http://govtsciencecollegedurg.ac.in/home/syllabus/ba1english.ப்ட்ப்
http://www.kuwarangal.com/uploads/academics/faculties/arts/english/Revised_M.A.English_July%2017_2009.ப்ட்ப்
http://sndt.digitaluniversity.ac/downloads/BA_English.ப்ட்ப்
http://mpbse.nic.in/qbank11/EnglishSpl11th-fnl.ப்ட்ப்
http://shahu.unishivaji.ac.in/syllabus/education/B.A.BEd.III(Int.)/B.A.BEd.III%20(Int)%20New.படப்
http://www.mp.gov.in/highereducation/itarsi/syllabus/ba/first/en_liter.htm
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Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
முதுகலை ஆங்கில இலக்கியம் பாடத்திட்டம் - "தி டச்சஸ் ஆப் மல்பி"
John Webster:
Born
1580London England
Died
1634 (aged 53–54)
Spouse
Sara Peniall
Information
Magnum opus
The White DevilThe Duchess of Malfi
*************************************************************************************
John Webster (c.1580 – c.1634) was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage.[1] He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.
The Duchess of Malfi:
The Duchess of Malfi is a macabre, tragic play written by the English dramatist John Webster in 1612–13.[1] It was first performed privately at the Blackfriars Theatre, then before a more general audience at The Globe, in 1613-14.[2] Published for the first time in 1623, the play is loosely based on true events that occurred between about 1508 and 1513, recounted in William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure (1567). The Duchess was Giovanna d'Aragona, whose father, Arrigo d'Aragona, Marquis of Gerace, was an illegitimate son of Ferdinand I of Naples. Her husbands were Alfonso Piccolomini, Duke of Amalfi, and (as in the play) Antonio Bologna.
The play begins as a love story, with a Duchess who marries beneath her class, and ends as a nightmarish tragedy as her two brothers exact their revenge, destroying themselves in the process.
The play is sometimes ridiculed by modern critics for the excessive violence and horror in its later scenes.[3] Nevertheless, the complexity of some of its characters, particularly Bosola and the Duchess, and Webster's poetic language, give it a continuing interest, and it is still performed in the 21st century.
Contents
1 Characters
2 Main themes
3 Plot
4 Quotations
5 The 1623 quarto
Characters:
Antonio Bologna. The Duchess's steward, and later her husband, recently returned from France, and full of scorn for the Italian courtiers whom he sees as more corrupt than the French. His social status, lower than that of the Duchess's aristocratic family, hinders his relationship with her.
Delio. A courtier, who tries to woo Julia. A friend of Antonio. (He is based on a historical character of the same name.)
Daniel de Bosola. A former servant of the Cardinal, now returned from imprisonment in the galleys. Sent by Ferdinand to spy on the Duchess. Later, on Ferdinand's command, he orders her execution, and still later, he seeks to avenge her. Being the malcontent of the play, he tends to view things cynically, and makes numerous critical comments on the nature of Renaissance society. He is frequently characterized by his melancholy. (He is based on the historical Daniele de Bozolo, about whom less is known.)
The Cardinal. Brother of the Duchess. A cool, rational, Machiavellian churchman who apparently gained his power through bribery and corruption. (Historically, his name was Luigi or Lodovico.)
Ferdinand. The Duke of Calabria, and twin brother of the Duchess. Unlike his rational brother the Cardinal, Ferdinand is given to fits of rage and violent outbursts. He also appears to have an incestuous desire for his twin sister. (In reality, his name was Carlo, and he was Marquis of Gerace.)
Castruchio. An old lord. His name is a play on the word "castrated", suggesting impotence. He belongs to the conventional character type of the elderly man with a young, unfaithful wife (Julia).
Roderigo. A courtier.
Grisolan. A courtier.
Silvio. A courtier.
Pescara. A marquis.
The Duchess. The chief tragic protagonist, and a young widow. She has three children in the play, two sons and a daughter, by Antonio. There is an inconsistency about earlier children by her deceased husband in the play, put down to a careless mistake by Webster himself.
Cariola. Duchess's waiting-woman. Dies tragically by strangling shortly after the Duchess and the youngest children. Her name is a play on the Italian carriolo meaning "trundle-bed", where personal servants would have slept.
Julia. Castruchio's wife, and the Cardinal's mistress. She dies at the Cardinal's hands from a poisoned Bible.
Malateste. A hanger-on at the Cardinal's court. The name means 'headache'. Referred to as a "mere stick of sugar candy" by the Duchess, he is yet another interchangeable courtier designed to convey the sycophantic and superficial nature of the court of Malfi.
Doctor. Sent for to diagnose and remedy Ferdinand's madness and his supposed "lycanthropia".
Main themes:
The main themes of the play are: misuse of power, revenge, the status of women and the consequences which arise when they attempt to assert their authority in a patriarchal society, the consequences of unequal marriage, cruelty, corruption and the duties of a ruler.
Plot:
The play is set in the court of Malfi (Amalfi), Italy over the period 1504 to 1510. The recently widowed Duchess falls in love with Antonio, a lowly steward, but her brothers, not wishing her to share their inheritance, forbid her from remarrying. However, she secretly marries Antonio and bears him several children.
The Duchess' lunatic and incestuously obsessed brother Ferdinand threatens and disowns her. In an attempt to escape, the Duchess and Antonio concoct a story that Antonio has swindled her out of her fortune and has to flee into exile. She takes Bosola into her confidence, not knowing that he is Ferdinand's spy, and arranges that he will deliver her jewellery to Antonio at his hiding-place in Ancona. She will join them later, whilst pretending to make a pilgrimage to a town nearby. The Cardinal hears of the plan, instructs Bosola to banish the two lovers, and sends soldiers to capture them. Antonio escapes with their eldest son, but the Duchess, her maid and her two younger children are returned to Malfi and, under instructions from Ferdinand, die at the hands of executioners under Bosola's command. This experience, combined with a long-standing sense of injustice and his own feeling of a lack of identity, turns Bosola against the Cardinal and his brother, deciding to take up the cause of "Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi" (V.2).
The Cardinal confesses to his mistress Julia his part in the killing of the Duchess, and then murders her to silence her, using a poisoned Bible. Next, Bosola overhears the Cardinal plotting to kill him (though he accepts what he sees as punishment for his actions), and so visits the darkened chapel to kill the Cardinal at his prayers. Instead, he mistakenly kills Antonio, who has just returned to Malfi to attempt a reconciliation with the Cardinal. Bosola stabs the Cardinal, who dies. In the brawl that follows, Ferdinand and Bosola stab each other to death.
Antonio's elder son by the Duchess appears in the final scene, and takes his place as the heir to the Malfi fortune, despite his father's explicit wish that his son "fly the court of princes", a corrupt and increasingly deadly environment.
Quotations:
"We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them."
-- Bosola, to Antonio after accidentally stabbing him. Act 5, Sc.4
"A Spanish fig for your impudence"
-- Bosola, to Antonio after being accused of poisoning the Duchess. Act 2, Sc.3
"Do you not weep?
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens."
-- Bosola, to Ferdinand upon gazing on the dead body of the Duchess. Act 4, Sc. 2
"Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young."
-- Ferdinand, after looking at the dead body of his sister the Duchess. Act 4, Sc.2
"She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had liv'd
Her time to a minute."
-- Ferdinand, after looking at the dead body of his sister the Duchess. Act 4, Sc.2
"It seems she was born first:
You have bloodily approv'd the ancient truth,
That kindred commonly do worse agree
Than remote strangers."
-- Bosola, in response to Ferdinand. Act 4, Sc. 2
"Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust,
Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust."
-- Ferdinand's dying words. Act 5, Sc.5
"Diamonds are of most value
They say, that have pass'd through most jewellers
hands"
-- The Duchess, talking about remarrying. Act 1, Sc. 2, l.262-263
"Whores, by that rule, are precious."
-- Ferdinand, in response to the above quote, l.264
The 1623 quarto:
The first printed edition contains a combined cast list for two productions of The Duchess of Malfi by the King's Men, c. 1614 and c. 1621, providing valuable information about the structure and evolution of the key dramatic company of the era. The printer was a Nicholas Okes, and the publisher John Waterson. Webster dedicated the play to George Harding, 8th Baron Berkeley, a noted patron of literature in his era. The phrasing of Webster's dedication indicates that the dramatist was soliciting the Baron's patronage, rather than acknowledging support already given; it is unknown to what degree that solicitation was successful.
வ்வ்வ்.என்.விக்கிபீடியா.ஒர்/விக்கி/தி டுசெச்ஸ் ஒப் மல்பி
Born
1580London England
Died
1634 (aged 53–54)
Spouse
Sara Peniall
Information
Magnum opus
The White DevilThe Duchess of Malfi
*************************************************************************************
John Webster (c.1580 – c.1634) was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage.[1] He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.
The Duchess of Malfi:
The Duchess of Malfi is a macabre, tragic play written by the English dramatist John Webster in 1612–13.[1] It was first performed privately at the Blackfriars Theatre, then before a more general audience at The Globe, in 1613-14.[2] Published for the first time in 1623, the play is loosely based on true events that occurred between about 1508 and 1513, recounted in William Painter's The Palace of Pleasure (1567). The Duchess was Giovanna d'Aragona, whose father, Arrigo d'Aragona, Marquis of Gerace, was an illegitimate son of Ferdinand I of Naples. Her husbands were Alfonso Piccolomini, Duke of Amalfi, and (as in the play) Antonio Bologna.
