace's Odes.
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Restoration Drama
No great dramatists emerged in the immediate post-Shakespearean period. Playwrights
continued to write in the Shakespearean style but did not reach the same literary heights or
introduce innovations of any great importance. In 1642 the Puritans closed theatres, declaring
them improper places for decent people. Theatres remained closed for eighteen years and were
not reopened until Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. After the Restoration the
frugal, sober and sombre society created by the Puritans was replaced by a more pleasureseeking attitude to life. The immoral behaviour of the Court set an example that was readily
followed by the upper classes.
Charles II, nicknamed 'the Merry Monarch', was a patron of the theatre and during his reign
new theatres were built: Drury Lane (1674) and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (1732).
Restoration theatres were very different from Elizabethan playhouses. They were smaller and
indoor. The audience no longer surrounded the stage but sat facing the actors, who did not
enter the stage through doors at the back as they had in Elizabethan times, but from the sides.
The personal contact between actors and audience, typical for the Elizabethan theatres was lost
and replaced by the effect of the fourth imaginary wall, and the illusion that the spectators were
looking at the stage through the keyhole. One can say that the modern stage began in this
period. Plays were also made more attractive by music between the acts and songs and dance
during the performance. Famous composers wrote for the theatre. By the end of the century
the musical part of a performance was sometimes more important than the play itself.
Painted scenery was used to reproduce settings. Performances took place at night: the
audience sat in the dark while the stage was illuminated by candles and torches. Another
Restoration innovation was the introduction of women players, which at the beginning was
shocking for the public. Love scenes in the Elizabethan theatre had only the poetic meaning
because the spectators knew that the female parts were played by boys. Two sexes in amorous
scenes were an exciting novelty. What we take for granted now was sensational for the
Restoration audience.
The middle and lower classes, who still lived by strict Puritan moral laws, considered theatregoing to be immoral, so drama became a form of entertainment for the upper classes, and
theatres became meeting places where people displayed their fashionable clothes and
discussed the latest gossip. Restoration audiences favoured spectacular productions.
Shakespeare's works continued to be performed but changes were often made to the original
texts to make the productions more extravagant and sensational. The Court had spent almost
twenty years in France, and the French influence can be seen in a new type of drama called
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heroic drama, which became popular for a while. Heroic tragedies tried to compete with epic
poetry. They were mainly about love and valour, the main character was generally a hero
whose passionate love conflicted with his patriotic duty. The plays were written in rhyming
couplets and in an elevated style, both of which made the language extremely artificial.
The term "heroic drama" was invented by John Dryden. He argued that the drama was a species of
epic poetry for the stage. Consequently, Dryden derived a series of rules for this type of play. First, the
play should be composed in heroic verse (closed couplets in iambic pentameter). Second, the play must
focus on a subject that relates to national foundations, mythological events, or important and grand
matters. Third, the hero of the heroic drama must be powerful, decisive and dominating even if he is wrong.
Dryden's All for Love (1678), based on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, is a good
example of this type of drama.
John Dryden (1631–1700) was the prominent man of letters of the Restoration. The son of a
wealthy Puritan family, he received a classical education and had a thorough knowledge of
Greek and Latin literature. He was inspired by the Latin poets Virgil, Horace, Ovid and tried to
reproduce the balance and clarity of their work in his poetry. He became a master of the heroic
couplet (two rhyming lines of iambic pentameters) parallelism, antithesis and repetition.
Antithesis (Greek for "setting opposite ") is a figure of speech in which two opposite ideas are put
together in a sentence to achieve a contrasting effect. The antagonistic features of the two objects or
phenomena are more easily perceived when they stand out in similar structures. Antithesis is generally
formed in parallel construction. Parallelism of expression serves to emphasize opposition of ideas.
Dryden wrote in almost every
widely regarded as the father
theatre, and tried to establish
influence on the poets of the
1744).
literary genre: comedy, heroic tragedy, verse, satire. But he is
of literary criticism. He wrote several essays on poetry and
guidelines for good taste in literature. He exercised a major
early eighteenth century, in particular Alexander Pope (1688–
The Restoration drama found its peculiar excellence in a type of play called the Comedy of
Manners. Restoration dramatists learned how to develop characters from the French
playwright Moliere, whose elegant style became a model to be imitated.
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, (1622–1673) was a French
playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western
literature. Among Molière's best-known works are Le Misanthrope (The Misanthrope), L'École
des Femmes (The School for Wives), Tartuffe ou L'Imposteur (Tartuffe or the Imposter),
L'Avare (The Miser), Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), and Le Bourgeois
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Gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman).
Comedy of Manners reflected the life of the Court, which was portrayed as being immoral,
corrupt, shameless but also elegant, witty and intelligent. Its main targets of criticism were
middle-class values and ideals, conventions, hypocrisy and above all the institution of
marriage. The comic effect was achieved primarily through the witty dialogue, which was often
in the form of repartee, a kind of verbal fencing match of witty comments and replies. In
Elizabethan drama comic characters were usually low and humble in origin. In the Comedy of
Manners they were aristocratic ladies and gentlemen who were easily recognised by the
audience as fashionable members of society. Two new male character types were created: the
gallant and the fop. The gallant was usually the hero of the play. He was a witty, elegant,
sophisticated yet cynical lover. The fop was a figure of fun, ridiculed for his stupidity and
pompous pretentiousness. The leading female characters generally had no feelings or morals.
Their only interests were fashion and infidelity. The characters usually had names that captured
some aspects of their personality: Scandal, Lady Fidget, Petulant, Mrs Squeamish, Sir
Fopling Flutter and Tattle.
It is important to note that the Comedy of Manners had no moral didactic purpose. These
plays were written purely to entertain theatre audiences.
As the 17th century came to an end the public objected to the quality of restoration comedy.
William Wycherley's (1640-1716) The Country Wife (1675) was accused of immorality. The
protests against the manners shown on the stage led to the publication of a pamphlet by Jeremy
Collier called A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage in 1698.
Many playwrights spoke against Collier, just as strongly as he criticized them. Among them
was William Congreve (1670–1729), the major dramatist of the 1690s.
His comedies deal with the world of fashion, courtship, seduction, but they are all witty, and
well-composed. His masterpiece The Way of the World (1700) is still staged in English theatres.
Here Congreve shows himself the supreme master of the comedy of manners, displaying the
narrow world of fashion and gallantry.
The Comedy of Manners has continued to be a popular form of theatre. In the 18th century
playwrights eliminated the indecency but maintained the wit and fun. In the early 19th century
under Queen Victoria it declined, to be revived by Oscar Wilde at the turn of the century.
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John Milton (1608–1674)
John Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the most brilliant achievements in English poetry and one
of the most beautiful poems in the world.
Early in his life John Milton resolved to be a great poet. He was born in London in 1608 into a
wealthy, well-educated family. His father, who had been disinherited by his family for
becoming a Protestant, instilled in his son a love of learning and strong religious beliefs. By the
age of sixteen he could write in Latin and Greek and had a good knowledge of Philosophy. He
attended Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took his Master of Arts degree and
distinguished himself as an outstanding student. For a period of time he considered taking
religious orders, but finally decided to move back home, where he continued his studies and
wrote. He had a period of long six years of solitary study and preparation for future life.
He firmly believed that a poet must be a person of learning, familiar with ancient and
contemporary philosophy, history, languages and literatures. In 1638 he visited France and
Italy. Milton had long admired Italian language and culture, and there he visited many interesting
people. In Florence he met Galileo, blind, aged, and imprisoned.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and
philosopher. Galileo's championing of heliocentrism (astronomical model in which the Earth and
planets revolve around a relatively stationary Sun at the center of the Solar System) was
controversial within his lifetime. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615,
and Galileo was tried, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", forced to recant, and spent the rest
of his life under house arrest.
Milton intended to go to Greece, but he had to interrupt his trip, when he got to know that his
countrymen were fighting for freedom at home. "I considered it wrong," he wrote, "to be
travelling for amusement abroad in foreign lands while my countrymen were fighting for
liberty at home."
When Milton got home from his tour, he took part in the struggle for the Puritan cause. He
became a publicist, and gave himself to prose propaganda. Milton served in the government of
England under Oliver Cromwell. As Latin Secretary to the Council of State, Milton was
responsible for all correspondence with foreign countries. Milton, who had always had weak
eyesight, was going blind, and doctors warned him not to take the job as it involved translating
into Latin all the government's foreign correspondence. Milton replied that he had to do his
duty for the Commonwealth and accepted the position. He eventually went totally blind.
As King Charles II came to the throne Milton was arrested as a traitor. His influential friends
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helped Milton to escape the scaffold. He spent the last years of his life in retirement dedicating
himself to the writing of his masterpieces. He died in 1674.
Works
John Milton's literary works can be divided into three periods.
Period I covers his years as a student. Milton was fascinated by Italian culture. He studied
writers like Petrarch and Dante, and their works influenced his early poems L’Allegro ("The
Cheerful Man") and Il Penseroso ("The Melancholy Man"), both written in 1632. In the first the
poet describes the joys of life in the country in spring, outside in the fields in the morning, but
at home in the evening, with music and books. In the second poem, which is set in the autumn,
he studies during the day and goes to church in the evening to listen to music.
His masque Comus was first performed in 1634. Comus (1634) presents the traditional moral
theme where virtue triumphs over vice.
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Comus is a story of a noble lady and her two brothers who are travelling through a forest,
and have to spend the night there. The lady is separated from her companions and attracted
by Comus, an evil pagan god, invented by Milton. He is known by his habit to waylay
travellers and make them drink a magic liquor which turns them into beasts. Comus,
disguised as a shepherd, offers to lodge the lady in his cottage. The brothers are warned of
the magic power of Comus by a good spirit. They make their way to his cottage where
Comus is pressing their sister to drink from a glass, but she, strong in her purity, refuses. The
lady is released, and the three travellers continue their way.
In 1637 Milton published his poem Lycidas, a pastoral elegy written in remembrance of the
death of a fellow student. The elegy is called pastoral because it imitates certain ancient elegies
in using imagery of shepherds and their flocks. Milton and Edward King (renamed Lycidas) are
the young shepherds feeding their flock. The word pastor (clergymen) literally means
"shepherd". As students, both Milton and King were preparing themselves for the Church, but
Milton changed his mind and King died.
In Period II Milton focused on prose writing. In 1643 he published The Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce, claiming the right of a husband or wife to break a marriage on the
grounds of incompatibility. In 1642Milton married a seventeen-year-old girl from a Royalist
family. She left him after just a few weeks because of their religious differences. They
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reconciled, but Milton never fully forgave his wife and became a strong supporter of divorce.
One of his greatest prose works, Areopagitica, published in 1644, is Milton's passionate
demand for freedom of speech and the press.
The Areopagus (the Greek name Areios Pagos, translated as "Ares Rock") is a hill in Athens
where a respected council met to take important decisions.
In the same year he wrote the pamphlet Of Education which promoted
schooling for the formation of humanistic leaders.
