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Banha University First Grade
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Faculty of Arts March 2011
Department of English Time Allowed: 3 hours
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Respond to the following questions:
* Note: Time limit for each question is 35 minutes. Grade for each question is 4.
1.
William Shakespeare's "Sonnet ll6" develops the theme of the eternity of true love through an elaborate and intricate cascade of images. State and discuss these images?
2.
Andrew Marvell is classified as a Metaphysical poet. The Metaphysical poets flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century; their love poetry deals with the philosophical, not the romantic, aspects of being in love. The title of
Marvell's poem "The Definition of Love" suggests such an approach. Explicate?
3.
"Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," and all the Lucy poems, exemplify
William Wordsworth's premises about the nature of poetry. Explain?
4.
The title of Wallace Stevens' poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" reflects the irony and complexity of the poem as a whole. The poem is filled with the visual imagery, wordplay, humor, and thematic tension common to Stevens' poetry.
Explain?
5.
In "A Noiseless Patient Spider," Walt Whitman's preference for open verse, although unorthodox, provides, surprisingly, plentiful evidence of his frequent reliance on traditional uses of repetition such as epanaphora, and epanalepsis.
Explain these devices and show their function in the poem?
Good Luck
Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab
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Question # One:
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William Shakespeare's "Sonnet ll6" develops the theme of the eternity of true love through an elaborate and intricate cascade of images. State and discuss these images?
Answer:
Shakespeare's "Sonnet ll6" develops the theme of the eternity of true love through an elaborate and intricate cascade of images. The sonnet uses imagery to give form to this belief that true love has to be stronger than death, set as a seal upon the lover's heart.
Shakespeare establishes the context early with his famous phrase "the marriage of true minds," a phrase which does more than is commonly recognized. The figure of speech suggests that true marriage is a union of minds rather than merely a license for the coupling of bodies. Shakespeare implies that true love proceeds from and unites minds on the highest level of human activity, that it is inherently mental and spiritual. From the beginning, real love transcends the sensual-physical. Moreover, the very highest level is reserved to "true" minds. By this he means lovers who have "plighted troth," in the phrasing of the marriage service—that is, exchanged vows to be true to each other. This reinforces the spirituality of loving, giving it religious overtones. The words "marriage" and "impediments" also allude to the language of the service, accentuating the sacred nature of love.
Shakespeare then deliberately repeats phrases to show that this kind of love is more than mere reciprocation. Love cannot be simply returning what is given, like an exchange of gifts. It has to be a simple, disinterested, one-sided offering, unrelated to any possible compensation. He follows this with a series of positive and negative metaphors to illustrate the full dimensions of love. It is first "an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken." This famous figure has not been completely explained, although the general idea is clear. Love is equated with some kind of navigating device so securely mounted that it remains functional in hurricanes. It then becomes not a device but a reference point, a "star," of universal recognition but speculative in its composition; significantly, it is beyond human ken.
In "Love's not Time's fool," Shakespeare moves on to yet another metaphorical level. To begin with, love cannot be made into a fool by the transformations of time; it operates beyond and outside it, hence cannot be subject to it. This is so although time controls those qualities, which are popularly thought to evoke love—physical attractions.
Shakespeare conjures up the image of the Grim Reaper with his "bending sickle," only to assert that love is not within his "compass"—which denotes both grip and reckoning and sweep of blade. Love cannot be fathomed by time or its extreme instrument, death. Love
"bears it out"—perseveres in adversity—to the "edge of doom"—that is, beyond the grave and the worst phase of time's decay.
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The final device is a conundrum in logic. It establishes an alternative—"If this be error"—then disproves it. What remains, and remains valid, is the other. It also bears a double edge. If this demonstration is wrong, Shakespeare says, "I never writ," which is an obvious contradiction. The only possible conclusion is that it is not wrong. He proceeds then to a corollary, "nor no man ever loved," which is as false as the previous statement.
This imagery duplicates the sequence of promises exchanged by true lovers in the marriage service that Shakespeare quotes in the opening of the poem. True love vows constancy regardless of better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health—all the vagaries of life and change. The simple series, however, seems to minimize the intensity of love necessary to do this. On the contrary, love is absolutely secure against external assault. In particular, it holds firm against the ravages of time. Since the poem begins by dissociating love from the limits of time, this should not be surprising, especially since the marriage service insists on the possibility of love surviving time and its consequence, change. So strong is the popular belief that love is rooted in physical attractiveness, however, that the poem is forced to repudiate this explicitly. It does it in the starkest way imaginable, by personifying time as the Grim Reaper and by bringing that specter directly before the eyes of the lover. This happens; the threat is real, but the true lover can face down even death.
