Banha University
Faculty of Education
English Department
A Guiding Model Answer for
Second Grade
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Poetry
June 13 (Year 2011)
Faculty of Education
Prepared by
Mohammad Badr AlDeen Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour, Ph.D.
University of Nevada, Reno (USA)
1
Faculty of Education
Second Grade
Department of English
Poetry
Second Term (Year 2010/2011)
Time: 60 minutes
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Poetry
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Respond to only one of the following two questions:
1. Sir Philip Sidney's "Ring out your bells" is a poem about the subject of
love. However, it is the hidden driving force of desire behind the various
forms of love that he explores through the filter of his own experiences and
feelings. Explicate?
(Time limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 25)
2. Sir Walter Ralegh's poem "Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen" is an anatomy
of love—its central theme is the difference between true love and false
love. Explicate?
(Time limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 25)
Respond to the following question:
1. Trace and discuss the idea of appearance and reality in Ben Jonson's "Still
to Be Neat" and Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder"?
(Time limit is 35 minutes; Grade is 35)
Good Luck
Mohammad Badr AlDeen Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour
2
Answers
Question One:
Sir Philip Sidney's "Ring out your bells" is a poem about the subject of love. However, it is
the hidden driving force of desire behind the various forms of love that he explores through
the filter of his own experiences and feelings. Explicate?
Answer:
"Ring out your bells" is a poem about the subject of love. However, it is the hidden
driving force of desire behind the various forms of love that Sidney explores through the
filter of his own experiences and feelings. Sidney's personal world included the political
arena in Queen Elizabeth's court. There, he and others sought the monarch's royal favor,
which could give them government employment, financial rewards, or honors testifying to
their worldly worth and virtue. Additionally, these courtiers courted noble patrons who
could help arrange an aristocratic marriage for them or help support their political, military,
or literary endeavors. Sidney had direct experience with frustrated desires in his attempts
to solicit more than temporary governmental or military appointments from Queen
Elizabeth.
The flattering compliments of Petrarchan love sonnets aimed at courting a lady's
favors arise from the same ambitious urges of desire as the hyperboles used to court a
queen or a noble. There is little difference between practices. Furthermore, when the
Platonic lover suffers and rages about his mistress's scorn and rejection of his worth and
faithfulness, his misery underlines the desire behind his egoistic self-love. Feelings of
worth, honor, and personal identity grow from the self-validation gained from recognition
or reward for deeds accomplished. Human courtiers such as Sidney felt equally
discouraged and frustrated when their valiant efforts were rejected.
In "Ring out your bells," Sidney works within the traditions and conventions of love
poetry. However, he rejuvenates them by showing what a few changes can do to
hackneyed concepts and images. His double vision, the extended metaphoric comparison
of love's trivialities with the solemnity of death, transforms the Petrarchan/Platonic singlevision lyric into a brief model of a mock-heroic romance. This second point of view
indirectly points out the comical exaggerations, trivialities, stupidities, and abuses.
Ironically, the final prayer might well express the poet's own desire: "Good lord, deliver us"
from poets who abuse poetry.
This song is divided into four stanzas, each composed of six lines of verse and four
lines of choral refrain. The speaker's opening request, addressed to his neighborly
audience, suggests the ancient custom of tolling church bells to announce a local death. It
also establishes the common funereal experience and the solemn tone for this poetic
monologue about the death of love. The speaker distances himself from his own abstract
3
emotion, the idea of love, by personifying it. In this way, the concept of love, separated
from himself, becomes a fictive character whose death is cause for his initial request.
When love is viewed as a separate individual, the speaker can complain bitterly about his
frustration and misery, the causes for love's infection, sickness and death, and his haughty
mistress's abusive and capricious cruelty. Thus, there are three characters in this dramatic
song: the speaker, his absent mistress, and love.