Period III. After the Restoration in 1660 Milton retired from public life and dedicated himself
to the writing of his great poetic masterpieces. He had always wanted to write an epic poem in
English in the classical style. Initially he had considered the legend of King Arthur as a suitable
subject matter. However, he eventually chose the Fall of Man as his theme and set to work on
Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost (1667) tells the story of Satan's banishment from Heaven and
his attempt to take revenge on God through the temptation of Adam and Eve.
Paradise Regained (1671) is written in the same epic style as Paradise Lost. It tells the story
of Christ's temptation by Satan in the desert. Milton needed to complete Paradise Lost by
showing how Christ, at the very beginning of his mission on Earth, defeated Satan. Paradise
Regained is based on an incident in the New Testament in which Christ resists the temptations
of Satan.
Samson Agonistes (1671) is Milton’s play depicting the events leading up to the killing of
Samson by the Philistines.
According to the biblical account, Samson was given supernatural strength by God in order to
combat his enemies and perform heroic feats such as killing a lion and destroying a pagan temple.
Samson had two vulnerabilities, however: his attraction to deceitful women and his hair, without
which he was powerless. These weaknesses ultimately proved fatal for him. Samson lost his
strength when Delilah allowed the Philistines to shave his hair during his sleep.
The play is modelled on Greek tragedies with its choruses, messengers and long monologues.
The play, focusing around the betrayal of Samson at the hands of Dalila, his wife, produces a
negative portrayal of love and love's effects. Women, and men's desire for women, are
connected to worship against God, and the idea that there is no possibility for the sacred
within love in a marriage. Samson, who is both holy and desirous of Delila, is seduced into
betraying God and losing the source of his strength, and thus betrays God. He is blinded
because of his sexual desires. The Chorus, after Delila attempts to seduce Samson again,
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criticises women for being deceptive.
The blinded Samson is Milton himself, blind and betrayed by his wife. Milton divorced his wife
who, like Delilah, came from the enemy's camp. The play is the reflection of Milton’s grief
over his fall, humiliation and his blindness.
Paradise Lost
Being a poet, in Milton's view, was not a matter of writing short lyrics that expressed his
private feelings and insights; being a poet meant competing with the great authors of antiquity,
the epic poets Homer and Virgil.
Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek
epic poets. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by
a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between
King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. The Odyssey is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad. It is the
second oldest extant work of Western literature, the Iliad being the oldest. It is believed to have
been composed near the end of the 8th century BC. The poem mainly centers on the Greek hero Odysseus (known
as Ulysses in Roman myths) and his journey home after the fall of Troy.
Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC – 19 BC), usually called Virgil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the
Augustan period. His Aeneid has been considered the national epic of ancient Rome from the time of its composition
to the present day. Modeled after Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid follows the Trojan refugee Aeneas as he
struggles to fulfill his destiny and arrive on the shores of Italy—in Roman mythology the founding act of Rome.
Milton first considered various English subjects for his works, especially King Arthur and the
knights of the Round Table. But finally, after years of thinking and reading he chose the biblical
story of the Fall of Man.
Milton worked on his epic all his life. According to one of the plans he wanted to write a
tragedy with Satan as its protagonist. Many readers have regarded Satan as the secret hero of
the poem. "Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it," asserted William Blake, the
poet and artist of the Romantic Age. In literary works evil frequently seems more interesting
than good.
In Paradise Lost Milton took a few verses from the Bible and developed them into a 10,565line poem. Although the poem ranges back and forth between Hell and Heaven, the most
important action takes place on Earth, where the first human beings, Adam and Eve, are given
the choice to obey or disobey God. They chose, as everybody knows, to disobey, and having
done so accepted their punishment and made the best of the life that was left to them.
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Content
The initial lines of the poem state its general subject. This is the poem:
Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death onto the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden...
The angels, led by Lucifer (the former name of Satan) by the command of God are driven
away from heaven into the great deep. Pandemonium, the palace of Satan, rises out of the
deep. Sitting on the throne decorated with precious stones Satan addresses his speech to the
fallen angels, and comforts them with hope of regaining heaven. When Satan gets the news
about the creation of man, he decides to go to heaven alone. He passes through the hell
gates, guarded by sin and death, and goes upward through chaos.
God, sitting on the throne, sees Satan flying towards the newly created world. God foretells
his success and the fall and punishment of man. He declares that man must die unless
someone agrees to undergo his punishment.
The Son of God offers himself as ransom for man and is accepted.
Should man finally be lost, should man
Thy creature late so loved, thy youngest son?
God answers:
О Son, in whom my soul hath chief delight,
Son of my bosom, son who act alone
My word, my wisdom...
Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will
Freely vouchsafed once more I will renew his life.
Satan enters the Garden of Eden, where he first sees Adam and Eve and overhears their
conversation concerning the Tree of Knowledge, of which they are forbidden to eat. Satan
starts tempting Eve in a dream, but the angels of Paradise discover him at Eve's ear, and
throw him away. In the morning Eve tells Adam about her troublesome dream. Archangel
Raphael, sent by God, comes to Paradise and warns Adam of his enemy. Adam promises to
be obedient to God. Satan, accompanied by the fallen angels appears in the garden, and
starts to battle against God's angels. The Son of God appears to drive the hosts of Satan to
the edge of heaven and forces them to fall down into the deep.
Raphael relates to Adam how God created the world within six days.
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Satan enters into the serpent, and in this form finds Eve alone. He persuades her to eat from
the Tree of Knowledge. Eve relates Adam of what has happened, and brings him the fruit.
Adam, thinking that Eve is lost, from extreme love for her, decides to perish with her, and
eats the fruit. Thus they are robbed of their innocence. They cover nakedness and try to hide
from God.
Soon man's sin is known. Death and sin come into the world, and Adam and Eve are to
leave the Paradise. They approach Son of God with repentance, and the Son of God asks his
Father not to let Adam and Eve die completely. God decides on their expulsion from
Paradise. Archangel Michael leads them to a high hill and shows the future misery of man
and what shall happen till the Flood, the future coming of Christ, his incarnation, death,
resurrection, and ascension, and foretells the corrupt state of the church till his second
coming. Adam and Eve, submissive, are led out of Paradise.
Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
To the subjected plain, then disappeared.
They looking back, so late their happy seat
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon.
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Milton is attempting to resolve an interesting dilemma that has puzzled many
people throughout the ages. 0n the one hand, we are told that through His
Providence God takes loving care of creation; on the other hand, we know that
there are many very bad things in the world, such as war, crime poverty,
disease, oppression, injustice, death – the list is endless. Milton asserts that God
is not responsible for these evils; instead, Adam's and Eve's disobedience to God's command
"Brought death into the world, and all our woe". God gave Adam and Eve the freedom to
choose between good and evil, and the strength to resist evil; yet they chose evil, and their
offering, including all of us, have suffered the effects of their choice ever since. This
explanation of course is not original to Milton, most Christians have accepted it for many
centuries.
How do you interpret the biblical story? Do you agree that eating from the tree of knowledge
Adam and Eve chose evil? Is the free will a loss or a gain?
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John Bunyan (1628–1688)
Unlike most of the other writers of his period Bunyan came from a low social class. He
worked with his hands as a brazier or tinker, a maker and mender of cooking pots and pans.
Yet he was the author of a book that, next to the Bible, has been the most widely read of all
English books: The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678),
commonly called The Pilgrim's Progress.
What we know about Bunyan comes mainly from his autobiographical work Grace Abounding
to the Chief of Sinners (1666), the "Chief of Sinner" being himself. In this book he describes
his childhood poverty, his service in the army fighting against King Charles I, and his marriage
when he was still a teen-ager. He and his wife, he says, were "as poor as poor might be, with
not so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both." Grace Abounding is
concerned with the state of Bunyan's soul and his relationship with God. To Bunyan, these
were the only really important thing in life.
Although he had never been formally educated or ordained as a minister, Bunyan felt entitled to
preach to his people. He began holding services in private houses and then, as his eloquence
and piety attracted many people, in the woods outside his home town of Bedford. Such
Puritan sects as the Baptists flourished during the years when England was without a king
(1649–1660), but with the Restoration of Charles II, the government soon reestablished the
Church of England and outlawed all other forms of religion. In 1660 he was arrested and jailed
for preaching without a license. The magistrate didn’t want to sentence him. He would gladly
have released him had he promised to give up public preaching. Moreover, there were strong
personal reasons why Bunyan should have been eager to leave the jail and resume support of
his family. Conditions at home were not ideal: about a year earlier, his first wife had died,
leaving a number of small children, one of them blind, to be taken care of. His second wife was
pregnant, and the news of her husband's arrest caused her to miscarry. He was desperately
needed at home. Yet his principles did not permit him to obey the law.
During his confinement, he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, which was such a great success that
he published a second part. Both parts have been translated into many languages and
republished countless times.
As the laws against nonconformists were relaxed Bunyan became famous as a preacher, even
in London, where an audience of several thousand would go to hear him on a Sunday. When
told about Bunyan, King Charles expressed astonishment that a tinker could draw such
crowds.
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Bunyan spoke to, and wrote for, people who believed that every individual human being is
engaged in a continuous battle against the forces of evil. Bunyan and his listeners believed that
the whole aim of life is to win this battle. Although, in this belief, the evil forces are powerful,
they are not so powerful as God. With God's help, the battle can be won and eternal life
attained. Bunyan told his readers how they could defeat evil and how God could save them. He
expressed his message in the language familiar to his readers, taken from their daily experience
and from the Bible, folk tales and popular literature. In Bunyan's books his readers recognized
their own lives, made surprising and interesting.
The Pilgrim's Progress
The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory, a story developed out of a metaphor. Bunyan's allegory
(often regarded as the best example of this kind of writing in English) grows out of the
metaphor "Life is a journey."
Allegory is a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms;
figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.
Christian and Christiana, Bunyan's heroes, are ordinary human beings who
suddenly feel the need for a closer relationship with God. Bunyan to portrays their spiritual
experiences as though they were physical. Instead of real places, Christian travels through such
allegorical places as the Valley of Humiliation, where he learns the value of being humble.
Christiana climbs the Hill Lucre, where she learns that money cannot save her soul.
Far from being realistic, the proper names in an allegory are direct clues to meaning. Mr.
Talkative is a man who speaks much but says little, Madam Bubble is always playful, Valiant
is always brave and strong, Atheist is always unbelieving, and Hypocrisy is always two-faced.
The characters are aspects of Christian's own consciousness, they never change, and they
disappear from the story after they have helped or hindered him on his journey.
Allegory thus enables Bunyan to tell two stories at the same time. One, the surface story,
involves a journey through a fantastic landscape. This story is an adventure story. The other
story involves the spiritual development of typical human beings who do not go anywhere, but
try to lead religious lives, avoiding the obstacles and temptations that get in the way. This
second story might be called a psychological story, since it is concerned with mental and
emotions processes. Yet, in the experience of reading, the two stories become one.