The play begins as a love story, with a Duchess who marries beneath her class, and ends as a nightmarish tragedy as her two brothers exact their revenge, destroying themselves in the process.
The play is sometimes ridiculed by modern critics for the excessive violence and horror in its later scenes.[3] Nevertheless, the complexity of some of its characters, particularly Bosola and the Duchess, and Webster's poetic language, give it a continuing interest, and it is still performed in the 21st century.
Contents
1 Characters
2 Main themes
3 Plot
4 Quotations
5 The 1623 quarto
Characters:
Antonio Bologna. The Duchess's steward, and later her husband, recently returned from France, and full of scorn for the Italian courtiers whom he sees as more corrupt than the French. His social status, lower than that of the Duchess's aristocratic family, hinders his relationship with her.
Delio. A courtier, who tries to woo Julia. A friend of Antonio. (He is based on a historical character of the same name.)
Daniel de Bosola. A former servant of the Cardinal, now returned from imprisonment in the galleys. Sent by Ferdinand to spy on the Duchess. Later, on Ferdinand's command, he orders her execution, and still later, he seeks to avenge her. Being the malcontent of the play, he tends to view things cynically, and makes numerous critical comments on the nature of Renaissance society. He is frequently characterized by his melancholy. (He is based on the historical Daniele de Bozolo, about whom less is known.)
The Cardinal. Brother of the Duchess. A cool, rational, Machiavellian churchman who apparently gained his power through bribery and corruption. (Historically, his name was Luigi or Lodovico.)
Ferdinand. The Duke of Calabria, and twin brother of the Duchess. Unlike his rational brother the Cardinal, Ferdinand is given to fits of rage and violent outbursts. He also appears to have an incestuous desire for his twin sister. (In reality, his name was Carlo, and he was Marquis of Gerace.)
Castruchio. An old lord. His name is a play on the word "castrated", suggesting impotence. He belongs to the conventional character type of the elderly man with a young, unfaithful wife (Julia).
Roderigo. A courtier.
Grisolan. A courtier.
Silvio. A courtier.
Pescara. A marquis.
The Duchess. The chief tragic protagonist, and a young widow. She has three children in the play, two sons and a daughter, by Antonio. There is an inconsistency about earlier children by her deceased husband in the play, put down to a careless mistake by Webster himself.
Cariola. Duchess's waiting-woman. Dies tragically by strangling shortly after the Duchess and the youngest children. Her name is a play on the Italian carriolo meaning "trundle-bed", where personal servants would have slept.
Julia. Castruchio's wife, and the Cardinal's mistress. She dies at the Cardinal's hands from a poisoned Bible.
Malateste. A hanger-on at the Cardinal's court. The name means 'headache'. Referred to as a "mere stick of sugar candy" by the Duchess, he is yet another interchangeable courtier designed to convey the sycophantic and superficial nature of the court of Malfi.
Doctor. Sent for to diagnose and remedy Ferdinand's madness and his supposed "lycanthropia".
Main themes:
The main themes of the play are: misuse of power, revenge, the status of women and the consequences which arise when they attempt to assert their authority in a patriarchal society, the consequences of unequal marriage, cruelty, corruption and the duties of a ruler.
Plot:
The play is set in the court of Malfi (Amalfi), Italy over the period 1504 to 1510. The recently widowed Duchess falls in love with Antonio, a lowly steward, but her brothers, not wishing her to share their inheritance, forbid her from remarrying. However, she secretly marries Antonio and bears him several children.
The Duchess' lunatic and incestuously obsessed brother Ferdinand threatens and disowns her. In an attempt to escape, the Duchess and Antonio concoct a story that Antonio has swindled her out of her fortune and has to flee into exile. She takes Bosola into her confidence, not knowing that he is Ferdinand's spy, and arranges that he will deliver her jewellery to Antonio at his hiding-place in Ancona. She will join them later, whilst pretending to make a pilgrimage to a town nearby. The Cardinal hears of the plan, instructs Bosola to banish the two lovers, and sends soldiers to capture them. Antonio escapes with their eldest son, but the Duchess, her maid and her two younger children are returned to Malfi and, under instructions from Ferdinand, die at the hands of executioners under Bosola's command. This experience, combined with a long-standing sense of injustice and his own feeling of a lack of identity, turns Bosola against the Cardinal and his brother, deciding to take up the cause of "Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi" (V.2).
The Cardinal confesses to his mistress Julia his part in the killing of the Duchess, and then murders her to silence her, using a poisoned Bible. Next, Bosola overhears the Cardinal plotting to kill him (though he accepts what he sees as punishment for his actions), and so visits the darkened chapel to kill the Cardinal at his prayers. Instead, he mistakenly kills Antonio, who has just returned to Malfi to attempt a reconciliation with the Cardinal. Bosola stabs the Cardinal, who dies. In the brawl that follows, Ferdinand and Bosola stab each other to death.
Antonio's elder son by the Duchess appears in the final scene, and takes his place as the heir to the Malfi fortune, despite his father's explicit wish that his son "fly the court of princes", a corrupt and increasingly deadly environment.
Quotations:
"We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them."
-- Bosola, to Antonio after accidentally stabbing him. Act 5, Sc.4
"A Spanish fig for your impudence"
-- Bosola, to Antonio after being accused of poisoning the Duchess. Act 2, Sc.3
"Do you not weep?
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens."
-- Bosola, to Ferdinand upon gazing on the dead body of the Duchess. Act 4, Sc. 2
"Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young."
-- Ferdinand, after looking at the dead body of his sister the Duchess. Act 4, Sc.2
"She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had liv'd
Her time to a minute."
-- Ferdinand, after looking at the dead body of his sister the Duchess. Act 4, Sc.2
"It seems she was born first:
You have bloodily approv'd the ancient truth,
That kindred commonly do worse agree
Than remote strangers."
-- Bosola, in response to Ferdinand. Act 4, Sc. 2
"Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust,
Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust."
-- Ferdinand's dying words. Act 5, Sc.5
"Diamonds are of most value
They say, that have pass'd through most jewellers
hands"
-- The Duchess, talking about remarrying. Act 1, Sc. 2, l.262-263
"Whores, by that rule, are precious."
-- Ferdinand, in response to the above quote, l.264
The 1623 quarto:
The first printed edition contains a combined cast list for two productions of The Duchess of Malfi by the King's Men, c. 1614 and c. 1621, providing valuable information about the structure and evolution of the key dramatic company of the era. The printer was a Nicholas Okes, and the publisher John Waterson. Webster dedicated the play to George Harding, 8th Baron Berkeley, a noted patron of literature in his era. The phrasing of Webster's dedication indicates that the dramatist was soliciting the Baron's patronage, rather than acknowledging support already given; it is unknown to what degree that solicitation was successful.
வ்வ்வ்.என்.விக்கிபீடியா.ஒர்/விக்கி/தி டுசெச்ஸ் ஒப் மல்பி
ல்ய்சிதாஸ் பி மில்டன்
"ல்ய்சிதாஸ்" எழுதியவர் ஜான் மில்டன் :
Form and Structure. The structure of Lycidas remains somewhat mysterious. J. Martin Evans argues that there are two movements with six sections each that seem to mirror each other. Arthur Barker believes that the body of Lycidas is composed of three movements that run parallel in pattern. That is, each movement begins with an invocation, then explores the conventions of the pastoral, and ends with a conclusion to Milton's "emotional problem" (quoted in Womack).
Voice. Milton's epigram labels Lycidas a "monody": a lyrical lament for one voice. But the poem has several voices or personae, including the "uncouth swain" (the main narrator), who is "interrupted" first by Phoebus (Apollo), then Camus (the river Cam, and thus Cambridge University personified), and the "Pilot of the Galilean lake" (St. Peter). Finally, a second narrator appears for only the last eight lines to bring a conclusion in ottava rima (see F. T. Prince). Before the second narrator enters, the poem contains the irregular rhyme and meter characteristic of the Italian canzone form. Canzone is essentially a polyphonic lyrical form, hence creating a serious conflict with the "monody." Milton may have meant "monody" in the sense that the poem should be regarded more as a story told completely by one person as opposed to a chorus. This person would presumably be the final narrator, who seemingly masks himself as the "uncouth swain." This concept of story-telling ties Lycidas closer to the genre of pastoral elegy.
Genre. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy, a genre initiated by Theocritus, also put to famous use by Virgil and Spenser. Christopher Kendrick asserts that one's reading of Lycidas would be improved by treating the poem anachronistically, that is, as if it was one of the most original pastoral elegies. Also, as already stated, it employs the irregular rhyme and meter of an Italian canzone. Stella Revard suggests that Lycidas also exhibits the influence of Pindaric odes, especially in its allusions to Orpheus, Alpheus, and Arethusa. The poem's arrangement in verse paragraphs and its introduction of various voices and personae are also features that anticipate epic structures. Like the form, structure, and voice of Lycidas, its genre is deeply complex. James Sitar
Monody. A lyrical lament for one voice.
height. The headnote — "In this Monody ... height." — did not appear in 1638 (Justa Edouardo King). This addition might be due to the less strict laws regarding published texts. The Trinity MS has the headnote but without the final sentence: "And by occasion ... height." The clergy Milton refers to is the clergy of the English Church as ruled by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, a champion of traditional liturgy and the bane of reformist Puritans. Bishops fell out of power in 1642, between the two editions.