The idea of death, a universal event, introduces the situation and allows the speaker
to appeal to a reader's sympathetic responses. When he urges his listeners to action—to
ring the church bells, openly express grief, wail sorrowful songs, and read thirty requiem
masses—the speaker clothes another commonplace occurrence, a romantic dispute and
separation, with the mental anguish normally associated with death and funerals. Other
experiences familiar to some readers are the paradoxical conflicts and frustrations in some
love relationships. In the first three stanzas, the speaker elaborates on the misery, scorn,
and rejection love endures when honor and loyalty are considered to be worthless virtues.
He portrays love dying on a bed built from his mistress's foolish and overweening pride;
wrapped in a burial shroud of disgrace; valued, even in her last testament, with false worth
and censure; and finally entombed in the lady's cold, stony heart. Ironically, the inscription
on love's tombstone will reveal that the lady's glancing eyes once shot arrows of love at the
speaker, creating instant love between them.
The first three choral refrains, identical in their four lines, echo the lover's plaints
about his proud mistress's scornful, frenzied behavior. Also, the fourth line repetitively
recalls a prayer drawn from church rituals. The fourth stanza abruptly and radically shifts
perspective. The speaker announces his error with a phrase similar to a biblical comment,
"Love is not dead, but sleepeth" (Matthew 9:24). Actually, love and his mistress are just
deliberating on a reward worthy enough for him. With his reversed attitude, the speaker
praises his mistress. His reawakened love helps him turn his scathing accusations into selfscorn and mockery for his earlier comments. Despite the speaker's jubilation, the song's
final line paradoxically repeats the religious prayer that concludes the first three refrains,
"Good lord, deliver us."
Question Two:
Sir Walter Ralegh's poem "Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen" is an anatomy of love—its
central theme is the difference between true love and false love. Explicate?
Answer:
"Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen" is an anatomy of love—its central theme is the
difference between true love and false love: False love is hidden in a swirl of superficial
verbiage; true love is painfully silent. Ralegh's argument follows traditional Renaissance
themes and conventions. For instance, he emphasizes the traditional Elizabethan view of
humankind as torn between passion and reason, emphasizing that his passion would lead
4
him to write love poems (complaints), and praise the queen's saintly perfection, beauty, and
glory in order to win her affection or at least to entertain her. In contrast to despairing
lovelorn poetic narrators, he has let reason dominate for the queen's sake. Revealing his
affection openly would not only be indiscreet and subject to misinterpretation, given her
high rank and the fact that so many others are also charmed by her, but would also be a
denial of the depth of his true affection, which, like deep waters, is so strong that he must
be silent. Another poetic convention of courtiers is exaggerated praise of the beloved, who
here is acknowledged to be beyond the reach of mortals.
The poem's themes of secret love, of the despairing, agonizing lover, and of a
potential for misunderstanding or public injury recur in Ralegh's poetry. They seem in
keeping with Ralegh's ongoing poetic dialogue with his queen, although some modern
commentators have attempted to attribute this poem to Sir Robert Ayton rather than to
Ralegh. Inevitably, in such a poem, private meaning related to the daily personal
conversations between the queen and her favorite would lie behind the public utterance,
especially given Ralegh and the queen's love of theatrics and their long history of public
performance of their interacting life roles.
"Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen," a thirty-eight-line lyrical poem in five stanzas,
directly addresses Queen Elizabeth I of England. The queen has perhaps criticized Ralegh's
failure to write love poems for her recently as indicative of his lack of affection or passion.
His poem is meant to refute such criticism and to explain that his love is indeed true and
unwavering despite his poetic silence. His organizing idea is the difference between true
love and false love—with his love, of course, being true and others' love false.
His initial image compares human passions to "floods and streams" to argue that
shallow passions, like shallow streams, "murmur," while deep passions, like deep floods of
water, remain silent because of their natures. His conclusion on the basis of this analogy is
that those who speak or write much about their inner feelings of affection in reality feel no
such affection. If they are very verbal and outspoken about their emotions ("rich in
words"), they will be lacking in the deeper affections characteristic of a lover and will be
incompetent in the true art of love ("poor in that which makes a lover"). The second stanza
applies the general rule to the particular case and asks the Queen, whom Ralegh praises as
the "dear Empress" or ruler of his heart, not to misunderstand the value and nature of true
passion. He asks her not to think that he feels no pain at her silence or their separation just
because he does not beg her to be more compassionate and to take pity on his sad state.