In the nineteenth century, The Pilgrim's Progress could be found in nearly every literate
household in England. Most children read it along with the Bible and the great plays of
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Shakespeare. In the twentieth century, its popularity has declined, mainly because of changes in
contemporary views of religion.
The doctrine that is at the heart of The Pilgrim's Progress comes directly from the New
Testament's Sermon on the Mount where Christ encourages his followers to seek "first the
kingdom of God, and his righteousness"and to avoid the broad path that leads to destruction.
In The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan describes what it means to follow the narrow path to
Christian salvation, resisting all temptation and all worldly cares and diversions along the way.
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The dreamer sees a man, Christian, clothed in rags, with a burden on his back, leaving his
house behind in the knowledge that it will burn down. The book he holds in his hands has
told him so. He has to flee his family who think he has gone mad and escape the City of
Destruction. On the advice of Evangelist he begins a journey through a series of allegorical
places. He effectively maneuvers his way through the Slough of Despond, passes under the
Wicket Gate (the gate through which the elect must pass, beginning their journey to
Heaven) and soon comes to the Interpreter's House, where he learns to think
metaphorically. After leaving this enlightening place, Christian sheds his burden and
receives the garb and certificate of the elect from some angels. His next stop is the Beautiful
Palace.
After leaving the palace, Christian slips down into the Valley of Humiliation, where he
battles and defeats Apollyon, the notorious fiend. After transversing the Valley of the
Shadow of Death in the dark, he catches up to his friend Faithful. Christian and Faithful
arrive in Vanity-Fair together, where they are arrested under the false charge of inciting a
riot. Faithful is tried and burnt at the stake, even though Christian is miraculously
delivered. Hopeful, inspired by Faithful's faith, becomes Christian's new traveling
companion.
The pair of pilgrims soon come to the Doubting Castle, owned by the Giant Despair, who
traps them inside and intends to kill them. Fortunately, their faith allows them to escape
from the dungeon and make their way to the Delectable Mountains. The shepherds in the
foothills warn Christian and Hopeful about the Flatterer and other potential threats in the
last leg of their journey. Unfortunately, the Flatterer manages to fool Christian and Hopeful
anyway. An angel rescues them, but punishes them for being so blind when they had been
warned. In the final stretch of the journey, they encounter Ignorance, who has not entered
the path through the Wicket Gate.
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In Beulah, which abuts heaven, Christian and Hopeful arrive at the river. To cross the river
is to die, but the must cross it in order to enter into heaven. When they arrive at the gates to
the Celestial City, they are welcomed graciously with a trumpet fanfares, and they take their
place alongside the rest of the elect. Ignorance gets to the gate, but because he doesn't have
a certificate of election, he is sent to hell. The pilgrim's progress to heaven completed, the
author awakes from his dream.
The second part concerns the Christiana, Christian's wife, who is inspired to follow on a
similar pilgrimage.
Text
Vanity Fair
Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and
the name of that town is "Vanity"; and at the town there is a fair kept, called "Vanity Fair"; it is kept all the year long. It
bears the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where 'tis kept is lighter than vanity; and also because all that is there
sold, or that comes thither is vanity. As is the saying of the wise, "All that comes is vanity."
This fair is no new erected business; but a thing of ancient standing. I will show you the original of it.
Almost five thousand years agone, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these two honest persons are;
and BEELZEBUB, APOLLYON, and LEGION, with their companions, perceiving by the path that the pilgrims
made, that their way to the City lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a fair; a fair wherein
should be sold of all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore at this fair are all such
merchandise sold: as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms; lusts, pleasures,
and delights of all sorts – as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls,
silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
And moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be deceivers, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues
and that of every kind.
Here are to be seen, too – and that for nothing – thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood red
colour.
And as in other fairs of less moment, there are the several rows and streets, under their proper names, where such
and such wares are vended; so here likewise you have the proper places, rows, streets (viz., countries and
kingdoms), where the wares of this fair are soonest to be found: here is the Britain row; the French row; the Italian
row; the Spanish row; the German row – where several sorts of vanities are to be sold. But as in other fairs, some
one commodity is as the chief of all the fair, so the ware of Rome and her merchandise is greatly promoted in this fair:
only our English nation, with some others, have taken a dislike thereat.
Now, as I said, the way to the Celestial City lies just through this town, where the lusty fair is kept; and he that will go
to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world. The Prince of princes himself, when
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here, went through this town to his own country, and that upon a fair day too; and as I think, it was BEELZEBUB, the
chief lord of this fair, that invited him to buy of his vanities; yea, would have made him lord of the fair, would he but
have done him reverence as he went through the town. Yea, because he was such a person of honour, BEELZEBUB
had him from street to street, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a little time, that he might, if possible,
allure that Blessed One to cheapen and buy some of his vanities. But he had no mind to the merchandise; and
therefore left the town without laying out so much as one farthing upon these vanities.
This fair, therefore, is an ancient thing, of long standing, and a very great fair.
Now these pilgrims, as I said, must needs go through this fair: well, so they did; but behold, even as they entered into
the fair, all the people in the fair were moved, and the town itself as it were in a hubbub about them; and that for
several reasons. For – First, the pilgrims were clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of
any that traded in that fair. The people, therefore, of the fair made a great gazing upon them: some said they were
fools; some they were lunatics; and some they are outlandish men.
Secondly: and as they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise at their speech; for few could understand what
they said. They naturally spoke the language of Canaan; but they that kept the fair were the men of this world: so that
from one end of the fair to the other, they seemed barbarians each to the other.
Thirdly: but that which did not a little amuse the merchandisers was, that these pilgrims set very light by all their wares
– they cared not so much as to look upon them; and if they called upon them to buy, they would put their fingers in
their ears, and cry, "Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity;" and look upwards, signifying that their trade and
traffic was in heaven.
One chanced mockingly, beholding the carriages of the men, to say unto them, "What will ye, buy?" but they, looking
gravely upon him, said, "We buy the truth".
At that there was an occasion taken to despise the men the more: some mocking; some taunting; some speaking
reproachfully; and some calling upon others to smite them. At last, things came to a hubbub and great stir in the fair,
insomuch that all order was confounded. Now was word presently brought to the great one of the fair, who quickly
came down, and deputed some of his most trusty friends to take these men into examination, about whom the fair was
almost overturned. So the men were brought to examination: and they that sat upon them, asked them whence they
came; whither they went; and what they did there in such an unusual garb?
The men told them that they were pilgrims and strangers in the world; and that they were going to their own country,
which was the heavenly Jerusalem; and that they had given none occasion to the men of the town, nor yet to the
merchandisers, thus to abuse them, and to let them in their journey. Except it was, for that when one asked them what
they would buy, they said they would buy the truth. But they that were appointed to examine them did not believe
them to be any other than lunatics and mad, or else such as came to put all things into a confusion in the fair. Therefore
they took them and beat them, and besmeared them with dirt; and then put them into the cage, that they might be
made a spectacle to all the men of the fair. There, therefore, they lay for some time, and were made the objects of any
man's sport, or malice, or revenge; the great one of the fair laughing still at all that befell them.
But the men being patient, and not rendering railing for railing, but contrariwise blessing, and giving good words for
bad, and kindness for injuries done, some men in the fair that were more observing and less prejudiced than the rest,
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began to check and blame the baser sort for their continual abuses done by them to the men. They, therefore, in angry
manner, let fly at them again: counting them as bad as the men in the cage, and telling them that they seemed
confederates, and should be made partakers of their misfortunes. The other replied, that for aught they could see, the
men were quiet and sober, and intended nobody any harm; and that there were many that traded in their fair that were
more worthy to be put into the cage, yea, and pillory too, than were the men that they had abused. Thus after divers
words had passed on both sides – the men behaving themselves all the while very wisely and soberly before them, –
they fell to some blows among themselves, and did harm one to another.
Then were these two poor men brought before their examiners again, and there charged as being guilty of the late
hubbub that had been in the fair. So they beat them pitifully, and hanged irons upon them, and led them in chains up
and down the fair for an example and a terror to others, lest any should further speak in their behalf, or join
themselves unto them. But CHRISTIAN and FAITHFUL behaved themselves yet more wisely; and received the
ignominy and shame that was cast upon them with so much meekness and patience, that it won to their side – though
but few in comparison of the rest – several of the men in the fair. This put the other party yet into a greater rage;
insomuch that they concluded the death of these two men. Wherefore they threatened that the cage nor irons should
serve their turn; but that they should die for the abuse they had done, and for deluding the men of the fair.
Then were they remanded to the cage again, until further order should be taken with them. So they put them in, and
made their feet fast in the stocks.
Here therefore they called again to mind what they had heard from their faithful friend, EVANGELIST; and were the
more confirmed in their way and sufferings by what he told them would happen to them. They also now comforted
each other, that whose lot it was to suffer, even he should have the best of it; therefore each man secretly wished that
he might have that preferment; but committing themselves to the all wise disposal of him that rules all things, with much
content they abode in the condition in which they were, until they should be otherwise disposed of.
What does vanity fair symbolize in the context of spiritual pilgrimage that the
whole book represents?
How do the people treat the pilgrims who ask for no other good but truth?
Can you bring any example from life that could correspond to the metaphorical
picture given in the book?
What is the message of the episode?
Link
William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, first published in 1847–48,
satirizes society in early 19th-century Britain. The book's title comes from John Bunyan's
allegorical story which was still widely read at the time of Thackeray's novel. In Bunyan’s
work, "Vanity Fair" refers to a stop along the pilgrim's progress: a never-ending fair held in a
town called Vanity, which is meant to represent man's sinful attachment to worldly things.
Thackeray interprets the allegory in his own way. In the preface to his book he writes:
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BEFORE THE CURTAIN
As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain
on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound
melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.
There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love
and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating,
fighting, dancing and fiddling; there are bullies pushing about,
bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, policemen
on the look-out, quacks (OTHER quacks, plague take them!)
bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at
the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the
light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind.
Yes, this is VANITY FAIR; not a moral place certainly; nor a
merry one, though very noisy. Look at the faces of the actors
and buffoons when they come off from their business; and
Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down
to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind
the canvas. The curtain will be up presently, and he will be
turning over head and heels, and crying, "How are you?"
A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an
exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his
own or other people's hilarity. An episode of humour or kindness
touches and amuses him here and there--a pretty child
looking at a gingerbread stall; a pretty girl blushing whilst her
lover talks to her and chooses her fairing; poor Tom Fool,
yonder behind the waggon, mumbling his bone with the honest
family which lives by his tumbling; but the general impression
is one more melancholy than mirthful. When you come home
you sit down in a sober, contemplative, not uncharitable frame
of mind, and apply yourself to your books or your business.
I have no other moral than this to tag to the present story
of "Vanity Fair." Some people consider Fairs immoral altogether,
and eschew such, with their servants and families: very
likely they are right. But persons who think otherwise, and are
of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps
like to step in for half an hour, and look at the performances.