Friend. Edward King, a schoolmate of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank off the coast of Wales in August, 1637. King entered Christ's College in 1626 when he was 14 years old. Upon finishing his studies, King was made a Fellow of Christ's thanks to his patron King Charles I. The Trinity MS of Lycidas is dated Nov. 1637, three months after King's death.
Never-sear. Never withered. 1638 has "never-sere". Laurel was considered the emblem of Apollo, myrtle of Venus, and ivy of Bacchus.
Lycidas. The name Lycidas is common in ancient Greek pastorals, establishing the style Milton imitates for this poem. William Collins Watterson notes that in Theocritus' pastoral, Lycidas loses a singing competition. Watterson asserts that Milton is aligning King with Lycidas in an attempt to portray himself as victorious over King. Virgil's ninth Eclogue is spoken in part by the shepherd Lycidas, a scene that includes, as Balachandra Rajan points out, a reference to social injustice. Lucan's Civil Wars 3.657-58 also tells the story of a Lycidas pulled to pieces during a sea battle by a grappling hook.
Lycidas? An echo of Virgil; "Who would not sing for Gallus?" (Eclogue 10.5).
bear. Bier, or funeral platform. 1638 has "biere".
Begin then, Sisters. Following the pastoral tradition of Theocritus, Moschus, and Virgil, Milton invokes the muses to begin the lament. See Virgil's Eclogue 4.1. The sisters are the nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory). Their sacred well is called Aganippe on Mount Helicon, just a bit lower than the "seat" of Jove.
lucky. It would certainly be bad luck to refuse an invitation to sing for the dead. Virgil's persona implies as much in Eclogue 10.5-6. See also OED2.
opening. 1638 has "glimmering" instead of "opening"; The Trinity MS replaces "glimmering" with "opening".
Batt'ning. Feeding.
Star. Venus as Hesperus, the evening star. 1638 has "ev'n-starre" in place of "Star that rose, at Ev'ning,". The Trinity MS corrected the 1638 reading to "Oft till the star that rose in evening bright".
westering. 1638 has "burnisht" in place of "westering"; Trinity MS initiated the change to "westering".
th'Oaten Flute. A Panpipe, or the flute used by Pan, traditionally associated with the songs of shepherds. See Virgil's Ecologues10.64-5. Spenser calls him "God of shepheards all" in The Shepheardes Calendar, "December," 7. Drawing of Pan playing a panpipe.
Satyrs. Mythical goat-men renowned for lust. Milton is probably referring to his (and King's) classmates at Christ's. Picture.
Damoetas. A traditional pastoral name, see Virgil's Eclogue 3. Also a clownish shepherd named Damoetas appears in Sidney's Arcadia. Search Dartmouth's Library catalog. Milton might be referring to Christ's College tutor William Chappel.
to hear our song. The narrator imagines that he and King were shepherds (poets and students) in the same pasture (Christ's College, Cambridge) and learned from the same master, William Chappel (perhaps personified here as Old Damoetas).
gadding. Wandering, unruly.
Canker. Cankerworm, a garden pest.
Taint-worm. Intestinal parasite that afflicts young calves, that is, weanlings.
weanling. Young livestock, recently weaned from mother's milk.
wardrop. Wardrobe. 1638 has "wardrobe".
blows. Blossoms.
Bards. Ancient Druid poet-singers: "An ancient Celtic order of minstrel-poets, whose primary function appears to have been to compose and sing (usually to the harp) verses celebrating the achievements of chiefs and warriors, and who committed to verse historical and traditional facts, religious precepts, laws, genealogies, etc." (OED2).
Mona. Anglesey, an Island off the west coast of Britain, once the home of Celtic druids.
Deva. The river Dee, where Chester, King's destination, stands. Spenser's Faerie Queene 4.11.39 refers to the Dee as "divine."
fondly. Foolishly, idly.
Lesbian shore. Calliope, daughter of Jupiter and Mnemosyne was Orpheus's mother and a muse. Orpheus, according to legend, could charm animals, birds, and even inanimate bits of nature with his music. For Milton, as for many others, he serves as a personified symbol of the power of poetic song. For the story of the death of Orpheus, see Ovid's Metamorphoses 11.1-66. Also see Albrecht Dürer's 1494 engraving, Death of Orpheus.
strictly. 1638 misprints this as "stridly".
Or with. 1638 has "Hid in the" in place of "Or with". "Or with" is a Trinity MS correction.
Amaryllis. The names of the nymphs, Amaryllis and Neaera, are conventional, borrowed from Virgil's Eclogues 1.4-5 and Eclogues 3.3.
Guerdon. Reward.
Fury. Milton refers to fate or destiny here as a "Fury," as if one of the Eumendies from classical Greek drama. Some traditions personify the Fates as three sisters, the sisters of destiny; one spins the thread of life, one measures out its length, and the third snips it with shears. Hughes asserts that this figure is Atropos. See Plato's Republic 620e.
Phoebus. Apollo. Virgil, in Eclogues 6.5-6, imagines the "Cynthian god" plucking at his ear.
foil. Hughes notes that a foil is the "setting of a gem".
Arethuse. A fountain in Sicily associated with poetic inspiration (see Arcades 30-31). Mincius is the river of Virgil's hometown, Mantua. Virgil associates the Mincius with his own pastoral verse in Eclogues 7. 15-16 and Georgics 3. 20-21.
higher mood. Epic poetry was considered to be a more elevated form than pastoral, thus in a higher mode.
Herald. Triton, a sea-god usually pictured with a trumpet.
plea. That is, at Neptune's request, to testify in his defence.
swain. A shepherd; a word frequently used by Theocritus, Virgil, and Spenser.
Hippotades. Homeric epithet for Aeolus, the wind-god, son of Hippotas. See Odyssey 10.3.
Panope. A sea nymph.
Bark. Small ship.
th'eclipse. A ship built during an eclipse might be imagined to be either cursed with bad luck or simply ill-built as a result.
Camus. Personification of the river Cam, which runs through Cambridge. This personification draws comparisons to Virgil's personification of Mincius, the river that runs through his home town.
sanquine flower. The Hyacinth. Apollo made this flower from the blood of his beloved Hyacinthus, whom he accidentally killed. The story is in Ovid's Metamorphoses 10.214-16.
The Pilot. It is commonly accepted that this refers to St. Peter, to whom Christ gave "the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 16:19). Peter's first meeting with Jesus is told in Luke 5:2-4.
Miter'd. A miter is a liturgical headress worn by bishops.
Line 113. 1645 has a period at the end of this line, but that appears to be an error, especially since the line is the last on the page in 1645.
Anow. Enough. 1638 has "Enough".
into the fold. See John 10:1.
Blind mouthes! John Ruskin suggests that "a bishop means a person who sees" and a "pastor means one who feeds. The most unbishoply character...is therefore to be blind. The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,—to be a mouth" (quoted in Orgel and Goldberg).
scrannel. Thin, shriveled.
Lines 121-127. An echo of Menalcas' sentiments in Virgil's Ecologues 3.8 1, 4-9, 30-4.
Woolf. The Roman Catholic Church.
privy. Secret. See 2 Peter 2:1. Perhaps also a pun on the Privy Council.
nothing. Critics dispute whether "little" should stand. In accordance with 1645, most modern editions use "nothing."
sed. 1638 has "said".
two-handed engine. The meaning of this phrase has generated much commentary. Orgel's assertion, that it is a sword large enough to require two hands to use, is commonly accepted.
smite once, and smite no more. See Matthew 26:31 and Mark 14: 27-9.
Alpheus. Personification of a river in Greece and also the god who fell in love with Arethusa and pursued her until she was turned into a fountain. See Ovid's Metamorphoses 5.865-875.
swart Star. Sirius, the dog star, is ascendant during the hottest days of the year; hence the term, "dog days."
rathe. Ready to bloom.
Crow-toe. Wild hyacinth.
Gessamine. Jasmine, a climbing shrub with fragrant flowers.
freakt. Flecked or streaked whimsically or capriciously; variegated. See OED2. "Freakt with jeat" (jet, black) means flecked with black streaks or spots.
wan. Pale.
Amaranthus. In the garden of Eden, an immortal flower (Paradise Lost 3.353-57). See also Spenser's Faerie Queene 3.6.45 (search "Amaranthus").
Daffadillies. This flower list, a typical pastoral element, was first added to the Trinity MS on a separate sheet of paper and marked for insertion here. Sacks contrasts this section with the plucking at the beginning of the poem (line 3). He asserts, "the anger has been purged, and the rewards (the undying flowers of praise) have been established."
Hebrides. The Hebrides lie off the west coast of Scotland.
whelming. Overwhelming, or drowning. 1638 has "humming". Trinity MS also has "humming", changed to "whelming" by marginal hand in BM and Cambridge copies of Justa Eduardo King (Carey & Fowler).
moist. Tear-dampened.
Bellerus. A giant for whom Land's End was called Bellerium in Roman times.
guarded Mount. Mount St. Michael's, near Land's End on the Cornish coast, across the Channel from Mont St. Michel. Milton imagines the patron saint of England looking out from here to guard England from overseas (Catholic) religion. Namancos is in Spain and Bayona a fortress near Cape Finisterre.