Instead, his silence is indicative of the depths of his genuine regard. Furthermore, if he does
not write love poems complaining that she misunderstands how deeply her beauty has
conquered his heart, the cause is not from any absence of love on his part but from "excess
of duty" or a sense of obligation to her as queen.
The third stanza explains further. Ralegh says that because he knows that he seeks
to serve a perfect saint, whose returned affection all desire but none deserve, he chooses to
5
endure pain and grief rather than reveal his feelings. His strong, passionate feelings would
compel him to write love poems to her, but because she is too high above him in rank,
status, and perfection, and in fact too high above all other potential human lovers,
discretion, reason, and devotion make him choose to be her suitor from afar, to love in
silence. This silence, he argues, betokens a deeper sorrow at the distance that separates
them than words could. Though words, of course, might be wittier, they would be more
superficial. As a "beggar" who cannot speak, he argues that he deserves more pity than
those who openly complain about their lovelorn state. His final appeal is for the queen, his
"dearest heart," not to misread his secret passion, a passion he swears is true. Ultimately,
he asks for her compassion for the deep pain he hides at the same time that he asserts that
he asks for no compassion. Thus, in a poem that is a love complaint, Ralegh claims not to
be writing love complaints out of courtesy and love for his queen. He claims that silent
suffering is more indicative of love than writing a poem in which he presents himself as the
silent sufferer.
Question Three:
Trace and discuss the idea of appearance and reality in Ben Jonson's "Still to Be Neat" and
Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder"?
Answer:
Appearance and reality is an obvious theme in Ben Jonson's "Still to Be Neat" and
Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder." "Still to Be Neat" is a song sung by the character
Clerimont in one of Ben Jonson's most successful and highly praised comedies, Epicœne:
Or; The Silent Woman. Clerimont is a rowdy co-conspirator of Sir Dauphine Eugenie, a
young man who is to inherit a fortune from his self-centered uncle, Morose. Epicoene, the
play, offers a single action which takes place in a small area of the city in one day. A hater
of noise named Morose, who carries his eccentricity to fantastic extremes, has disinherited
his nephew, Sir Dauphine Eugenie, on unjust suspicion of complicity in some noisy
practical jokes, and to confirm his spite he has decided to be married and beget an heir. But
first he must find a sufficiently quiet bride, and the wonderfully quiet Mistress Epicoene,
who lodges nearby, seems a likely choice. Actually Epicoene has been placed there and
instructed as to behavior by Dauphine; but Dauphine's impetuous friend Truewit, ignorant
of this, tries to prevent the marriage by bursting in on Morose with dire warnings about
wives and women generally. Morose thinks that Truewit has been sent by Dauphine, and in
a fit of rage he resolves to marry Epicoene at once. No sooner is the marriage ceremony
complete, however, than the supposed paragon of silence bursts into shrill railing. This
happens in the third act, and the rest of the play is a carnival of noise and absurdity. Finally
Dauphine offers to show his despairing uncle a way out of the marriage in exchange for a
modest allowance and a restoration of his rights as heir, and when the offer is accepted he
6
pulls off Epicoene's wig and declares the marriage invalid because the supposed bride is
really a boy.
The song is in two stanzas of six lines each. Like the plot of the play, it concerns
appearances, which can belie reality. The first stanza could be paraphrased as, "Lady,
although because of cosmetics you are lovely on the surface, you may not be beautiful at all
underneath." The second stanza says, "I prefer a woman whose surface is simple and
unaffected, unadorned, but who is lovely within." One key to understanding the poem is to
know that the word "still" here really means "always" and carries a concessive sense: "Still
to be neat" could therefore be paraphrased, "Although you always appear neat." "Neat,"
"dressed," "powdered," and "perfumed" describe the cosmetic artifices employed by a
woman in high society to make herself beautiful to the eyes of admiring, eligible men.