There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some
grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and
some of very middling indeed; some love-making for the
sentimental, and some light comic business; the whole
accompanied by appropriate scenery and brilliantly illuminated
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with the Author's own candles.
What more has the Manager of the Performance to say? –
To acknowledge the kindness with which it has been received
in all the principal towns of England through which the Show
has passed, and where it has been most favourably noticed by
the respected conductors of the public Press, and by the Nobility
and Gentry. He is proud to think that his Puppets have given
satisfaction to the very best company in this empire. The
famous little Becky Puppet has been pronounced to be uncommonly
flexible in the joints, and lively on the wire; the Amelia
Doll, though it has had a smaller circle of admirers, has yet
been carved and dressed with the greatest care by the artist; the
Dobbin Figure, though apparently clumsy, yet dances in a very
amusing and natural manner; the Little Boys' Dance has been
liked by some; and please to remark the richly dressed figure
of the Wicked Nobleman, on which no expense has been
spared, and which Old Nick will fetch away at the end of this
singular performance.
And with this, and a profound bow to his patrons, the
Manager retires, and the curtain rises.
What is Thackeray’s interpretation of Vanity Fair?
The concept is widely employed in modern times. For example, the well-known
magazine has the same name.
How far has it (concept) gone from the original meaning offered by Bunyan?
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English Literature in the Enlightenment Period
Historical and Cultural Context
Literary Context
Daniel Defoe (1607-1731)
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
Henry Fielding (1707–1754)
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
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Historical and Cultural Context
Literary historians have applied several names to the long period that runs from 1660 to 1800:
The Enlightenment, The Age of Reason, The Augustan Age, and The Neoclassical
Period. Each of them applies to some characteristics of the period, but none applies to all.
"The Age of Reason" and "The Enlightenment" reveal now people were gradually
changing their view of themselves and the world. In 1662 the Royal Society was opened in
London. It was a meeting place of all kinds of scientists and philosophers. Its first president
became King Charles II. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was the president of the Royal Society
from 1703 to 1727.
Isaac Newton contributed to the development of science by his profound studies in
mathematics and physics. He was the founder of the modern science of optics. His discovery
of the law of gravitation made him the founder of science of gravitational astronomy. Joseph
Addison called him "a miracle of the present age".
Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. His name
is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, an Irish writer
and politician, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine.
Newton's works suggested that there were indeed intelligible laws in nature
which could be demonstrated by physics and mathematics, and moreover that the universe
exhibited a magnificent symmetry and a mechanical certainty. This universe, according to
Newton, could not have risen out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature: "a wonderful
Uniformity in the Planetary System had to be the handiwork of an intelligent and benevolent
Creator". Newton's declaration demonstrates his belief that there was order and design in
creation, and therefore religious mystery could be challenged, and sometimes even replaced by
reason. The scientific discoveries of the time proved that the universe is controlled by natural
laws that men could discover and understand.
The model of the world didn't seem chaotic and unpredictable any more, but symmetrical,
balanced, and logic. The ideal of universal law, order, and tidiness which could be concluded
from Newton's physics was echoed in the arguments of contemporary scholars.
John Locke (1632–1704) declared that reason, experience and observation were the
unquestionable guides to universal truth. For Locke the mind was a tabula rasa at birth, "a
white paper, void of all characters, without any ideals". When he rhetorically demanded how
the mind acquired "all the materials of reason and knowledge", he answered, "from experience."
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The contact between scientists, philosophers and men of letters initiated the development of
rational attitude in Restoration literature. Scientific experiments gave no place for feelings and
intuition. It seemed that everything had a natural explanation and the unlimited power of human
reason could challenge God.
The two terms Augustan and Neoclassical refer to real and imagined similarities between
England and its literature in this period and ancient Rome and its literature, especially in the
reign of the Roman Emperor Octavius.
Octavius (63 в.с – 14 a.d.) was the Roman Emperor who took the high-sounding title Augustus,
meaning "the magnificent, grand, and exalted one."Augustus restored peace and order to Rome
after the tumult and civil wars that followed Julius Caesar's assassination.
The Stuart monarchs of England restored peace and order to England after the
civil wars that led up to the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The people of both Rome and
England were tired of their quarrels and ready to settle down, make money, and enjoy life. The
Roman Senate had hailed Augustus as the second founder of Rome, the English people
brought back the son of Charles I from his exile in France, crowned him as Charles II and
called him their savior.
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Literary Context
There were literary similarities as well as political ones. In this age many English writers
consciously modeled their works on the Latin classics, which they had studied in school and in
the universities. The classics, it was generally agreed, were valuable because they represented
what was permanent and universal in human experience. All educated people knew the classics
better than they knew English literature, and one of their pleasures in reading a new work in
English was recognizing its similarities to the works in Latin and Greek. These new works were
called neoclassical.
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts,
literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture
of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome. The main Neoclassical movement coincided with the 18th
century Age of Enlightenment..
The earlier part of the century was a golden age of prose. In line with the general reaction
against the complexities, decorations and rhetorical extravagances of late European
Renaissance literature, the new prose was characterized by a certain restraint. It was simpler,
clearer and more precise than the previous prose. The rationalist tendencies of the age led to a
more reasonable and empirical world view. The new writers of both prose and poetry were
more concerned with balance, clarity and coherence. It was a reflection of the desire for peace
and order in a society emerging from a period of revolution and civil war.
It is also important to take into consideration the changes in the reading public. Female
readers became increasingly numerous. Another market was made up of the huge number of
household servants who had access to their masters' books.
A rising middle class, hungry for literary representations of a changing social reality, wanted
new forms of entertainment and intellectual encouragement. Those were provided by the
proliferation of the press and coffee houses. The first coffee houses appeared in London in
the middle of the seventeenth century and became the centers of intellectual and social life.
They served as the meeting places of people of different social status and occupation. There
were coffee houses for statesmen, merchants, writers, and poets. Men (women were not
admitted into the coffee houses) came to enjoy a cup of newly-imported Turkish coffee, which
cost only a penny, smoke a pipe, read a newspaper, discuss political events or gossip. Coffee
was being imported in large quantities, and it afforded a refreshment for a wide variety of club
activities, ranging from games of checkers to the buying and selling of goods and the
formulation of political policy. The most famous of the coffee houses in London were the
Will's – where men of letters and poets met, and the Button's – the place of journalists.
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The Will's boasted of the patronage of such people as John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and
Alexander Pope. It was there that the considerable number of neoclassical rules and
regulations were formulated.
The main characteristic of the new literature was "From the head, not the heart". Feelings and
emotions were mistrusted. Poems, singing pastoral love, nature and passions were considered
to be ridiculous. Following the fashions of the day people began to place reason and common
sense above Elizabethan enthusiasm and Puritan rigid faith. Imagination of the Elizabethan Age
was gradually replaced by logical analytical approach.
Shakespeare's tragedies and Milton's Paradise Lost were ridiculed. There was a feeling that
Shakespeare and Milton should be reformed, their wild imagination restrained, and their literary
form made more "correct". Shakespeare's characters were thought as monstrous and unreal,
the mixture of tragic and comic elements was regarded as a sin against good taste. Hamlet was
criticized because the Prince of Denmark fought a duel with Laertes, who was beneath his rank,
and because such vulgar creatures as grave diggers were permitted to appear on the same
platform with a prince of blood.
Imagination was declining in poetry. Blank verse, so much loved by Elizabethans, was
replaced by rhymed couplets, inspired by ancient Greek and Roman authors. The works of
Homer, Horace and Virgil were considered to be the best models for literature.
As for drama, the eighteenth century is a particularly unfruitful period. The tone of plays was
frequently moralizing and there was often a strong didactic element to them. The theatre
became a place where the moral standards of a well-ordered society should be upheld.
Essays, journalism and the novel were the most important aspects of literary production.
The abolition of the Licensing Act in 1694 marked the end of censorship and heralded a new
period of freedom for the press. Many accomplished writers of the age were encouraged to
write articles or essays for the growing number of newspapers and periodicals. Journalism
became a new trade. Depending on the periodical the subjects were current affairs, politics,
literature, fashion, gossip, entertainment and contemporary manners and morals. It was a prose
characterized by simplicity and conversational tone. Its main concern was to reach the largest
number of readers possible.
The eighteenth century novel represented a new departure from previous canons. It was a
prose dealing with a world of actual human experience.
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The novel took individual experience as its most important criterion. The plots taken from
history, legend, mythology and previous literature were largely abandoned by the new
novelists.
The rejection of classical literary conventions meant that the readers were presented with
original plots acted out by highly individual characters in singular circumstances. The fact
that characters were often given contemporary names and surnames was something new
and served to reinforce the realistic impression.
The eighteenth-century novel revealed a much greater concern with the exactness of time.
References were made to particular times of the year or even to days, and characters and
events developed against a temporal background which had not been systematically present
in fiction.
Greater attention was paid to the setting. In previous fiction (for example, in Sidney or in
Bunyan) the idea of place had usually been vague and fragmentary. More detailed
descriptions and specific references to the names of streets or towns helped to make the
narrative all the more 'realistic'.
There was a general movement away from rhetorical and figurative language towards its
more descriptive and denotative form.
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Daniel Defoe (1607-1731)
Daniel Foe added the gentlemanly prefix De to his name when he was about thirty-five. His
father was a London candle manufacturer. Defoe's family were Dissenters and so he was
barred from attending either of the two English universities.
The term dissenter (from the Latin dissentire, “to disagree”), labels one who disagrees in matters
of opinion, belief, etc. In the social and religious history of England and Wales, and, by extension,
Ireland, however, it refers particularly to a member of a religious body who has, for one reason or
another, separated from the Established Church or any other kind of Protestant who refuses to
recognise the supremacy of the Established Church in areas where the established Church is or was Anglican.
Instead, Daniel had a sound education at the highly reputable Presbyterian Academy of
Newington Green, where the Bible and John Bunyan were a prominent part of the curriculum.
In the academy Defoe also studied history, law, economics, geography and natural science,
rather than the Latin and Greek classics offered by Cambridge and Oxford. As Defoe left the
Academy he was fluent in five languages (which did not include Latin or Greek). He first
intended to be a Presbyterian minister but thought better of it and followed a career of a
merchant, trading in a variety of commodities, including haberdashery, brandy, wool, real
estate, and eventually civet cats. He married when he was twenty-four. Meanwhile, he became a
political activist and a journalist. His practical interests extended to politics and the theory of
commerce. His early work An Essay Upon Projects contains a wide range of radical
proposals for a new kind of state, and pre-dates by two centuries ideas of a similar kind.
Defoe’s dissenting spirit led him to take part in the rebellion against the Roman Catholic king
James II, in 1685, but, luckily, he escaped punishment. In 1688, a true Protestant king in the
shape of William III was crowned, but Defoe's commercial prosperity and personal delight
were short lived. He went bankrupt in 1692 and spent much of his time hiding from his
creditors.