Look homeward. The Angel could refer to either St. Michael, whose mount it is, or Lycidas. In either case, the injunction is for him to turn his eye from the threat of Spain (represented by Namancos and Bayona) and instead to look homeward, where Lycidas has drowned (Orgel & Goldberg). Lawrence Lipking asserts that the angel is in fact Lycidas, who is looking not to where he drowned but to his destination, Ireland. He further asserts that Milton demands a change of attention from Spain to Ireland because he felt the pagans in Ireland were a serious threat to England.
Dolphins. Dolphins were thought by sailors to be a good omen at sea, looking after the ship and guarding it from peril.
him that walk'd the waves. Alluding to Jesus, who walked on water according to Matthew 14:25-26.
weep no more. Recalls the opening line of the poem "Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more." The invocation to begin the lament is repeated as the invitation to end the lament.
unexpressive nuptial Song. According to Hughes, "the unutterable nuptial Song is sung at the marriage supper of the Lamb." See Revelation 14:9. Janet E. Halley makes important points about the unacknowledged homoerotic features of Milton's pastoral heaven here and in Epitaphium Damonis (see her "Female Autonomy" 241-242).
In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love. 1638 omits this line entirely.
wipe the tears. See Revelation 7:17.
Genius. The spirit or guardian angel of the place.
Dorick. The sort of Greek spoken in Crete and Laconia. Also the dialect preferred by Theocritus and Bion, the earliest practictioners of pastoral verse. A doric lay is the sort of song sung by pastoral poets in doric.
th'Okes and rills. "Oates," reeds, quills, and pipes are all terms associated with composing and singing pastoral poetry. This line signifies the end of the shepherd persona.
Quills. The hollow reeds of the shepherd's pipes; the stops are the holes one covers with fingers to make different notes sound.
Pastures new. See the end of Virgil's Eclogues10. 70-97.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
ரேலடேது டு ம.எ.இங்கிலீஷ் லிடேரடுரே
Andrew Marvell:
Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman (also named Andrew Marvell). As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert. He was a colleague and friend of John Milton.
Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, East Riding of Yorkshire, near the city of Kingston upon Hull. The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School. A secondary school in the city is now named after him.
His most famous poems include To His Coy Mistress, The Garden, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, and the Country House Poem, "Upon Appleton House”.
To His Coy Mistress:
To His Coy MistressHad we but world enough, and time,This coyness, Lady, were no crimeWe would sit down and think which wayTo walk and pass our long love's day.Thou by the Indian Ganges' sideShouldst rubies find: I by the tideOf Humber would complain. I wouldLove you ten years before the Flood,And you should, if you please, refuseTill the conversion of the Jews.My vegetable love should growVaster than empires, and more slow;An hundred years should go to praiseThine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;Two hundred to adore each breast,But thirty thousand to the rest;An age at least to every part,And the last age should show your heart.For, Lady, you deserve this state,Nor would I love at lower rate.But at my back I always hearTime's wingèd chariot hurrying near;And yonder all before us lieDeserts of vast eternity.Thy beauty shall no more be found,Nor, in thy marble vault, shall soundMy echoing song: then worms shall tryThat long preserved virginity,And your quaint honour turn to dust,And into ashes all my lust:The grave's a fine and private place,But none, I think, do there embrace.Now therefore, while the youthful hueSits on thy skin like morning dew,And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires,Now let us sport us while we may,And now, like amorous birds of prey,Rather at once our time devourThan languish in his slow-chapt power.Let us roll all our strength and allOur sweetness up into one ball,And tear our pleasures with rough strifeThrough the iron gates of life:Thus, though we cannot make our sunStand still, yet we will make him run.
To His Coy Mistress is a witty metaphysical poem written by the British author and statesman Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the Interregnum. The poem is often considered an argument for the concept of 'carpe diem'. However, it should be remembered that Andrew Marvell was highly educated and Christian—whether Puritan or not—and is more likely mocking the concept of 'carpe diem' that other poets extolled. The poem might even be aimed specifically against Robert Herrick's To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time. It is doubtful that Marvell would be in favor of the girl, the listener, agreeing to the speaker's proposition.[citation needed]
Marvell probably wrote the poem prior to serving in Oliver Cromwell's government as a minister, and the poem was not published in his lifetime.
Synopsis
To His Coy Mistress presents a familiar theme in literature–carpe diem (meaning seize the day), a term coined by the ancient Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known as Horace (65-8 B.C.). Here is the gist of Andrew Marvell's poem: In response to a young man’s declarations of love for a young lady, the lady is playfully hesitant, artfully demure. But dallying will not do, he says, for youth passes swiftly. He and the lady must take advantage of the moment, he says, and “sport us while we may.” Oh, yes, if they had “world enough, and time” they would spend their days in idle pursuits, leisurely passing time while the young man heaps praises on the young lady. But they do not have the luxury of time, he says, for “time's wingéd chariot” is ever racing along. Before they know it, their youth will be gone; there will be only the grave. And so, the poet pleads his case: Seize the day.
Structure
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter and rhymes in couplets. The first part ("Had we...") is ten couplets long, the second ("But...") six, and the third ("Now therefore...") seven.
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Theme and Summary
“To His Coy Mistress” presents a familiar theme in literature–carpe diem (meaning seize the day), a term coined by the ancient Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known as Horace (65-8 B.C.). Here is the gist of Andrew Marvell's poem: In response to a young man’s declarations of love for a young lady, the lady is playfully hesitant, artfully demure. But dallying will not do, he says, for youth passes swiftly. He and the lady must take advantage of the moment, he says, and “sport us while we may.” Oh, yes, if they had “world enough, and time” they would spend their days in idle pursuits, leisurely passing time while the young man heaps praises on the young lady. But they do not have the luxury of time, he says, for “time's wingéd chariot” is ever racing along. Before they know it, their youth will be gone; there will be only the grave. And so, the poet pleads his case: Seize the day.
The Title
The title suggests (1) that the author looked over the shoulder of a young man as he wrote a plea to a young lady and (2) that the author then reported the plea exactly as the young man expressed it. However, the author added the title, using the third-person possessive pronoun "his" to refer to the young man. The word "coy" tells the reader that the lady is no easy catch; the word "mistress" can mean lady, manager, caretaker, courtesan, sweetheart, and lover. It can also serve as the female equivalent of master. In "To His Coy Mistress," the word appears to be a synonym for lady or sweetheart. In reality, of course, Marvell wrote the entire poem.
The Persona (The Young Man)
Although Andrew Marvell writes "To His Coy Mistress" in first-person point of view, he presents the poem as the plea of another man (fictional, of course). The poet enters the mind of the man and reports his thoughts as they manifest themselves. The young man is impatient, desperately so, unwilling to tolerate temporizing on the part of the young lady. His motivation appears to be carnal desire rather than true love; passion rules him. Consequently, one may describe him as immature and selfish.
"To His Coy Mistress" as a Metaphysical Poem
"To His Coy Mistress," acclaimed long after Marvell's death a masterly work, is a lyrical poem that scholars also classify as a metaphysical poem. Metaphysical poetry, pioneered by John Donne, tends to focus on the following:
Startling comparisons or contrasts of a metaphysical (spiritual, transcendent, abstract) quality to a concrete (physical, tangible, sensible) object. In "To His Coy Mistress," for example, Marvell compares love to a vegetable (Line 11) in a waggish metaphor.
Mockery of idealized romantic poetry through crude or shocking imagery, as in Lines 27 and 28 ("then worms shall try / That long preserved virginity').
Gross exaggeration (hyperbole), as in Line 15 ("two hundred [years] to adore each breast].
Expression of personal, private feelings, such as those the young man expresses in "To His Coy Mistress."
Presentation of a logical argument, or syllogism. In "To His Coy Mistress," this argument may be outlined as follows: (1) We could spend decades or even centuries in courtship if time stood still and we remained young. (2) But time passes swiftly and relentlessly. (3) Therefore, we must enjoy the pleasure of each other now, without further ado. The conclusion of the argument begins at Line 33 with "Now therefore."
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is in iambic tetrameter, with eight syllables (four feet) per line. Each foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The last syllable of Line 1 rhymes with the last syllable of Line 2, the last syllable of Line 3 rhymes with the last syllable of Line 4, the last syllable of Line 5 rhymes with the last syllable of Line 6, and so on. Such pairs of rhyming lines are called couplets. The following two lines, which open the poem, exhibit the meter and rhyme prevailing in most of the other couplets in the poem: ......1.................2................3..............4 Had WE but WORLD e NOUGH and TIME ......1.......... ..2......... ....3...............4 This COY ness LA dy WERE no CRIME
Setting
The poem does not present a scene in a specific place in which people interact. However, the young man and the young lady presumably live somewhere in England (the native land of the author), perhaps in northeastern England near the River Humber. The poet mentions the Humber in Line 7.