The marriage service does that also, by asking the thinking lover to promise fidelity "until death do us part."
Question # 2:
Andrew Marvell is classified as a Metaphysical poet. The Metaphysical poets flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century; their love poetry deals with the philosophical, not the romantic, aspects of being in love. The title of Marvell's poem "The Definition of
Love" suggests such an approach. Explicate?
Answer:
Andrew Marvell is classified as a Metaphysical poet. The Metaphysical poets flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century; their love poetry deals with the philosophical, not the romantic, aspects of being in love. The title suggests such an approach. The eight quatrains of the poem appear as an argument leading to the "therefore" of the final stanza, which has the terseness and compactness normally associated with definitions. It must be realized, however, that much Metaphysical poetry utilizes ambiguity, double meanings, and ironies. Here the term "definition" has its original Latin meaning of "restriction" as a double meaning. Marvell's aim is to link the two meanings.
The poet speaks in the first person about "my love." It soon becomes clear that
"love" refers to the state, not the person, who is never described. Only in the first stanza is the object of love mentioned, in an enigmatic statement that "it" is "strange and high." This suggests, perhaps, the aristocratic origins and uniqueness of the lady, as well as the quality
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He does not trace the birth of his love in terms of time and place but by abstractions, here personified as "Despair" and "Impossibility." In the second stanza, "magnanimous
Despair" is contrasted with "feeble Hope." The oxymoron is at the heart of the poem—it could mean that, because of the lady's nobility, he could never win her, but since his is a noble love, he has become greathearted (the literal meaning of magnanimous), the highest
Aristotelian virtue. If he had merely hoped for a suitable partner, he would never have allowed himself to fall in love with the lady. All this gives the poem a definite locus.
Other interpretations might suggest, more abstractly, that only despair can provide the strength and integrity of emotion that are necessary to break the lover out of a second-rate love. Idealism both elevates the love and proclaims its unattainability.
The third stanza introduces a third term—Fate. If it were up to love alone, the poet would soon consummate his love, but Fate will not allow this. The next stanza expands on this: Fate, like a jealous lover, wants to guard her own power. True fulfilled love not only has great power but also is self-determining.
The poem then sets up a series of extended images to explore this: In stanzas 5 and
6, the image is of the two lovers as two poles, on which "Love's whole world" turns. They are never able to touch, because to do so would be to collapse that very world, to cause it to lose its dimensions. In stanza 7, the image becomes geometrical: Lesser loves may touch, as oblique lines will; perfect loves run as do parallel lines (perhaps as parallel circles, the typical symbol of perfection), and never join. The final stanza does not continue these images but returns to the triad of love, Fate, and the lovers. Their fate is, paradoxically, always to be separated, yet to be in true "conjunction of the Mind."
The tone of the poem, which is humorous and ironic, is established in two main ways: first, through the very tight, economic verse form that Marvell learned from the classical poets. The meter is a very regular iambic tetrameter, with accentuated alternating rhymes. The feel is of couplet form, with heavy punctuation at the end of every second line. Each stanza is a complete sentence. The effect is of tight control, an economy that belongs to the enigmatic and the paradoxical. The meter is able to pass from simple monosyllables to technical and abstract polysyllables with fluency and sharpness. The form is so "defined," so "restricted," that it invites the ironic awareness of the tension between formal control and the situational powerlessness of the poet. The words are mathematically placed in terms of balance and closure, yet the sense is of inconclusiveness, even failure. The tone is thus delicately balanced, tongue-in-cheek.
The second way in which tone is established is by means of wit. The Metaphysical concept of wit has to do with the quick play of the mind, the ability to be intelligent and poetic at the same time and, above all, to achieve new insight by means of joining the most unlikely concepts. The imagery that is the expression of this "conjunction of the Mind" is
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His contrast of Hope's "tinsel wing" with Fate's "iron wedges" is also striking, as is the personification of Fate jealously squeezing itself between the lovers, suggesting something claustrophobic. Sometimes the conceits do not logically fit together—there are parallel lines and conjunctions; Fate comes between the lovers, yet "Love's whole world" also occupies the same space. The humorous tone allows such discrepancies—indeed, they become part of the joke.