By 1702 he was notorious as the author of a pamphlet called The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters. At first, the Church of England party applauded and admired the pamphlet, then
they discovered that it was ironic, meaning exactly the opposite of what it said. The
government had Defoe arrested, exposed in the pillory for three days, and then jailed. He was
released on the condition that he would become a spy and a writer for the very government
which had locked him up because of his satire.
Defoe got out of prison with the help of a Tory politician, Robert Harley. Defoe repaid Harley
by agreeing to edit and write almost single-handedly his periodical The Review from 1704–
1713. The Review proved to be an ideal vehicle for his prodigious journalistic talents, and had
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a considerable influence over future periodicals of the century. Defoe also carried out
intelligence work as a spy and government agent during this period, adapting himself to the
views of whichever party was in power. When George I came to the throne in 1714, the Tories
fell out of favour, but Defoe continued working for the government.
Defoe was a prolific journalist. Most of his works are pamphlets and books of advice offered
for the improvement of people and their lives. He touched on every conceivable subject: the
choice of a wife, the history of the Devil, the manufacture of glass. A great many of his works
are political. Defoe wrote propaganda for both of the major political parties, sometimes
defending both sides of a particular public issue. Some of his works are written in verse. The
True-Born Englishman (1701) is a long poem that scolds the English people for their
antipathy to King William because he was Dutch. Defoe argues that all the English are, in a
sense, foreigners. In 1719, at the age of fifty-nine, Defoe turned from journalism to a new form
of prose fiction.
Defoe's innumerable writings can be roughly classified into four groups.
A large number of them, like The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, are concerned with the
political and religious controversies of the time.
The works in a second group advise people on how to become virtuous as well as rich: The
Family Instructor (1715, 1728), for example, and The Complete English Tradesman (1725,
1727).
A third group is made up of journalistic accounts of sensational events, such as A Journal of
the Plague Year (1722).
The fourth group contains Defoe's fiction. Robinson Crusoe (1719) is generally considered
the first novel written in English. Defoe followed it with several other novels, including
Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722) and Lady Roxana
(1724).
Though his fiction sold especially well, Defoe had to confront one financial crisis after another
during his later years. He and his wife, Mary, had a large family to support, and Defoe had a
talent for getting into disastrous business deals. Late in 1730 he went into hiding to avoid
debtor's prison. After several months he secretly returned to London, where he died, aged
sixty, early in 1731.
In spite of his enormous contribution to literature, Defoe is usually remembered as the author
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of only one book, the popular Robinson Crusoe.
The basic story of Robinson Crusoe is well known: a sailor is shipwrecked on a tropical island
and for many years manages to lead a more or less civilized life there, without human
companionship, until a young "cannibal" whom he named Friday arrived. This classic book,
which has been filmed many times and often re-written and simplified for very young readers,
has an almost universal appeal because it portrays a single strong individual who, all alone,
triumphs over hostile surroundings. Readers of the book are bound to ask themselves such a
question as "Could I survive if I were cast away on an island by myself?"
The appeal of Robinson Crusoe is also great because Defoe presents Crusoe's story as a true
account of what happened to a real person. Many people believe that Defoe modeled
Robinson Crusoe on an actual man, a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk
quarreled with his commanding officer and, at his own request, was abandoned on an
uninhabited Pacific island. There he stayed for almost five years (1704–1709), and after his
rescue and return to England he was interviewed by journalists, including Sir Richard Steele
and possibly Defoe himself.
But it was only the idea of an isolated man that Defoe used. The events in the book have
nothing to do with Selkirk or with anyone else. It is a tribute to Defoe's skill that many readers
have assumed the tale to be true.
Defoe's other novel Moll Flanders is written in the genre of picaresque.
The picaresque novel (Spanish: "picaresca," from "pícaro," for "rogue" or "rascal") is a genre of prose
fiction which depicts the adventures of a low social class hero, often criminal or dishonest, who lives by
his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt a realistic style, with elements of comedy
and satire. This style of novel originated in 16th-century Spain and flourished throughout Europe in the
17th and 18th centuries. It continues to influence modern literature.
Its full title is The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was
Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her
Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother),
Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd
Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.
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Moll was born in Newgate Prison to a mother who was transported to Virginia shortly
afterwards for theft. Around the age of three a parish took her in and she was given to the
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care of a nurse. When her nurse died, Moll became a maid-servant in the household of the
Mayor, and learned the same lessons as the daughters of the house. The older son of the
house seduced her. Then the younger one fell in love with her also, and wanted to marry
her, not being aware of her relationship with his brother. The older one convinced the
unwilling girl to marry the younger one, and she lived as his wife until his death a few years
later. His parents took charge of the two children from the marriage.
Moll then married a gentleman-draper who spent her money and soon went bankrupt. He
broke out of jail and left the country, leaving Moll free to marry again, though perhaps not
legally.
After a period of time she married again and went to Virginia to her husban's mother.
Unhappily the woman turned out to be her mother as well. This discovery made Moll leave
her brother/husband and children and return to England. Her goods were lost in a storm
and she moved to Bath.
In Bath she became acquainted with a very modest and very friendly gentleman, whose wife
was insane. They lived as lovers for several years, until he fell gravely ill. After he recovered
he repented his sinful ways and did not want to see Moll anymore, but took care of the son
she had born him.
Moll wanted to get married, but did not see any likely prospects. She wanted to go to the
north. Before the trip Moll met an honest, sober gentleman who agreed to take care of her
money. He decided to divorce his unfaithful wife and marry Moll when she returned.
In Lancashire Moll met someone she thought to be a wealthy Irish gentleman. They married.
Then it turned out that he had married her for her money and she had married him for his.
They liked each other very well, but decided that it was only practical to part, and consider
the marriage nonexistent.
Back in London Moll married the man who had been taking care of her money, and had
successfully obtained a divorce. They lived together soberly and happily for five years until
he went bankrupt and died.
Being no longer young, Moll eventually took to crime, stealing things. Moll became an
excellent and successful thief, and had many adventures until at last she was caught stealing
some silk. In Newgate Moll met her Lancashire husband being brought in for highway
robbery. They reasserted their love and together were transported to Virginia.
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In Virginia they settled in Virginia quite far from the place where her brother and son lived,
and began a tobacco plantation. After a year Moll returned to see her son. He gave her the
income from some land her mother had left her. Soon afterwards her brother died.
Moll and her husband became quite rich and ultimately moved back to England (incognito)
to end their days there.
The main features of Defoe's novels are the following:
they are presented as memoirs or autobiographies;
their protagonist is presented in a series of episodes (no real plot);
they have contemporary and realistic setting;
in them primacy of the economic motive (characters have the reader informed of their
stocks of money and commodities) diminishes the importance of personal relations;
their characters overcome misfortune through self-reliance, hard work and belief in God.
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On The Education of Wome n
I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a
Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and
impertinence; while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than
ourselves. One would wonder, indeed, how it should happen that women are conversible at all; since they are only
beholden to natural parts, for all their knowledge. Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew or make
baubles. They are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write their names, or so; and that is the height of a woman`s
education. And I would but ask any who slight the sex for their understanding, what is a man (a gentleman, I mean)
good for, that is taught no more? I need not give instances, or examine the character of a gentleman, with a good
estate, or a good family, and with tolerable parts; and examine what figure he makes for want of education. The soul
is placed in the body like a rough diamond; and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear. And `tis
manifest, that as the rational soul distinguishes us from brutes; so education carries on the distinction, and makes some
less brutish than others. This is too evident to need any demonstration. But why then should women be denied the
benefit of instruction? If knowledge and understanding had been useless additions to the sex, God Almighty would
never have given them capacities; for he made nothing needless. Besides, I would ask such, What they can see in
ignorance, that they should think it a necessary ornament to a woman? or how much worse is a wise woman than a
fool? or what has the woman done to forfeit the privilege of being taught? Does she plague us with her pride and
impertinence? Why did we not let her learn, that she might have had more wit? Shall we upbraid women with folly,
when `tis only the error of this inhuman custom, that hindered them from being made wiser? The capacities of women
are supposed to be greater, and their senses quicker than those of the men; and what they might be capable of being
bred to, is plain from some instances of female wit, which this age is not without. Which upbraids us with Injustice,
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and looks as if we denied women the advantages of education, for fear they should vie with the men in their
improvements. . . . [They] should be taught all sorts of breeding suitable both to their genius and quality. And in
particular, Music and Dancing; which it would be cruelty to bar the sex of, because they are their darlings. But besides
this, they should be taught languages, as particularly French and Italian: and I would venture the injury of giving a
woman more tongues than one. They should, as a particular study, be taught all the graces of speech, and all the
necessary air of conversation; which our common education is so defective in, that I need not expose it. They should
be brought to read books, and especially history; and so to read as to make them understand the world, and be able
to know and judge of things when they hear of them. To such whose genius would lead them to it, I would deny no
sort of learning; but the chief thing, in general, is to cultivate the understandings of the sex, that they may be capable of
all sorts of conversation; that their parts and judgements being improved, they may be as profitable in their
conversation as they are pleasant. Women, in my observation, have little or no difference in them, but as they are or
are not distinguished by education. Tempers, indeed, may in some degree influence them, but the main distinguishing
part is their Breeding. The whole sex are generally quick and sharp. I believe, I may be allowed to say, generally so:
for you rarely see them lumpish and heavy, when they are children; as boys will often be. If a woman be well bred,
and taught the proper management of her natural wit, she proves generally very sensible and retentive. And, without
partiality, a woman of sense and manners is the finest and most delicate part of God`s Creation, the glory of Her
Maker, and the great instance of His singular regard to man, His darling creature: to whom He gave the best gift either
God could bestow or man receive. And `tis the sordidest piece of folly and ingratitude in the world, to withhold from
the sex the due lustre which the advantages of education gives to the natural beauty of their minds. A woman well bred
and well taught, furnished with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and behaviour, is a creature without
comparison. Her society is the emblem of sublimer enjoyments, her person is angelic, and her conversation heavenly.
She is all softness and sweetness, peace, love, wit, and delight. She is every way suitable to the sublimest wish, and
the man that has such a one to his portion, has nothing to do but to rejoice in her, and be thankful. On the other hand,
Suppose her to be the very same woman, and rob her of the benefit of education, and it follows – If her temper be
good, want of education makes her soft and easy. Her wit, for want of teaching, makes her impertinent and talkative.