Characters
Young Man: He pleads with a young lady to stop playing hard to get and accept his love. Young Lady: A coquettish woman.
coyness: evasiveness, hesitancy, modesty, coquetry, reluctance; playing hard to get which . . . walk: example of enjambment (carrying the sense of one line of verse over to the next line without a pause) Thou, Thine, Thy: For a guide to these and other archaic pronouns–such as thine, thee, and thyself–click here. Ganges: River in Asia originating in the Himalayas and flowing southeast, through India, to the Bay of Bengal. The young man here suggests that the young lady could postpone her commitment to him if her youth lasted a long, long time. She could take real or imagined journeys abroad, even to India. She could also refuse to commit herself to him until all the Jews convert to Christianity. But since youth is fleeting (as the poem later points out), there is no time for such journeys. She must submit herself to him now. rubies: gems that may be rose red or purplish red. In folklore, it is said that rubies protect and maintain virginity. Ruby deposits occur in various parts of the world, but the most precious ones are found in Asia, including Myanmar (Burma), India, Thailand, Sri, Lanka, Afghanistan, and Russia. Humber: River in northeastern England. It flows through Hull, Andrew Marvell's hometown. Flood . . . Jews: Resorting to hyperbole, the young man says that his love for the young lady is unbounded by time. He would love her ten years before great flood that Noah outlasted in his ark (Gen. 5:28-10:32) and would still love her until all Jews became Christians at the end of the world. vegetable love: love cultivated and nurtured like a vegetable so that it flourishes prolifically this state: This lofty position; this dignity Time's wingèd chariot: In Greek mythology, the sun was personified as the god Apollo, who rode his golden chariot from east to west each day. Thus, Marvell here associates the sun god with the passage of time. marble vault: The young lady's tomb. worms: a morbid phallic reference quaint: preserved carefully or skillfully dew: The 1681 manuscript of the poem uses glew (not dew), apparently as a coined past tense for glow. transpires: erupts, breaks out, emits, gives off slow-chapt: chewing or eating slowly Thorough: Through
Comments Lines 5 and 6, Lines 23 and 24, Lines 27 and 28: The final stressed vowel sounds of these pairs of lines do not rhyme, as do the final stressed vowel sounds of all the other pairs of lines. Three Sections of the Poem: Lines 1-20 discuss what would happen if the young man and young woman had unlimited time. Lines 21-32 point out that they do not have unlimited time. Lines 33-46 urge the young woman to seize the day and submit.
Study Questions and Essay Topics
Why does this poem, written in the 17th Century, remain popular in the 21st Century?
Write an essay that analyzes the personality and character of the young man.
Identify examples in the poem of metaphor, alliteration, hyperbole, personification, and other figures of speech.
Why does Marvell use the word echoing in Line 27?
What is Marvell's tone (or attitude) in Lines 31 and 32?
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Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation"
Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation" is an eloquent exchange of dialogue between a dark West African man and his British landlady that inexorably verges on the question of apartheid. The poet makes use of the most articulate means to air his views, through that of a telephone conversation, where there is instant and natural give-and-take. It exhibits a one-to-one correspondence between the two.
The interaction between a coloured and a white individual at once assumes universal overtones. At the outset, the poet says that the price seemed reasonable and the location 'indifferent'. Note that as a word, even though it denotes being 'unbiased', it is a word with negative connotations.
However, as we come across the Landlady's biased nature, the word 'indifferent' gains positive overtones; it is better than being impartial. The lady swears that she lived 'off premises'. Nevertheless, the very aspect of his colour poses a problem to her, far from her promise to remain aloof. Nothing remains for the poet, he says, but confession. It gives a picture of him sitting in a confessional, when he hasn't committed any crime. His crime is his colour; his remorse is solutionless.
He tells the lady that he hates a wasted journey. Perhaps his words connote more than he literally signifies. The poet seems to be tired of his life conditioned by racist prejudices. As he mentions that he is a West African, the lady is crammed with silence, but a silence that speaks volumes.
A telephone is an instrument that primarily transmits voices, here it becomes a medium for silence also. The so-called civilized world has these silent, powerful issues that need to be voiced. Here, the silence echoes. It is a silence that is the consequence of her sophisticated upbringing. However, her prejudices transcend her to primitivism living in the superstitious narrow-mindedness of caste and colour.
When the voice finally came, it was 'lip-stick coated',well made-up and diplomatic to suit an affected atmosphere. The inevitable question finally comes cross: "Are you dark? Or very light?" The poet views it as button B or Button A. The question places two alternatives before him: dark or light, the truth or lies.
The first option would obviously shut off all doors to him. The term Button B also is the button in the public telephone box to get the money back. Button A is the one to connect the call. The poet first ponders on the Button B to get out of his predicament. He then realizes that escapism is not the solution, and decides to face the situation.
The words: "Stench /Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak" signify the claustrophobic nature of the questions rather than the atmosphere. The colur 'red' in "Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered" forebode caution. The questions were too naked to be true. The speaker at last brings himself to believe them. His response is very witty: "You mean-like plain or milk chocolate?"
This is the most apt response as dark chocolate is certainly more tempting than plain chocolate. Her disinterested approval of the question was like that of a clinical doctor made immune to human emotions through experience. Human pain and misery has a saturation point; after a certain point people tend to joke at their own agony. As the saying goes: Be a God, and laugh at Yourself. The speaker therefore begins enjoying the situation and confuses the lady on the other side. He asserts: "West African sepia", to further confuse her.
Silence for spectroscopic Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent Hard on the mouthpiece. "What's that?" conceding "Don't know what that is." "Like brunette." "That's dark, isn't it?" "Not altogether. Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused- Foolishly, madam-by sitting down, has turned My bottom raven black-One moment, madam!"-sensing Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap About my ears-"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather See for yourself?"The last lines verge on vulgarity, but simply out of outrage. The mixed feelings, the random and broken sentences, the lack of coherence is speech, the question-answer mode are all typical of a telephone conversation that reverberates more than it sounds.
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Commentary on Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka Wole Soyinka recollects vividly in Ake Mrs. Huti talking about white racism. He was thus mentally prepared to cope with the racism before he left for England. The race problem which has been treated with levity in the immigrant poems is treated from the poet’s personal experience in “Telephone Conversation.” “Telephone Conversation” involves an exchange between the black speaker and a white landlady. This poem more than any other is enriched by Soyinka’s experience of drama. It appears that the speaker is so fluent in the landlady’s language that she is unable to make out that he is black and a foreigner. But he, knowing the society for its racial prejudice, deems it necessary to declare his racial identity rather than be rejected later when she discovers that he is black. When he tells her that he is African, she seems stunned and there is “Silenced transmission of/Pressurized good-breeding.” When she speaks, her voice is Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder pipped. These details are evide... [to view the full essay now, purchase below]
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Nataraj, the dancing form of Lord Shiva, is a symbolic synthesis of the most important aspects of Hinduism, and the summary of the central tenets of this Vedic religion. The term 'Nataraj' means 'King of Dancers' (Sanskrit nata = dance; raja = king). In the words of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Nataraj is the "clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of…A more fluid and energetic representation of a moving figure than the dancing figure of Shiva can scarcely be found anywhere," (The Dance of Shiva)
The Origin of the Nataraj Form:
An extraordinary iconographic representation of the rich and diverse cultural heritage of India, it was developed in southern India by 9th and 10th century artists during the Chola period (880-1279 CE) in a series of beautiful bronze sculptures. By the 12th century AD, it achieved canonical stature and soon the Chola Nataraja became the supreme statement of Hindu art.
The Vital Form & Symbolism:
In a marvelously unified and dynamic composition expressing the rhythm and harmony of life, Nataraj is shown with four hands represent the cardinal directions. He is dancing, with his left foot elegantly raised and the right foot on a prostrate figure — 'Apasmara Purusha', the personification of illusion and ignorance over whom Shiva triumphs. The upper left hand holds a flame, the lower left hand points down to the dwarf, who is shown holding a cobra. The upper right hand holds an hourglass drum or 'dumroo' that stands for the male-female vital principle, the lower shows the gesture of assertion: "Be without fear."Snakes that stand for egotism, are seen uncoiling from his arms, legs, and hair, which is braided and bejeweled. His matted locks are whirling as he dances within an arch of flames representing the endless cycle of birth and death. On his head is a skull, which symbolizes his conquest over death. Goddess Ganga, the epitome of the holy river Ganges, also sits on his hairdo. His third eye is symbolic of his omniscience, insight, and enlightenment. The whole idol rests on a lotus pedestal, the symbol of the creative forces of the universe.
The Significance of Shiva's Dance:
This cosmic dance of Shiva is called 'Anandatandava,' meaning the Dance of Bliss, and symbolizes the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, as well as the daily rhythm of birth and death. The dance is a pictorial allegory of the five principle manifestations of eternal energy — creation, destruction, preservation, salvation, and illusion. According to Coomerswamy, the dance of Shiva also represents his five activities: 'Shrishti' (creation, evolution); 'Sthiti' (preservation, support); 'Samhara' (destruction, evolution); 'Tirobhava' (illusion); and 'Anugraha' (release, emancipation, grace).The overall temper of the image is paradoxical, uniting the inner tranquility, and outside activity of Shiva.
A Scientific Metaphor:
Fritzof Capra in his article "The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics," and later in the The Tao of Physics beautifully relates Nataraj's dance with modern physics. He says that "every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction…without end…For the modern physicists, then Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena."
The Nataraj Statue at CERN, Geneva:
In 2004, a 2m statue of the dancing Shiva was unveiled at CERN, the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva. A special plaque next to the Shiva statue explains the significance of the metaphor of Shiva's cosmic dance with quotations from Capra: "Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics."
To sum up, here's an excerpt from a beautiful poem by Ruth Peel:
"The source of all movement,Shiva's dance,Gives rhythm to the universe.He dances in evil places,In sacred,He creates and preserves,Destroys and releases.