Question # 3:
"Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," and all the Lucy poems, exemplify William
Wordsworth's premises about the nature of poetry. Explain?
Answer:
"Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known," and all the Lucy poems, exemplify
William Wordsworth's premises about the nature of poetry. The language is direct and virtually free of literary tropes. The only simile the poet uses is the rather cliché "Fresh as a rose in June" (line 6), which he says describes the way Lucy looks to him everyday. Even his use of adjectives and adverbs is limited. Only in characterizing the path of the moon in the night sky does Wordsworth attempt to suggest change and motion through choice of descriptors: that sphere is variously "sinking" (line 15), "descending" (line 20), and finally
"bright" (line 24) as it drops out of sight behind Lucy's cottage. The result of such sparseness of verbal decoration, coupled with the sparseness of the ballad stanza itself
(quatrains of alternating lines of four and three beats), focuses the reader's attention on the action in the poem. Much of that action is simple mental reverie, but the growing state of anxiety which the speaker feels as he approaches Lucy's cottage is made apparent to the reader through the simple language and rustic form of this ballad.
As he does with many of his early compositions, Wordsworth uses the ballad stanza form in "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known" to achieve a note of rustic simplicity. His technique is deliberate and has a historical explanation: In the eighteenth century, most poets relied on elevated language and formal devices that reflected the influence of classical literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge made a conscious effort to transform poetry into something more simple and direct, in which human emotions could be expressed directly in language that all people would understand. Wordsworth states these principles in his famous Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, with other poems (1800); there, he describes poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [...] recollected in tranquillity." A poet is not some seer invested with special divine powers;
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The very simplicity of Lucy's life-style has strong appeal for Wordsworth. Looking back over almost two centuries of poetry shaped by Romantic ideas about the importance of nature and its prominent place as a counter to the evils of civilization, it may be hard to imagine the significance of Wordsworth's achievements in this and the other Lucy poems.
Wordsworth's contemporary Francis Jeffrey, editor of the influential Edinburgh Review, thought that in "Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known" the poet was trying to handle the
"copious subject" of "Love, and the fantasies of lovers" in "one single thought." It is
"improbable," Jeffrey thought, that any reader would comprehend Wordsworth's meaning from such a simplistic endeavor ( Edinburgh Review , 1808).
Such an opinion would hardly be considered tenable in the twentieth century. The tenets of Romantic poetry, which include a recognition of the power of unadorned speech, have gained considerable ascendancy in literary criticism, and twentieth century readers are much more likely than Jeffrey was to sympathize with Wordsworth's intent in this poem.
The direct statements concerning the speaker's idle reverie have an immediacy of impact that makes the poet's central ideas easily understandable. This poem is about the simple joys of love and the intensity of feeling that one person can have for another; it emphasizes the tremendous sense of attachment such a feeling provokes. At the same time, the poem serves to remind readers of the tremendous sense of loss that follows the death of a beloved. Wordsworth has carefully woven into his lover's reverie the possibility of such impending doom through his consistent references to the descending moon; its path through the night sky serves as a symbol for the fading lover whose death is foreseen at the end of the poem.
It would be unwise to make too much of this single lyric, however; taken in the context of the series of Lucy poems, it serves to give readers a glimpse into the kind of simple but sincere passions that characterize the life of rustics, a group of people
Wordsworth greatly admired. By extension, these passions are ones that Wordsworth attributes to all people of genuine sensibility. These passions are, in his opinion, what define individuals as truly human and what make life worth living.
Question # 4:
The title of Wallace Stevens' poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" reflects the irony and complexity of the poem as a whole. The poem is filled with the visual imagery, wordplay, humor, and thematic tension common to Stevens' poetry. Explain?
Answer:
The title of Wallace Stevens' poem reflects the irony and complexity of the poem as a whole, perhaps suggesting that humans are no more resistant to death than ice cream is to the sun. The poem is filled with the visual imagery, wordplay, humor, and thematic tension common to Wallace Stevens' poetry.
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The poem is written in the third person, seemingly by someone who is assembling a group of people both to create and to attend a wake (it is common in some cultures to have a celebration of the life of the person who has died, with food and drink, after a time of mourning) for a poor woman. In stanza 1 there is a call for a person muscular enough to whip up desserts by hand; evidently there is not enough money for an electric mixer, let alone someone who would be paid to cater the food. The desserts will have to be served in kitchen cups; there is no fine china or crystal. The common people who will attend will come in their everyday clothes, rather than formal attire; the flowers will be brought in last month's newspapers, rather than in vases, or as wreaths or other floral arrangements. All these details suggest that there is nothing fancy or special about death and its aftermath; indeed, in this poem, death is so ordinary as to be shocking and unusual rather than trite, because Stevens avoids the euphemisms and denials that often accompany the details and descriptions of death.