Her knowledge, for want of judgement and experience, makes her fanciful and whimsical. If her temper be bad, want
of breeding makes her worse; and she grows haughty, insolent, and loud. If she be passionate, want of manners
makes her a termagant and a scold, which is much at one with Lunatic. If she be proud, want of discretion (which still
is breeding) makes her conceited, fantastic, and ridiculous. And from these she degenerates to be turbulent,
clamorous, noisy, nasty, the devil! . . . The great distinguishing difference, which is seen in the world between men and
women, is in their education; and this is manifested by comparing it with the difference between one man or woman,
and another. And herein it is that I take upon me to make such a bold assertion, That all the world are mistaken in
their practice about women. For I cannot think that God Almighty ever made them so delicate, so glorious creatures;
and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same
accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves. Not that I am for exalting
the female government in the least: but, in short, I would have men take women for companions, and educate them to
be fit for it. A woman of sense and breeding will scorn as much to encroach upon the prerogative of man, as a man of
sense will scorn to oppress the weakness of the woman. But if the women`s souls were refined and improved by
teaching, that word would be lost. To say, the weakness of the sex, as to judgment, would be nonsense; for ignorance
and folly would be no more to be found among women than men. I remember a passage, which I heard from a very
fine woman. She had wit and capacity enough, an extraordinary shape and face, and a great fortune: but had been
cloistered up all her time; and for fear of being stolen, had not had the liberty of being taught the common necessary
knowledge of women`s affairs. And when she came to converse in the world, her natural wit made her so sensible of
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the want of education, that she gave this short reflection on herself: "I am ashamed to talk with my very maids," says
she, "for I don`t know when they do right or wrong. I had more need go to school, than be married." I need not
enlarge on the loss the defect of education is to the sex; nor argue the benefit of the contrary practice. `Tis a thing will
be more easily granted than remedied. This chapter is but an Essay at the thing: and I refer the Practice to those
Happy Days (if ever they shall be) when men shall be wise enough to mend it.
What are the advantages of a woman’s education? What is the author’s attitude to women in
general?
Does Defoe present a woman’s education as a benefit of a man, or a woman, or both?
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Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
Jonathan Swift is one of the main prose writers of the early eighteenth century and England's
greatest satirist. Swift was born in Dublin, of English parents, seven months after the death of
his father. He had prosperous Anglo-Irish uncles who paid for his education, first at an
excellent private grammar school at Kilkenny, Ireland, and then at Trinity College, Dublin. After
that he went to England and became secretary to Sir William Temple, a distant relative. Temple
was a writer, a wealthy country gentleman, a statesman and diplomat. At Moor Park, his
handsome estate near London, he maintained a large household of interesting people.
The job gave Swift the opportunity to mingle with public figures, read, and look for a more
important and permanent position. Unfortunately, noting came up, and after several years of
disappointment Swift had to take his life into his own hands. He obtained a Master's degree
from Oxford University, and was ordained a priest in the Church of Ireland, although he
desperately wanted a career in England.
Swift was assigned to remote parishes in the Irish countryside. To Swift, Ireland seemed a
cultural desert, and he escaped to England whenever it was possible. His longest period of
absence from Ireland was from 1710 to 1713, when he was in London writing pamphlets defending the Tories. Swift hoped to be made an English bishop as a reward, but his political
friends fell from power, and the only appointment he could obtain was the Dean of St.
Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Swift went back to Ireland and held that office for the remaining
thirty years of his life.
Swift has always been a controversial figure to his biographers, who have attacked him,
defended him, and eagerly speculated about his life. Some biographers say that his biggest
personal attachment was to Esther Johnson, a friend whom Swift always called Stella.
Fourteen years younger than he, Stella was just a child when Swift first met her at Sir William
Temple's house and began to supervise her education. Eventually they became deeply
committed to each other. There is no evidence at all that Swift and Stella ever married.
However, many letters, journals, and poems exist to prove that it was a very satisfactory
relationship for both.
As the years passed, Swift made fewer and fewer visits to London, though he continued to
correspond with Alexander Pope and with many other literary friends. In his last days he
suffered from a disease of the inner ear which made him dizzy, deaf, and disoriented. He was
buried in his cathedral in Dublin, where tourists come every day to read his epitaph:
Text
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Here is placed the body
Of Jonathan Swift
Dean of this cathedral church
Where angry rage
Cannot cut through his heart
Go away, traveller
And imitate, if you can
a valiant for manly freedom
Laying claim.
Здесь покоится тело Джонатана
Свифта, декана этого собора, и
суровое негодование уже не
раздирает его сердце. Ступай,
путник, и подражай, если
можешь, тому, кто мужественно
боролся за дело свободы.
An epitaph may be an actual inscription on a gravestone or a short literary work, written as if for a
gravestone, appearing in a collection of poetry. In European literature the epitaph developed as a
variation of the classical epigram. A popular genre in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the age of
classicism, the epitaph subsequently came to be little used.
Works
Swift produced a great amount of journalism defending his religious and political beliefs. His
first important book, The Tale of a Tub (1704), is a satirical allegory about the three major
religious groups in the 18th century Britain: Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Dissenters
(Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Mennonites, etc.). The narrator tells the story of a father
who leaves each of his three sons a coat (the Christian Religion) with a strict instruction that
they shouldn’t change it. Peter (St Peter – the Roman Catholic Church), Martin (Martin Luther
– the Anglican Church) and Jack (John Calvin – the Dissenters) disobeyed their father by
altering their coats to make them more fashionable.
Saint Peter (died AD 64 or 67), also known as Simon Peter, was an early Christian leader, one
of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ according to the New Testament and Christian tradition,
and the first bishop of Rome.
Martin Luther (1483 –1546) was a German monk, Catholic priest, professor of theology and seminal figure of a
reform movement in 16th century Christianity, subsequently known as the Protestant Reformation. He strongly
disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. Luther taught that
salvation is not earned by good deeds but received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as
redeemer from sin and subsequently hell. His theology challenged the authority of the Pope of the Roman Catholic
Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge. Luther's efforts to reform the
theology and practice of the Roman Catholic Church launched the Protestant Reformation.
John Calvin (1509–1564) was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He
was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Calvinists broke
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with the Roman Catholic church but differed with Lutherans on the real presence of Christ in the Lord's supper,
theories of worship, and the use of God's law for believers, among other things. Calvinism can be a misleading term
because the religious tradition it denotes is and has always been diverse, with a wide range of influences rather than a
single founder. The movement was first called "Calvinism" by Lutherans who opposed it.
Peter furnished his coat with gold lace and other beautiful accessories. Martin removed the
false decoration from his coat without tearing the cloth. Jack fanatically ripped his garment to
shreds to get rid of all ornaments.
Swift was deeply committed to the ideals of justice and humanity. In the series of pamphlets,
The Drapier's Letters (1724–1725), Swift became an Irish patriot defending the Irish rights
against the oppressive policies of their English rulers.
The most famous of his pamphlets, A Modest Proposal (1729), satirizes the British by
proposing an outrageous solution to the "Irish problem." To revive Ireland's industries and
bring the country out of its current financial collapse Swift offers to sell infant children for
meat. The author states that Ireland needs a cheap and simple solution to help its impoverished
population. The Irish streets are full of woman beggars and many of them have children, which
they fail to feed properly. Children mostly grow up to become thieves. Swift argues that among
the 1.5 million people in the country, approximately 120,000 are children who are useless to
society.
Gulliver's Travels (1726) is Swift’s most famous book. The book was an immediate success.
It has been interpreted at many different levels: as a travel book for children, a sharp political
satire and an accusation of a society that accepts war and corruption and rejects altruism and
reason.
Content
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
The book begins with a short introduction in which Lemuel Gulliver, in the style of books of
the time, gives a brief outline of his life and history before his voyages.
During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a
prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than 6 inches tall, who are inhabitants of the island
country of Lilliput. He is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the court.
From there, the book follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput. He is also given
the permission to wander around the city on a condition that he must not harm anybody.
Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to win their neighbours, the Blefuscudians, by stealing their
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fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput,
displeasing the King and the court. Gulliver is charged with treason for, among other
"crimes", m
" aking water"in the capital (even though he was putting out a fire and saving
countless lives). He is sentenced to be blinded, but with the assistance of a kind friend, he
escapes to Blefuscu. He finds an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing
ship, which safely takes him back home.
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
When the sailing ship Adventure is forced to land for want of fresh water, Gulliver is
abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 72 feet (22 m) tall (the scale
of Brobdingnag is about 12:1, compared to Lilliput's 1:12). He brings Gulliver home and
his daughter cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for
money. Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen
orders a small house to be built for him so that he can be carried around in it. The house is
referred to as his 'travelling box'. Between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps
and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King.
The King is not happy with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the
use of guns and cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his travelling box is seized by a giant
eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea, where he is picked up by some sailors,
who return him to England.
Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
After Gulliver's ship was attacked by pirates, he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island
near India. Fortunately, he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to
the arts of music and mathematics but unable to use them for practical purposes. Gulliver
sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science. Great resources and manpower
are employed on researching absurd schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers,
softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering
political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons.
Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a trader who can take him on to Japan. While
waiting for a passage, Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where
he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures. In
Luggnagg he encounters the struldbrugs, unfortunates who are immortal. They do not have
the gift of eternal youth, but suffer the disabilities and illnesses of old age and are considered
legally dead at the age of eighty. After his visit to Japan, Gulliver returns home, determined
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to stay there for the rest of his days.
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to the sea as the captain
of a trader as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage his crew mutiny
and leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue as pirates. Gulliver
comes upon a race of hideous, deformed and savage humanoid creatures to which he
conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards he meets a race of horses who call
themselves Houyhnhnms (which in their language means "the perfection of nature"). They are
the rulers, while the deformed creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their dreadful
form.
Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household, and comes to admire the Houyhnhnms
and their lifestyle, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some
semblance of reason which they only use to aggravate the vices Nature gave them. However,
an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms decide that Gulliver, a Yahoo, is a danger to their
civilisation, and expel him.
He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that
Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to
his home in England, but he is unable to reconcile himself to living among 'Yahoos' and
becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and
spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables, basically becoming
insane.
Style
Swift’s contemporaries immediately understood that Swift was doing several things in
Gulliver’s Travels. Under the pretense of describing politics in Lilliput, he was indirectly
referring to politicians and political events in his own country. For instance, in the imaginary
Lilliput there are two major parties, distinguished by a trivial detail: the height of the heels on the
shoes they wear. Another characteristic is the way they eat eggs. The Big-Endians always cut
open the big end of a boiled egg, and the Little-Endians always cut open the little end. These
parties have had a long and bitter history: one emperor has lost his life, another – his throne,
and many Lilliputians have had to go live in another country, Blefuscu. All these details suggest
that Swift was thinking of specific events in English history. It is possible to identify the
parallels between Swift’s fictions and historical fact. Lilliput, for example, represents England
and Blefuscu represents France, where some English Catholics lived in exile. The Big-Endians
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are people loyal to Catholicism, and the Little-Endians are those loyal to Anglicanism. The
emperor who lost his life is Charles I, the one who lost his throne is James II.
In Gulliver's Travels different peoples that Gulliver visits metaphorically represent different
aspects of humanity.
Gulliver represents an everyman, a middle-class Englishman who is fundamentally decent and
benevolent. In the course of his travels, he becomes less tolerant and more judgmental of the
nations he visits and of his fellow human beings.