We are part of this danceThis eternal rhythm,And woe to us if, blindedBy illusions,We detach ourselvesFrom the dancing cosmos,This universal harmony…"
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It is the Age of Darkness... In his 28th incarnation, Lord Shivawalks through an archway of torchesthrough dark corridors into the center of the eartha halo of fire around his head lighting the way like a miners' lampleaving footprints that glow in the dark,waiting to be filled someday by the masters who will follow
Shiva closes his eyes and the sun goes outholds his breath and all of the creatures fall deadcovers his ears and the universe goes silentnot a water dropnot a heartbeatnot a sound from a songbird in any of the 4 corners
Shiva swallows the stars until they burn like coals through his eyeshis outline glows against the night sky like an eclipse of the sunand sparks follow each of his movements like a shower of meteors
He lights up the sky with the Auroracomets appear before dawnhe showers the earth with hot rocks that make the seas bubble and boil
He walks on full moon nights through broken temples covered with prayers in Sanskritthrough crumbling arches overrun with immense fig treesand guarded by a cobra
Shiva hides behind Pluto in the dark recesses of the 7th galaxyhe greets us at death in that quiet place that is faint in our memoriesthat place that has always been there but we can't quite remember
When you cross that bridge to the other world, open the door and step throughstep through the stars, swim through the Milky Way,touch the very boundaries of the universe
and then...it is the Age of Awakening
On the Night of Shiva, as creation awaited, the drum sounded and music awoke the vast silence with the vibration of om and brought the universe into existenceCovered with ashes and pale blue in color, Shiva sustains the universe through practice of austeritiesHe takes the first step and the world begins to spin until the momentum of its own force keeps it in motionrivers flow from the Nile to the Ganges and pour into the oceanand trees turn from green to gold to bare branch a thousand times a day
And the dance begins...
The primal energy infuses everything and nature awakensflowers bloom, waterfalls tumble into immense canyons, and the animals evolve as consciousness races back to its source
Shiva reveals his secret to Matseyendra - Lord of the Fishesthe secret of the ages, the secret of yogaand then turns into a statue at Kayavarohan, awaiting discovery someday by one who seeks awakening
Awakening happens only in the next world, the next, and then the nextbut the promise of awakening is here and nowand without the promise, there is only cold and darkness
But Shiva remains hiding just out of sighthe reveals himself last - if everfor to discover Shiva is to understand the mystery that has no answer
So we create myths: Stonehenge, the Elephant Caves, pyramids, Abu Simbel, the riddle of the Sphynx, the lost cities - Angkor Wat, Machu Piccu, Copan...how were they built, and why? it's quite simple - like Shiva, they have been there since the beginning
And the dance goes on even though worlds collide, the sun burns out and the universe freezesit just awaits the next step
Lord of the Other Universe - the One Beyond - Hari Om!
The dance beginsDance continuesDance never ends
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Western Philosophy19th century philosophy
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Full name
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born
May 25, 1803(1803-05-25)Boston, Massachusetts
Died
April 27, 1882 (aged 78)Concord, Massachusetts
School/tradition
Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the early 19th century. His teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s, while he was seen as a champion of individualism and prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. As a result of this ground breaking work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".[1] Considered one of the great orators of the time, Emerson's enthusiasm and respect for his audience enraptured crowds. His support for abolitionism late in life created controversy, and at times he was subject to abuse from crowds while speaking on the topic. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."
The American Scholar:
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.
Summary
Emerson uses Transcendentalist and romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship to nature. There are a few key points he makes that flesh out this vision:
We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself, "a doctrine ever new and sublime".
An individual may live in either of two states. In one, the busy, "divided" or "degenerate" state, he does not "possess himself" but identifies with his occupation or a monotonous action; in the other, "right" state, he is elevated to "Man", at one with all mankind.
To achieve this higher state of mind, the modern American scholar must reject old ideas and think for him or herself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking", "the victim of society", "the sluggard intellect of this continent".
"The American Scholar" has an obligation, as "Man Thinking", within this "One Man" concept, to see the world clearly, not severely influenced by traditional/historical views, and to broaden his understanding of the world from fresh eyes, to "defer never to the popular cry."
The scholar's education consists of three pursuits:
To investigate and to understand nature, which includes the scholar's own mind and person.
To study the "mind of the past": to read literature, to observe art, to study institutions.
To take action and to interact with the world; not to become the recluse thinker commenting from afar.
"The office [the duty] of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances."
Importance
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. declared this speech to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".[1] Building on the growing attention he was receiving from the essay Nature, this speech solidified Emerson's popularity and weight in America, a level of reverence he would hold through out the rest of his life. Phi Beta Kappa's literary quarterly, "The American Scholar", was named after the speech.
The American Scholar: (TEXT)
An address given by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on August 31 1837, this speech is seen as a fore-runner to Vannevar Bush's article As We May Think. It laid out the aims of scholarship which Vannevar Bush sought to aid via automation of access to Literature.
Because of it's date, the address is now out of copyright, so is reproduced here in full.
Mr. President and Gentlemen,
I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?
In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, -- the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year, we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character, and his hopes.
It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its
end. The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, -- present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, `All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.' In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.
I.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, -- so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, -- in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? -- A thought too bold, -- a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, -- when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
II.
The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past, -- in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, -- learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, -- by considering their value alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, -- the act of thought, -- is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, -- let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; -- cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, -- when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, -- we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, -- with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.
I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, -- only the authentic utterances of the oracle; -- all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.
Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office, -- to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, -- as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical men' sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, -- who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day, -- are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
The world, -- this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.
It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.
The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, -- with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, -- remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock.
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town, -- in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity, -- these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, -- he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those `far from fame,' who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.
I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, -- watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; -- must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, -- how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, -- these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, -- this he shall hear and promulgate.
These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, -- happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, -- his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, -- until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; -- that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.
In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, -- free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, -- see the whelping of this lion, -- which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, -- by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
Yes, we are the cowed, -- we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, -- darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light, that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called `the mass' and `the herd.' In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, -- one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, -- ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, -- full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.
Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money, -- the "spoils," so called, "of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, -- more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying, that we have come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another; we drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say, of nearer reference to the time and to this country.
Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness, -- "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, -- is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state.
One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, -- is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; -- show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; -- and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have differently followed and with various success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
There is one man of genius, who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated; -- I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have difficulty, which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of isanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, -- to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; -- tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, -- but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, -- some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, -- patience; -- with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; -- not to be reckoned one character; -- not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, -- please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy.
Epithalamium (from Greek; epi- upon, and thalamium nuptial chamber, sometimes also spelled "epithalamion") specifically refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride. Or, specifically, written for the bride on the way to her marital chamber. The word derives from the Greek epithalamios which means "of a wedding", epi (of) + thalamos (bridal chamber.) This form continued in popularity through the history of the classical world; the Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous epithalamium, which was translated from or at least inspired by a now-lost work of Sappho.
History
It was originally among the Greeks a song in praise of bride and bridegroom, sung by a number of boys and girls at the door of the nuptial chamber. According to the scholiast on Theocritus, one form was employed at night, and another, to rouse the bride and bridegroom on the following morning. In either case, as was natural, the main burden of the song consisted of invocations of blessing and predictions of happiness, interrupted from time to time by the ancient chorus of Hymen hymenaee. Among the Romans a similar custom was in vogue, but the song was sung by girls only, after the marriage guests had gone, and it contained much more of what modern attitudes would identify as obscene.
Development as a Literary Form
In the hands of the poets the epithalamium was developed into a special literary form, and received considerable cultivation. Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus and Pindar are all regarded as masters of the species, but the finest example preserved in Greek literature is the 18th Idyll of Theocritus, which celebrates the marriage of Menelaus and Helen. In Latin, the epithalamium, imitated from Fescennine Greek models, was a base form of literature, when Catullus redeemed it and gave it dignity by modelling his Marriage of Thetis and Peleus on a lost ode of Sappho.
In later times Statius, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris and Claudian are the authors of the best-known epithalamia in classical Latin; and they have been imitated by James Buchanan, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Jacopo Sannazaro, and a whole host of modern Latin poets, with whom, indeed, the form was at one time in great favor.
The names of Ronsard, Malherbe and Scarron are especially associated with the genre in French literature, and d'Iarini and Metastasio in Italian. Perhaps no poem of this class has been more universally admired than the pastoral Epithalamion of Edmund Spenser (1595), though he also has important rivals - Ben Jonson, Donne and Francis Quarles. Ben Jonson's friend, Sir John Suckling, is known for his epithalamium "A Ballad Upon a Wedding." In his ballad, Suckling playfully demystifies the usual celebration of marriage by detailing comic rustic parallels and identifying sex as the great leveler.
At the close of In Memoriam A.H.H., Tennyson has appended a poem, on the nuptials of his sister, which is strictly an epithalamium.
E. E. Cummings also returns to the form in his poem Epithalamion, which appears in his 1923 book Tulips and Chimneys. E.E.Cummings' Epithalamion consists of three seven octave parts, and includes numerous references to ancient Greece.
The term is occasionally used beyond poetry, for example to describe Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream
THE LOVER BESEECHETH HIS MISTRESS.NOT TO FORGET HIS STEADFAST FAITHAND TRUE INTENT.
ORGET not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant ; My great travail so gladly spent, Forget not yet ! Forget not yet when first began The weary life ye know, since whan The suit, the service none tell can ; Forget not yet ! Forget not yet the great assays, The cruel wrong, the scornful ways, The painful patience in delays, Forget not yet ! Forget not ! oh ! forget not this, How long ago hath been, and is The mind that never meant amiss Forget not yet ! Forget not then thine own approv'd, The which so long hath thee so lov'd, Whose steadfast faith yet never mov'd : Forget not this !