Stanza 2 continues with the preparations, except that now someone is being asked to take a sheet from the top of a cheap and broken dresser to cover the deceased person's face, even if that means that her ugly feet protrude. Instead of soft lights or candlelight, the lamp should be turned to glare on her body, to show that she is now cold and silent in death.
Stevens is insisting that one must look directly at death, in all its matter-of-factness, and see it not as a stage of some mystical or spiritual transformation, but rather as actual fact to be faced and dealt with.
The fact that the wake takes place in the woman's own home, rather than in a church, and that preparations are inexpensive and minimal, including making the food in her own kitchen, reflects Stevens' insistence that death not be romanticized, idealized, or sentimentalized. Perhaps if death indeed will melt everyone away to nothing, no matter how tasty or delicious they may be while alive, then in the classic tradition of carpe diem , they should seize the day while they are able.
Language play is an important feature of this poem, as it is in many of Stevens' poems. Given the associations many readers will have with curds (for example, curdled milk, which is spoiled, or Miss Muffett being scared by the spider), "concupiscent curds"
(line 3) may seem like a poetic oxymoron (a conjunction of incongruous or contradictory terms). In fact, however, Stevens is pointing to the fact that something as ordinary and bland as milk may, if whipped properly, be turned into ice cream, a dessert that is to many people so luscious, sweet, and desirable that it is the object of a food-lust.
Other words are used as puns (words with multiple and often contradictory meanings, which may be serious as well as humorous); one example is "dumb" (line 14), which suggests both that the dead woman is no longer intelligent and that she is as mute and silent as the grave. Stevens also uses the sound devices of assonance and alliteration to emphasize the musical quality of the poem. In line 3, for example, "cups concupiscent curds" uses the alliterative device of four hard c sounds in only three words; "dresser of deal" in line 9 is alliterative in a similar fashion.
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Another device common in the poem is the use of ordinary images to create an extraordinary scene. One such image is that of the person making the ice cream; he has strong enough hands, wrists, and forearms to do it because he makes hand-rolled cigars, a special art in Stevens' time. A second image of those who will be attending the wake is the
"wenches," or serving girls; a wench is not only a serving girl, she is also, by connotation, a
"loose woman." The central image of the poem, however, is certainly "the emperor of icecream." This metaphor is complex and ambiguous enough, in fact, to he a literary symbol rather than simply a metaphor.
Question # 5:
In "A Noiseless Patient Spider," Walt Whitman's preference for open verse, although unorthodox, provides, surprisingly, plentiful evidence of his frequent reliance on traditional uses of repetition such as epanaphora, and epanalepsis. Explain these devices and show their function in the poem?
Answer:
In a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (August, 1856), Whitman spoke of poets
"walking freely out from the old traditions"; he became the forerunner of such innovation through his rejection of conventional subjects, language, rhythm, and rhyme. Yet his preference for open verse, although unorthodox, provides, surprisingly, plentiful evidence of his frequent reliance on traditional uses of repetition.
One such reiterative device is epanaphora (initial repetition), which is used effectively in the conclusion of "A Noiseless Patient Spider": "Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, / Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul."
Epanalepsis (internal repetition), however, contributes more than epanaphora to this particular work. For example, the word "marked" refers first to the persona—"I marked"— then to the spider, who "mark'd how to explore," providing an essential transitional link between the two. Other examples of the use of internal reiteration of words (or their variant forms) to provide coherence in this short, ten-line poem follow: "you," "stood and stand,"
"surrounding" and "surrounded," "them," and "ever." Whitman's use of the interjection "O" affords yet another example of epanalepsis, and the sense of awe imparted by the usage is sustained indirectly by means of assonance in "Soul," "oceans," "form'd," and "anchor hold."
In his 1876 preface to Leaves of Grass , the poet referred to his verses as his
"recitatives" (the recitative is a musical style in which the text is presented rhetorically in the rhythm of natural speech with some melodic variations), and Whitman's poetry exudes a sense of music throughout, not in the traditional manner, but in a new vein, much of it emanating from his expertise in using the repetition of sounds, words, and phrases to create expressive rhythms.
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