The "hid causes" of art could be either a natural, inner beauty or merely cunning
strategies of self-adornment. Since the lady is always seen covered with powder, perfumed,
and clothed in fancy, carefully arranged dress, it is to be presumed that she hesitates to
show herself without the protecting artifice of cosmetics. Therefore, even though one has
not discovered art's hid cause, one may conclude that it is not natural beauty, but cunning
and conceit. She is not entirely as sweet as she appears; her beauty is hollow and not
"sound."
"Give me a look, give me a face/ That makes simplicity a grace" is a sort of
rationalist motto. It means that the singer prefers a woman whose face and figure ("look"
may refer to how she looks overall) are pleasing in themselves. Simplicity is exactly the
opposite of artifice and implies a lack of adornment. Grace is used in a double sense; it
means "graceful," but it is also a word for "virtue," as in the cardinal virtues recommended
by religion. So, just as simplicity—a sense of straightforwardness and lack of design, lack
of a hidden agenda—is a moral virtue, so a simple face without makeup is graceful and
lovely.
"Loosely flowing robes" are contrasted with clothes that are always ("still") "neat."
The hair, rather than being powdered and piled up in a fashionable coiffure, should hang
loose in "sweet neglect." "Adulteries," like most of the key terms in this song, also has two
meanings: sexual dishonesty and adulteration. Literally, art or artifice in a woman's
makeup is something unnecessarily added to her natural beauty—an adulteration of her
physical virtues. If "art" here refers to the fine arts in general, then to use artistic devices to
hide the fundamental situation is to make an adulteress of art. Although these "adulteries"
of high fashion, makeup, and dress may attract a man's attention ("they strike mine eyes"),
they do not win his heart.
Accepting this "symbolic" interpretation of "Still to Be Neat," this elegant little song
becomes a typical statement of Ben Jonson's position on the nature of art and language.
Jonson lived in a time when the natural philosophy of thinkers such as Francis Bacon and
Thomas Hobbes, who were attempting to develop what would today be called a scientific
7
view of reality, engaged in a critique of figural language. When poets employ symbolism
and figures of speech to ornament the expression of their meaning, they are moving away
from direct reference—from the clean and uncluttered literal designation, which would be
the ideal of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.
This distrust of linguistic embellishment, of poetic fancy and ornament, was based
on a philosophy that placed nature before art. Western civilization's new-found confidence
in its ability to know the natural world through direct observation and experimentation was
replacing a medieval approach to nature as a sort of text written by God. Jonson seems to
accept the change in values and tries to reflect it in the rhetoric of his poetry. As Arthur R
Marotti says in his article "All About Jonson's Poetry," "Jonson reveals an hostility to
sensuous imagery as well as metaphoric inventiveness, which are to him impediments to
communication, a disguising of subject matter he would like to represent in a more direct
way."
In his most famous comedies, he represents gullible characters who are easily
fooled by appearances and are at the mercy of scoundrels who take advantage of their
uncritical acceptance of convincing language and their unpenetrating observational powers.
His highly polished epigrams and eulogies often warn of art's ability to deceive.
"Delight in Disorder" incorporates the idea of a "slight disorder in the dress" as well
as in the hair of its female subjects. Ben Jonson notes that there is something suspicious
about a woman who is always neatly dressed: What is she hiding? He calls for the "sweet
neglect" of "robes loosely flowing, hair as free" in the woman who would capture his heart.
"Delight in Disorder" is a short poem, just fourteen lines long, written in lilting
tetrameter couplets. With its light-hearted, playful tone, its simple language, and its
implications of more profound truths lying just below the surface, it is typical of the secular
poems Herrick included in his Hesperides.
The poem begins by stating its subject, "disorder," which is surprisingly referred to
as "sweet," reinforcing the title, where it is indicated that disorder brings "delight." The
poet proceeds to state that disorder "kindles" a "wantonness" in clothing. In other words, it
causes a fire, somehow related to the garments, which at least by the third line we are
certain belong to a woman. However, the use of "wantonness" as the object of "kindles"
indicates the poet does not mean that disorder sets clothing on fire, but that it stimulates the
wearer sexually or, even more likely, the person observing her.