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/wyattbib.htm
Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman (also named Andrew Marvell). As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert. He was a colleague and friend of John Milton.
Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, East Riding of Yorkshire, near the city of Kingston upon Hull. The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School. A secondary school in the city is now named after him.
His most famous poems include To His Coy Mistress, The Garden, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, and the Country House Poem, "Upon Appleton House”.
To His Coy Mistress:
To His Coy MistressHad we but world enough, and time,This coyness, Lady, were no crimeWe would sit down and think which wayTo walk and pass our long love's day.Thou by the Indian Ganges' sideShouldst rubies find: I by the tideOf Humber would complain. I wouldLove you ten years before the Flood,And you should, if you please, refuseTill the conversion of the Jews.My vegetable love should growVaster than empires, and more slow;An hundred years should go to praiseThine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;Two hundred to adore each breast,But thirty thousand to the rest;An age at least to every part,And the last age should show your heart.For, Lady, you deserve this state,Nor would I love at lower rate.But at my back I always hearTime's wingèd chariot hurrying near;And yonder all before us lieDeserts of vast eternity.Thy beauty shall no more be found,Nor, in thy marble vault, shall soundMy echoing song: then worms shall tryThat long preserved virginity,And your quaint honour turn to dust,And into ashes all my lust:The grave's a fine and private place,But none, I think, do there embrace.Now therefore, while the youthful hueSits on thy skin like morning dew,And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires,Now let us sport us while we may,And now, like amorous birds of prey,Rather at once our time devourThan languish in his slow-chapt power.Let us roll all our strength and allOur sweetness up into one ball,And tear our pleasures with rough strifeThrough the iron gates of life:Thus, though we cannot make our sunStand still, yet we will make him run.
To His Coy Mistress is a witty metaphysical poem written by the British author and statesman Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the Interregnum. The poem is often considered an argument for the concept of 'carpe diem'. However, it should be remembered that Andrew Marvell was highly educated and Christian—whether Puritan or not—and is more likely mocking the concept of 'carpe diem' that other poets extolled. The poem might even be aimed specifically against Robert Herrick's To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time. It is doubtful that Marvell would be in favor of the girl, the listener, agreeing to the speaker's proposition.[citation needed]
Marvell probably wrote the poem prior to serving in Oliver Cromwell's government as a minister, and the poem was not published in his lifetime.
Synopsis
To His Coy Mistress presents a familiar theme in literature–carpe diem (meaning seize the day), a term coined by the ancient Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known as Horace (65-8 B.C.). Here is the gist of Andrew Marvell's poem: In response to a young man’s declarations of love for a young lady, the lady is playfully hesitant, artfully demure. But dallying will not do, he says, for youth passes swiftly. He and the lady must take advantage of the moment, he says, and “sport us while we may.” Oh, yes, if they had “world enough, and time” they would spend their days in idle pursuits, leisurely passing time while the young man heaps praises on the young lady. But they do not have the luxury of time, he says, for “time's wingéd chariot” is ever racing along. Before they know it, their youth will be gone; there will be only the grave. And so, the poet pleads his case: Seize the day.
Structure
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter and rhymes in couplets. The first part ("Had we...") is ten couplets long, the second ("But...") six, and the third ("Now therefore...") seven.
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Theme and Summary
“To His Coy Mistress” presents a familiar theme in literature–carpe diem (meaning seize the day), a term coined by the ancient Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known as Horace (65-8 B.C.). Here is the gist of Andrew Marvell's poem: In response to a young man’s declarations of love for a young lady, the lady is playfully hesitant, artfully demure. But dallying will not do, he says, for youth passes swiftly. He and the lady must take advantage of the moment, he says, and “sport us while we may.” Oh, yes, if they had “world enough, and time” they would spend their days in idle pursuits, leisurely passing time while the young man heaps praises on the young lady. But they do not have the luxury of time, he says, for “time's wingéd chariot” is ever racing along. Before they know it, their youth will be gone; there will be only the grave. And so, the poet pleads his case: Seize the day.
The Title
The title suggests (1) that the author looked over the shoulder of a young man as he wrote a plea to a young lady and (2) that the author then reported the plea exactly as the young man expressed it. However, the author added the title, using the third-person possessive pronoun "his" to refer to the young man. The word "coy" tells the reader that the lady is no easy catch; the word "mistress" can mean lady, manager, caretaker, courtesan, sweetheart, and lover. It can also serve as the female equivalent of master. In "To His Coy Mistress," the word appears to be a synonym for lady or sweetheart. In reality, of course, Marvell wrote the entire poem.
The Persona (The Young Man)
Although Andrew Marvell writes "To His Coy Mistress" in first-person point of view, he presents the poem as the plea of another man (fictional, of course). The poet enters the mind of the man and reports his thoughts as they manifest themselves. The young man is impatient, desperately so, unwilling to tolerate temporizing on the part of the young lady. His motivation appears to be carnal desire rather than true love; passion rules him. Consequently, one may describe him as immature and selfish.
"To His Coy Mistress" as a Metaphysical Poem
"To His Coy Mistress," acclaimed long after Marvell's death a masterly work, is a lyrical poem that scholars also classify as a metaphysical poem. Metaphysical poetry, pioneered by John Donne, tends to focus on the following:
Startling comparisons or contrasts of a metaphysical (spiritual, transcendent, abstract) quality to a concrete (physical, tangible, sensible) object. In "To His Coy Mistress," for example, Marvell compares love to a vegetable (Line 11) in a waggish metaphor.
Mockery of idealized romantic poetry through crude or shocking imagery, as in Lines 27 and 28 ("then worms shall try / That long preserved virginity').
Gross exaggeration (hyperbole), as in Line 15 ("two hundred [years] to adore each breast].
Expression of personal, private feelings, such as those the young man expresses in "To His Coy Mistress."
Presentation of a logical argument, or syllogism. In "To His Coy Mistress," this argument may be outlined as follows: (1) We could spend decades or even centuries in courtship if time stood still and we remained young. (2) But time passes swiftly and relentlessly. (3) Therefore, we must enjoy the pleasure of each other now, without further ado. The conclusion of the argument begins at Line 33 with "Now therefore."
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is in iambic tetrameter, with eight syllables (four feet) per line. Each foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The last syllable of Line 1 rhymes with the last syllable of Line 2, the last syllable of Line 3 rhymes with the last syllable of Line 4, the last syllable of Line 5 rhymes with the last syllable of Line 6, and so on. Such pairs of rhyming lines are called couplets. The following two lines, which open the poem, exhibit the meter and rhyme prevailing in most of the other couplets in the poem: ......1.................2................3..............4 Had WE but WORLD e NOUGH and TIME ......1.......... ..2......... ....3...............4 This COY ness LA dy WERE no CRIME
Setting
The poem does not present a scene in a specific place in which people interact. However, the young man and the young lady presumably live somewhere in England (the native land of the author), perhaps in northeastern England near the River Humber. The poet mentions the Humber in Line 7.
Characters
Young Man: He pleads with a young lady to stop playing hard to get and accept his love. Young Lady: A coquettish woman.
coyness: evasiveness, hesitancy, modesty, coquetry, reluctance; playing hard to get which . . . walk: example of enjambment (carrying the sense of one line of verse over to the next line without a pause) Thou, Thine, Thy: For a guide to these and other archaic pronouns–such as thine, thee, and thyself–click here. Ganges: River in Asia originating in the Himalayas and flowing southeast, through India, to the Bay of Bengal. The young man here suggests that the young lady could postpone her commitment to him if her youth lasted a long, long time. She could take real or imagined journeys abroad, even to India. She could also refuse to commit herself to him until all the Jews convert to Christianity. But since youth is fleeting (as the poem later points out), there is no time for such journeys. She must submit herself to him now. rubies: gems that may be rose red or purplish red. In folklore, it is said that rubies protect and maintain virginity. Ruby deposits occur in various parts of the world, but the most precious ones are found in Asia, including Myanmar (Burma), India, Thailand, Sri, Lanka, Afghanistan, and Russia. Humber: River in northeastern England. It flows through Hull, Andrew Marvell's hometown. Flood . . . Jews: Resorting to hyperbole, the young man says that his love for the young lady is unbounded by time. He would love her ten years before great flood that Noah outlasted in his ark (Gen. 5:28-10:32) and would still love her until all Jews became Christians at the end of the world. vegetable love: love cultivated and nurtured like a vegetable so that it flourishes prolifically this state: This lofty position; this dignity Time's wingèd chariot: In Greek mythology, the sun was personified as the god Apollo, who rode his golden chariot from east to west each day. Thus, Marvell here associates the sun god with the passage of time. marble vault: The young lady's tomb. worms: a morbid phallic reference quaint: preserved carefully or skillfully dew: The 1681 manuscript of the poem uses glew (not dew), apparently as a coined past tense for glow. transpires: erupts, breaks out, emits, gives off slow-chapt: chewing or eating slowly Thorough: Through
Comments Lines 5 and 6, Lines 23 and 24, Lines 27 and 28: The final stressed vowel sounds of these pairs of lines do not rhyme, as do the final stressed vowel sounds of all the other pairs of lines. Three Sections of the Poem: Lines 1-20 discuss what would happen if the young man and young woman had unlimited time. Lines 21-32 point out that they do not have unlimited time. Lines 33-46 urge the young woman to seize the day and submit.