The Lilliputians, a tiny race of people, represent much of what is petty and small-minded
about the English and humankind in general. They are physically and morally smaller than
Gulliver. They are arrogant, selfish, hypocritical, and surprisingly dangerous and cruel in spite
of their small size.
The Brobingnagians, the race of giants, are physically and morally bigger than Gulliver.
While vice does exist in their country, unlike humans, they have not built vice into their
government and institutions. Therefore, they represent much of what is good in humankind.
The Brobdingnagian king is shocked at Gulliver's account of English politics and society, and
refuses his offer of gunpowder as he cannot think of any good coming from it. However, the
great size of the Brobingnagians means that Gulliver can never feel safe or equal in their
society. They treat him kindly, but as a plaything or an exhibit. Gulliver was large and strong in
Lilliput, and absolutely powerless in Brobdingnag. Swift means this as a warning to nations,
such as the English of his time, that the arrival of a larger or more powerful force can easily put
an end to their dominance on the world stage.
The Laputans represent the dangers and limitations of abstract and theoretical knowledge.
This field was growing in Swift's time, under the influence of what became known as the
Enlightenment. When Swift wrote this section of the novel, many of the impracticable
experiments and theories resembling those described in the book had actually been carried out
or proposed by the scientists of the Royal Society of London. The Laputan people's addiction
to abstract knowledge makes them indifferent to each other and to all human concerns. The
fact that the King of Laputa inhabits an island that floats above his domain is symbolic of his
ungrounded thinking and his separation from his people and their practical concerns.
The Houyhnhnms represent reason and virtue. They operate their society according to these
principles and as a result, have no crime, disease or other problems. They subordinate their
own individual lives and concerns to the good of their society as a whole. So deep-rooted is
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this tendency that they have no distinguishing characteristics or names, and they do not seem
to possess an emotional life beyond treating everyone with respect and kindness. While they
represent the rational faculty that man possesses, they do not seem fully human and, indeed,
expel Gulliver from their society because they see him as a Yahoo. This suggests that Swift
does not intend their nation to be seen as a complete and self-contained model for an ideal
human society. Their way of life only exemplifies much what is admirable in human beings.
The humanoid Yahoos, on the contrary, represent all that is bestial, low and despicable in
human behavior. Gulliver is ashamed to recognize the similarities between them and human
beings. They are dirty, greedy, violent and destructive of themselves and others. While they are
constantly likened to human beings by Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms, an important distinction
is drawn: human beings are endowed with reason, and Yahoos are not. The conclusion is not,
however, that humans are better than Yahoos, because they (unlike Yahoos) have the ability to
choose good or evil, and frequently choose evil. The Yahoos are therefore not identical to
humans, but symbolize humans at their worst.
Swift’s approach to the analysis of human nature is complex.
Does he view a man as a representative of a particular time and society or
human race in general?
What is his conclusion about this man?
Do you think evil or good prevails in human nature?
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Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
Samuel Richardson received little formal education. His family hoped that he would become a
priest, however, due to the lack of means he was apprenticed to a printer in London. Thirteen
years later he set up his own shop as a stationer and printer and became one of the leading
figures in the London trade.
Richardson married his employer's daughter, Martha Wilde, and they had six children. Sadly,
she and all their children died. He married again, and had six children with Elizabeth Leake, and
although two of them also died of childhood illness, four survived.
Richardson's literary career began after he was in his fifties and well-established as a printer,
when two booksellers proposed that he should compile a volume of model letters for unskilled
letter writers. While preparing this, Richardson became fascinated by the project, and a small
sequence of letters from a daughter in service, asking her father's advice when threatened by
her master's advances, formed the beginning of Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740–41).
Pamela was a huge success and became something of a cult novel.
Content
Pamela Andrews is a beautiful 15-year old maidservant. Her master, Mr. B, makes
unwanted advances towards her after the death of his mother. His high rank hinders him
from proposing marriage. Mr. B locks Pamela up in one of his estates, and attempts to
seduce her. She rejects him, but is falling in love. He intercepts her letters and becomes even
more enamored by her innocence and intelligence.
Finally Mr. B sincerely proposes to Pamela. Pamela attempts to build a successful
relationship with him and to acclimatise to upperclass society.
Richardson's other most popular epistolary novel, also regarded today as his masterpiece, is
Clarissa or, the History of a Young Lady (1747–8). Clarissa is one of the longest novels in
the English language. It is a tragic story of a girl who runs off with her seducer, but is later
abandoned.
Content
Clarissa Harlowe receives a substantial fortune from her grandfather. The family attempts to
force Clarissa to marry Roger Solmes, who is willing to trade properties with James,
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Clarissa’s brother. Robert Lovelace (the family’s enemy) tricks Clarissa into eloping with
him. Clarissa becomes Lovelace’s prisoner for many months. She refuses to marry him even
after he rapes her.
Clarissa escapes to find sanctuary at the house of a shopkeeper and his wife. She becomes
dangerously ill due to the mental pressure. Eventually Clarissa dies in the full consciousness
of her virtue and trusting in a better life after death. Lovelace dies in a duel with Clarissa’s
cousin.
Style
Richardson believed that letters could be used to accurately portray character traits. He quickly
adopted the epistolary novel form, which granted him "the tools, the space, and the freedom to
develop distinctly different characters speaking directly to the reader".
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary
entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents"
such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use. The epistolary form can add
greater realism to a story.
In his first novel, Pamela, he explored the various complexities of the title character's life, and
the letters allow the reader to witness her develop and progress over time. The novel was an
experiment, but it allowed Richardson to create a complex heroine through a series of her
letters. When Richardson wrote Clarissa, he had more experience in the form and expanded
the letter writing to four different correspondents, which created a complex system of
characters encouraging each other to grow and develop over time.
Richardson’s novels were enormously popular in their day. Although he has been accused of
being a verbose and sentimental storyteller, his emphasis on detail, his psychological insights
into women, and his dramatic technique have earned him a prominent place among English
novelists.
His last novel is The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4). By the time Richardson
writes Grandison, he transforms the letter writing from telling of personal insights and
explaining feelings into a means for people to communicate their thoughts on the actions of
others and for the public to celebrate virtue. The letters are no longer written for a few people,
but are passed along in order for all to see.
In the London literary world, Richardson was a rival of Henry Fielding, and the two responded
to each other's literary styles in their own novels.
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Henry Fielding (1707–1754)
Henry Fielding was an 18th century English writer and magistrate. He attended Eton College,
where he studied classical authors and began to challenge the literary world. Fielding wrote his
first play in 1728. He then enrolled at the University of Leiden in Holland, but left to return to
London in 1729. Fielding wrote masques, farces, comedies, burlesques and political satires
which so exasperated the Whig government that all London theaters, except two protected by
royal patent, were ordered closed by the Licensing Act of 1737. Fielding's career as a
playwright was at an end.
Unable to find meaningful work, Fielding began studying law at Middle Temple and became a
barrister. In the meantime, he married Charlotte Craddock and edited The Champion; or,
British Mercury, a satirical political publication.
In 1740, Samuel Richardson published Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, which was an instant
success. The tale of a young woman, who becomes a great lady and finds true happiness by
defending her chastity, was the London sensation of the season, an early bestseller.
Pamela was read as a lesson in morality by all young ladies. However, Fielding found the work
objectionable and set out to write a parody of it, which he called An Apology for the Life of
Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741). In Shamela the virtuous heroine is hilariously exposed as a
crafty schemer. Although the book was published anonymously, Fielding was generally
accepted as the author.
He followed with Joseph Andrews (1742), another parody published anonymously, and The
History of the Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743).
Despite his productivity, Fielding endured significant personal loss in these years. His father
passed away in 1741, followed by one of his daughters in 1742 and his wife in 1744. He
married his wife's maid in 1747 after the two grew close during a period of mourning.
Fielding's legal training was at last put to good use in the late 1740s, when he was appointed
justice of the peace for Westminster and then magistrate of Middlesex. Together with his halfbrother Sir John Fielding, he established a new tradition of justice and suppression of crime in
London. They helped to found what is known as London's first police force, the Bow Street
Runners, in 1749 and did a great deal to improve prison conditions.
Although he devoted significant energy to struggle with crime, Fielding managed to complete
his celebrated novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), a work considered one
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of the English language's great early novels.
Fielding’s final novel was sentimental Amelia (1751). It describes the hardships suffered by a
young couple newly married.
Fielding's health was in serious decline by this point. He traveled by sea to Portugal with his
wife and daughter in the summer of 1754, but never returned to England, as he passed away in
Lisbon on October 8.
Tom Jones
Fielding’s best-plotted novel, his great mock epic, romance and picaresque, The History of
Tom Jones, a Foundling, was begun in 1746. When the novel finally appeared, it was
enthusiastically received by the general public. However, the Tory journalists, who strongly
disliked Fielding for supporting the House of Hanover, and Richardson and his group, who
saw Fielding as a “filthy and immoral writer,” disapproved of the book as well as of Fielding
himself, particularly for “marrying his cook.”
The plot of Tom Jones is among the most perfectly planned plots in literature. It is very
complicated for a simple summary. Its basis is Tom's alienation from his foster father, Squire
Allworthy, and his sweetheart, Sophia Western, and his reconciliation with them after lively and
dangerous adventures on the road and in London.
The triumph of the book is its presentation of English life and character in the mid18th century. Every social type is represented, and through them every shade of
moral behavior. Fielding himself called Tom Jones a “comic epic poem in prose,”
though others say it is essentially a comic romance.
Fielding used the term ‘comic epic poem in prose’ in the “Preface to Joseph Andrews”. Fielding claimed that he was
founding a new genre of writing but this was not entirely accurate. There was a long tradition of such writing before
him, though it was not completely developed or established. Homer’s Odyssey is often referred to as a ‘comic epic in
verse’. Fielding tried to combine ‘comic epic poem’ and ‘prose epic’ to produce what he termed as ‘comic epic
poem in prose’.
Fielding does include some parts that parody heroic poetry, particularly, the digressions. Like
other eighteenth century writers, Fielding felt it was his duty to try to change his society. Thus,
he headed each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones with an introductory essay, each of which
enlarges on an idea that he wished to promote, much like the Greek chorus in a tragedy.
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The structure of Tom Jones shows three major parts, each six books in length.
The first third of the novel is set in the Paradise Hall of Squire Allworthy in Somersetshire. In
this part Tom Jones grows from infant foundling into a teenager who falls in love with the
beautiful daughter of Squire Western. Tom’s infancy and early years to age twenty need only
the first three books to be told; the beginning of his twenty-first year and his break with the
squire highlight the next three books.
The second third, books 7 through 12, take but weeks to complete, recounting Tom’s
adventures on the road to London. In this section, the protagonist experiences many episodic
adventures involving a diverse cast of characters that include a woman in distress, soldiers
on the march, gypsies, untrustworthy lawyers, puppeteers, women admirers of the title
character, and an impoverished robber.