The remaining twelve lines in the poem comprise a single sentence. This section of
the poem consists of five couplets, set apart by semicolons, which are the multiple subjects
of the verb in the thirteenth line of the poem, "bewitch." The "me" that follows "bewitch"
is clearly a reference to Herrick himself or to his persona. Essentially, then, Herrick will
give five examples of disorder in clothing which he finds captivating. He begins at the top
and works down. The first item mentioned is a "lawn," or linen scarf; to be effective, it
8
must be "thrown" around the shoulders with seeming casualness. Just below it is a laced
bodice, with a triangular piece below it called a "stomacher." Herrick likes to see the laces,
or their ends, loose enough to touch the stomacher. The cuffs at the ends of the sleeves
should also seem careless, and the ribbons attached to them should be free to "flow
confusedly." Herrick's fourth example is the petticoat, which should swing freely as the
lady walks. Finally, a shoestring not too well tied can suggest a "wild civility," or a
willingness to be friendly, or more than friendly.
In the final couplet, Herrick compares the effect on him of the style he has just
illustrated to that of a lady who prides herself on being "precise," or neat in every
particular. Even though there are a great many sexual implications in the poem, one should
not assume that Herrick is calling for promiscuous behavior. His point is that there is
nothing wrong with being flirtatious, if only in the way one dresses, and there is much to be
said for careless grace, as exemplified in what this poem describes and in all the lyrics of
the Cavaliers, as opposed to the precision of the Puritans, who seemed incapable of finding
delight in anything.
This poem is little more than a long synecdoche or metonymy. While describing
the clothes, Herrick is really hoping for some "sweet disorder" or even a touch of
wantonness in the lady associated with them. An "erring lace" is a much-desired corrective
to a straight-laced woman, and a neglectful cuff might indicate a touch of neglect in
adhering to the strict moral precepts inculcated by cautious elders. A mind that sometimes
thinks confusedly and a heart with a touch of the tempestuous are certainly elements to be
desired. Even so, all caution is not to be thrown to the winds—a touch of civility remains
amid the wildness, though it is certainly not the major attribute: It is confined to the
shoestring—hardly a major restraint.
The civility of the poem is also retained in its carefully constructed series of
couplets in iambic tetrameter ("distraction" was a four-syllable word in the seventeenth
century). The only breaks in the sweet falling of the iambs are in the second line, which
begins with the trochaic "Kindles," emphasizing the wilder rhythm of fire, and the eighth
line, which begins with "Ribbons," also a trochee, endowing the streamers with a strong,
independent flow. "Into," beginning the fourth line, could also be read as a trochee, and in
each case the strong opening beat of the word is made more emphatic because it follows an
enjambment.
Much of the power of this poem comes in the connotative suggestions of the words.
"Kindles" suggests the beginning of an inner fire, and "wantonness," though its primary
meaning in the seventeenth century was merely playfulness, did also have its modern
suggestion of lighthearted sexual play. "Distraction" suggests that one's mind can wander
from the mundane to the exciting, and, as was mentioned earlier, an "erring" lace hints that
the lady herself might be willing to wander. The word "enthralls" instead of the more
straightforward "encircles" suggests that it is more than the lady's waist that is captured by
9
the lace embroidery. A "winning" wave in the petticoat surely gathers a prize of hearts, a
"careless" shoestring indicates one who does not care overmuch for restrictions, and a
"wild" civility connotes freedom from the restrictions of a watchful society. Since love is a
witch, it is not absolutely clear that "bewitch" is not strictly denotative in its effect on the
poem. The oxymorons "sweet disorder" and "wild civility" (and perhaps "fine distraction")
serve to create a tension that keeps the reader aware that the poet is speaking of a woman as
well as the clothes she is wearing.
The syntax of the poem also increases its tension. After the declarative statement of
the first couplet, the poem continues in one long sentence with six extensively developed
subjects (lawn, lace, cuff, ribbons, wave, and shoestring) all holding the verb in abeyance,
endowing the poem with the power of suspense.
10