The third part, books 13 through 18, is set in London, taking only days to complete. Yet the
tone is grimmer, not the comical rowdy, farcical adventures Tom has hitherto met on the road
but ugly involvements: prostitution, incest, and the like, similar to what Fielding had seen of
London himself. In the third part Tom searches for his beloved, fights a duel, has encounters
with a possessive seductress, goes to jail, gains his freedom, and reunites with his beloved.
This section ends when the principal characters return to Somersetshire.
Style
One of the novel’s innovations is the narrative persona.
Narrative point of view or narrative perspective describes the position of the narrator (the character of
the storyteller) in relation to the story being told.
In the first-person narration, the story is revealed through a narrator who is also a character within the story, so that
the narrator reveals the plot by referring to this viewpoint character with forms of "I" or, when plural, "we".
The second-person narration is less common in fiction. The narrator refers to him- or herself as 'you' in a way that
suggests alienation from the events described, or emotional/ironic distance.
The third-person narration provides the greatest flexibility to the author and thus is the most commonly used
narrative mode in literature. Every character is referred to by the narrator as "he", "she", "it", or "they", but never as "I"
or "we" (first-person), or "you" (second-person). The third-person "subjective", or limited, narrator describes one
or more character's feelings and thoughts. He may know absolutely everything about a single character and every
piece of knowledge in that character's mind, but the narrator's knowledge is "limited" to that character. The thirdperson "objective", or omniscient, narrator has knowledge of all times, people, places, and events, including all
characters' thoughts. An omniscient third-person narrator who interrupts the narrative and speaks directly to the
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readers is called obtrusive. He may use these intrusions to summarise, philosophise, moralise or guide the reader’s
interpretation of events. If the narrator does not address the reader directly he is referred to as non-obtrusive.
When telling the story, the narrator generally uses third-person omniscient point of view that
enables him to reveal the thoughts of the characters. When commenting on the story, the
narrator uses first-person point of view, sometimes in the singular and sometimes in the plural.
Text
from Tom Jones. Book 9, Chapter 3
It hath been observed, by wise men or women, I forget which, that all persons are doomed to be in love once in their
lives. No particular season is, as I remember, assigned for this; but the age at which Miss Bridget was arrived, seems
to me as proper a period as any to be fixed on for this purpose: it often, indeed, happens much earlier; but when it
doth not, I have observed it seldom or never fails about this time. Moreover, we may remark that at this season love
is of a more serious and steady nature than what sometimes shows itself in the younger parts of life. The love of girls is
uncertain, capricious, and so foolish that we cannot always discover what the young lady would be at; nay, it may
almost be doubted whether she always knows this herself.
What is the purpose of Fielding’s digressions in the book?
Do they help or obstruct the process of reading?
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Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
The greatest poet of the period who modeled himself after the great poets of classical antiquity
is Alexander Pope (1688–1744). He first attracted public attention in 1709 when he wrote
Pastorals, the bookish poems that were largely an imitation of Virgil. Still, the poems were a
success, and went from hand to hand before they were published. Pope became really famous
as the author of Essay on Criticism (1711), a brilliant poem written in rhymed couplets, in
which he sets out his principles for writing poetry. As a true classicist, Pope was more
interested in form and correctness than in imagination and feelings. He praised the ideals of
truth, reason, and polished order in poetry and prose:
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
Pope's later poems were published in The Spectator, the newspaper edited by Steele and
Addison. His most famous poem was The Rape of the Lock (1714). It concerns the quarrel
between two families caused by Lord Petre's cutting a lovelock from the head of Arabella
Fermor, Belinda in the poem. The poem is a bitter satire on the mode of life of fashionable
people of his day. The joke is in the disparity between the high style of the poem and the
triviality of the subject. The poem was published with the permission of Miss Fermor. Pope
described the matter in a mock-heroic poem. It is a playful poem full of paradoxes, witty
observations and humorous epic allusions.
Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroic-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock
common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works
either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities to such a point that
they become absurd.
In 1715 Pope issued the first volume of his translation in heroic couplets of Homer's Iliad. The
poem was completed in 1720. It was followed by a translation of the Odyssey.
The publication of his works gave Pope a financial independence. In 1717 Pope moved to a
villa in Twickenham, on the River Thames, west of London, where he lived till the end of his
life. The most celebrated people of the day came to see him there. He became friends with
Jonathan Swift and, together with some other leading literary figures, they formed the
Scriblerus Club to discuss topics of contemporary interest and to ridicule all false tastes in
learning.
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In Essay on Man (1733- 34) Pope revealed his philosophic ideas on the world and the man
living in it. According to Pope the universe is a smoothly running machine, set in motion by
God. The aim of man is to learn to master this machine. Man can rise high and fall very low,
but he is fundamentally good and generally attempts to perfection.
Pope's success made the heroic couplet the dominant poetic form of the century. His poems
were translated into many foreign languages, making him famous throughout the European
continent.
In the second half of the century, however, he fell out of favour, as tastes began to change and
his sophisticated poetry was considered to lack feeling. He did not appeal to readers again until
the beginning of the twentieth century, when once more his wit and technical ability found an
appreciative public.
The Augustan poet was a social being whose private feelings were considered inappropriate for
public confession. The influence of ancient Rome dominated in the first half of the eighteenth
century. Locked into well balanced forms, poets obediently produced estimable satire and
mock heroic verse. However, by the middle 1700s, it was evident that the 'conflict' between the
intellect and the emotions was coming to a climax and that the neoclassical canons were
challenged by a more personal and melancholic kind of poetry.
Text
from The Essay on Man
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall:
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Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
What contrasted features does Pope describe to illustrate “a middle state” in a
man?
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Reference List
Reference List
Selected Bibliography:
1. Elements of Literature, Literature of England. – Holt : Reinhart & Winston. – 1989.
2. Kenneth Broadey. Focus on English and American Literature / Kenneth Broadey, Fabio Malgaretti. – Москва :
Айрис-пресс. – 2003.
3. The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. – Wordsworth Edition Ltd. – 1994.
4. Denis Delaney. Fields of Vision. Literature in the English language. Volumes I, II / Denis Delaney, Ciaran Ward,
Carla Rho Fiorina. – Pearson Education Limited. Longman. – 2007.
5. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Third Edition. – Oxford University Press. – 2004.
6. English Literature. Английская литература: Сред. века – XVIII век : учебное пособие для 10-11 кл. шк. с
углубл. изучением англ. яз. / сост. В.Р. Трусова. – Москва : Просвещение. – 2002.
7. English and American Literature: A course of Lectures. Английская и американская литература : Курс
лекций для школьников старших классов и студентов. – Санкт-Петербург : КОРОНА принт. – 2002.
8. What is the English We Read. Универсальная хрестоматия текстов на английском языке / сост. Т.Н.
Шишкина, Т.В. Леденева, М.А. Юрченко. – Москва : Проспект. – 2006.
9. Тумбина, О.В. Lectures on English Literature. Лекции по английской литературе V–XX веков /
О.В. Тумбина. – Санкт-Петербург : КАРО. – 2003.
10. Teachers & Students’ Guide to the British Literature : методическое пособие по истории британской
литературы для учителей и учащихся / сост. Н.Н. Часовая. – Москва : Айрис-пресс. – 2002.
11. Guide to English and American Literature : учебное пособие по английской и американской литературе /
сост. О.В. Зубанова. – Москва : Менеджер. – 2004.
Internet Resources:
1. Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://
www.luminarium.org
2. About.com. Classic Literature. A History of English Literature by Robert Huntington Fletcher [Электронный
ресурс]. – Режим доступа:
3. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rfletcher/bl-rfletcher-history-table.htm
4. A brief history of English literature [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа:
http://
www.universalteacher.org.uk/lit/history.htm
5. History World. HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://
historyworld.net/wrldhis/plaintexthistories.asp?historyid=aa08
6. Literarism. The Republic of Letters. English literature [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://
literarism.blogspot.ru
7. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://en.wikipedia.org
8. Wikisource, the free library [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://en.wikisource.org
9. Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://en.academic.ru
10. Bartleby.com: Great Books Online [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://bartleby.com
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11. Encyclopedia.com. Free Online Encyclopedia [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа:
http://
www.encyclopedia.com
12. Internet Encyclopedia of Philisophy [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.iep.utm.edu
13. GradeSaver. Study Guide and essay Editing [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://
www.gradesaver.com
14. Dictionary.com [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://dictionary.reference.com
15. Study Guides, Lesson Plans, Homework Help, Answers & More [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа:
http://www.enotes.com
16. Free Essays, Term Paper, Research Paper, and Book Report [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа:
http://www.123helpme.com
17. Answers. The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life’s Questions [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа:
http://www.answers.com
�
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Шевченко, Людмила Леонидовна
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History of English Literature (from Anglo-Saxons to the Age of Reason)
Subject
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1. Литературоведение. 2. Литература Европы — Англия — 5 в. — 6 в. — 7 в. — 8 в. — 9 в. — 10 в. — 11 в. — 12 в. — 13 в. — 14 в. — 15 в. — 16 в. — 17 в. — 18 в. 3. Языкознание. 4. Германские языки. 5. английская литература. 6. история литературы. 7. литературные жанры. 8. литературные тексты. 9. комментарии. 10. анализ художественного текста. 11. английский язык. 12. английские писатели.
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History of English Literature (from Anglo-Saxons to the Age of Reason) [Электронный ресурс] : [учебное пособие] / Л. Л. Шевченко ; Алтайский государственный педагогический университет. — 1 компьютерный файл (pdf; 28.2 MB). — Барнаул : АлтГПУ, 2015. — 198 с.
Учебное пособие предлагает материал для подготовки и проведения практических занятий по дисциплине «История литературы страны изучаемого языка». В нем представлен теоретический материал, охватывающий основные периоды английской литературы с V по XVIII век и включающий сведения о направлениях в развитии литературных жанров, авторах и их произведениях. Тексты произведений сопровождаются комментариями, вопросами и практическими заданиями, направленными на формирование у студентов навыков интерпретации и анализа художественного текста. В пособии даются определения изучаемых литературоведческих, культурологических и философских понятий, а также дополнительные сведения о персоналиях и событиях изучаемых эпох, которые позволят студентам расширить их кругозор. Материал данного учебного пособия ориентирован на студентов факультетов иностранных языков, а также студентов филологических факультетов, изучающих английский язык по углубленной программе.
Creator
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Шевченко, Людмила Леонидовна
Source
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Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2015
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Алтайский государственный педагогический университет
Date
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03.12.2015
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©Алтайский государственный педагогический университет, 2015
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pdf, exe
Language
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русский
Type
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Учебное пособие
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<a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/shevchenko.exe">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/exe/shevchenko.exe</a><br /><a href="http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/shevchenko.pdf">http://library.altspu.ru/dc/pdf/shevchenko.pdf</a>
английская литература
английские писатели
английский язык
Англия
Германские языки
история литературы
комментарии10анализ художественного текста
Литература Европы
литературные жанры
литературные тексты
Литературоведение
Языкознание