Study Questions and Essay Topics
Why does this poem, written in the 17th Century, remain popular in the 21st Century?
Write an essay that analyzes the personality and character of the young man.
Identify examples in the poem of metaphor, alliteration, hyperbole, personification, and other figures of speech.
Why does Marvell use the word echoing in Line 27?
What is Marvell's tone (or attitude) in Lines 31 and 32?
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Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation"
Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation" is an eloquent exchange of dialogue between a dark West African man and his British landlady that inexorably verges on the question of apartheid. The poet makes use of the most articulate means to air his views, through that of a telephone conversation, where there is instant and natural give-and-take. It exhibits a one-to-one correspondence between the two.
The interaction between a coloured and a white individual at once assumes universal overtones. At the outset, the poet says that the price seemed reasonable and the location 'indifferent'. Note that as a word, even though it denotes being 'unbiased', it is a word with negative connotations.
However, as we come across the Landlady's biased nature, the word 'indifferent' gains positive overtones; it is better than being impartial. The lady swears that she lived 'off premises'. Nevertheless, the very aspect of his colour poses a problem to her, far from her promise to remain aloof. Nothing remains for the poet, he says, but confession. It gives a picture of him sitting in a confessional, when he hasn't committed any crime. His crime is his colour; his remorse is solutionless.
He tells the lady that he hates a wasted journey. Perhaps his words connote more than he literally signifies. The poet seems to be tired of his life conditioned by racist prejudices. As he mentions that he is a West African, the lady is crammed with silence, but a silence that speaks volumes.
A telephone is an instrument that primarily transmits voices, here it becomes a medium for silence also. The so-called civilized world has these silent, powerful issues that need to be voiced. Here, the silence echoes. It is a silence that is the consequence of her sophisticated upbringing. However, her prejudices transcend her to primitivism living in the superstitious narrow-mindedness of caste and colour.
When the voice finally came, it was 'lip-stick coated',well made-up and diplomatic to suit an affected atmosphere. The inevitable question finally comes cross: "Are you dark? Or very light?" The poet views it as button B or Button A. The question places two alternatives before him: dark or light, the truth or lies.
The first option would obviously shut off all doors to him. The term Button B also is the button in the public telephone box to get the money back. Button A is the one to connect the call. The poet first ponders on the Button B to get out of his predicament. He then realizes that escapism is not the solution, and decides to face the situation.
The words: "Stench /Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak" signify the claustrophobic nature of the questions rather than the atmosphere. The colur 'red' in "Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered" forebode caution. The questions were too naked to be true. The speaker at last brings himself to believe them. His response is very witty: "You mean-like plain or milk chocolate?"
This is the most apt response as dark chocolate is certainly more tempting than plain chocolate. Her disinterested approval of the question was like that of a clinical doctor made immune to human emotions through experience. Human pain and misery has a saturation point; after a certain point people tend to joke at their own agony. As the saying goes: Be a God, and laugh at Yourself. The speaker therefore begins enjoying the situation and confuses the lady on the other side. He asserts: "West African sepia", to further confuse her.
Silence for spectroscopic Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent Hard on the mouthpiece. "What's that?" conceding "Don't know what that is." "Like brunette." "That's dark, isn't it?" "Not altogether. Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused- Foolishly, madam-by sitting down, has turned My bottom raven black-One moment, madam!"-sensing Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap About my ears-"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather See for yourself?"The last lines verge on vulgarity, but simply out of outrage. The mixed feelings, the random and broken sentences, the lack of coherence is speech, the question-answer mode are all typical of a telephone conversation that reverberates more than it sounds.
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Commentary on Telephone Conversation by Wole Soyinka Wole Soyinka recollects vividly in Ake Mrs. Huti talking about white racism. He was thus mentally prepared to cope with the racism before he left for England. The race problem which has been treated with levity in the immigrant poems is treated from the poet’s personal experience in “Telephone Conversation.” “Telephone Conversation” involves an exchange between the black speaker and a white landlady. This poem more than any other is enriched by Soyinka’s experience of drama. It appears that the speaker is so fluent in the landlady’s language that she is unable to make out that he is black and a foreigner. But he, knowing the society for its racial prejudice, deems it necessary to declare his racial identity rather than be rejected later when she discovers that he is black. When he tells her that he is African, she seems stunned and there is “Silenced transmission of/Pressurized good-breeding.” When she speaks, her voice is Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder pipped. These details are evide... [to view the full essay now, purchase below]
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Nataraj, the dancing form of Lord Shiva, is a symbolic synthesis of the most important aspects of Hinduism, and the summary of the central tenets of this Vedic religion. The term 'Nataraj' means 'King of Dancers' (Sanskrit nata = dance; raja = king). In the words of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Nataraj is the "clearest image of the activity of God which any art or religion can boast of…A more fluid and energetic representation of a moving figure than the dancing figure of Shiva can scarcely be found anywhere," (The Dance of Shiva)
The Origin of the Nataraj Form:
An extraordinary iconographic representation of the rich and diverse cultural heritage of India, it was developed in southern India by 9th and 10th century artists during the Chola period (880-1279 CE) in a series of beautiful bronze sculptures. By the 12th century AD, it achieved canonical stature and soon the Chola Nataraja became the supreme statement of Hindu art.
The Vital Form & Symbolism:
In a marvelously unified and dynamic composition expressing the rhythm and harmony of life, Nataraj is shown with four hands represent the cardinal directions. He is dancing, with his left foot elegantly raised and the right foot on a prostrate figure — 'Apasmara Purusha', the personification of illusion and ignorance over whom Shiva triumphs. The upper left hand holds a flame, the lower left hand points down to the dwarf, who is shown holding a cobra. The upper right hand holds an hourglass drum or 'dumroo' that stands for the male-female vital principle, the lower shows the gesture of assertion: "Be without fear."Snakes that stand for egotism, are seen uncoiling from his arms, legs, and hair, which is braided and bejeweled. His matted locks are whirling as he dances within an arch of flames representing the endless cycle of birth and death. On his head is a skull, which symbolizes his conquest over death. Goddess Ganga, the epitome of the holy river Ganges, also sits on his hairdo. His third eye is symbolic of his omniscience, insight, and enlightenment. The whole idol rests on a lotus pedestal, the symbol of the creative forces of the universe.
The Significance of Shiva's Dance:
This cosmic dance of Shiva is called 'Anandatandava,' meaning the Dance of Bliss, and symbolizes the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, as well as the daily rhythm of birth and death. The dance is a pictorial allegory of the five principle manifestations of eternal energy — creation, destruction, preservation, salvation, and illusion. According to Coomerswamy, the dance of Shiva also represents his five activities: 'Shrishti' (creation, evolution); 'Sthiti' (preservation, support); 'Samhara' (destruction, evolution); 'Tirobhava' (illusion); and 'Anugraha' (release, emancipation, grace).The overall temper of the image is paradoxical, uniting the inner tranquility, and outside activity of Shiva.
A Scientific Metaphor:
Fritzof Capra in his article "The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics," and later in the The Tao of Physics beautifully relates Nataraj's dance with modern physics. He says that "every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction…without end…For the modern physicists, then Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomena."
The Nataraj Statue at CERN, Geneva:
In 2004, a 2m statue of the dancing Shiva was unveiled at CERN, the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva. A special plaque next to the Shiva statue explains the significance of the metaphor of Shiva's cosmic dance with quotations from Capra: "Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics."
To sum up, here's an excerpt from a beautiful poem by Ruth Peel:
"The source of all movement,Shiva's dance,Gives rhythm to the universe.He dances in evil places,In sacred,He creates and preserves,Destroys and releases.
We are part of this danceThis eternal rhythm,And woe to us if, blindedBy illusions,We detach ourselvesFrom the dancing cosmos,This universal harmony…"
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It is the Age of Darkness... In his 28th incarnation, Lord Shivawalks through an archway of torchesthrough dark corridors into the center of the eartha halo of fire around his head lighting the way like a miners' lampleaving footprints that glow in the dark,waiting to be filled someday by the masters who will follow
Shiva closes his eyes and the sun goes outholds his breath and all of the creatures fall deadcovers his ears and the universe goes silentnot a water dropnot a heartbeatnot a sound from a songbird in any of the 4 corners
Shiva swallows the stars until they burn like coals through his eyeshis outline glows against the night sky like an eclipse of the sunand sparks follow each of his movements like a shower of meteors
He lights up the sky with the Auroracomets appear before dawnhe showers the earth with hot rocks that make the seas bubble and boil
He walks on full moon nights through broken temples covered with prayers in Sanskritthrough crumbling arches overrun with immense fig treesand guarded by a cobra
Shiva hides behind Pluto in the dark recesses of the 7th galaxyhe greets us at death in that quiet place that is faint in our memoriesthat place that has always been there but we can't quite remember
When you cross that bridge to the other world, open the door and step throughstep through the stars, swim through the Milky Way,touch the very boundaries of the universe
and then...it is the Age of Awakening
On the Night of Shiva, as creation awaited, the drum sounded and music awoke the vast silence with the vibration of om and brought the universe into existenceCovered with ashes and pale blue in color, Shiva sustains the universe through practice of austeritiesHe takes the first step and the world begins to spin until the momentum of its own force keeps it in motionrivers flow from the Nile to the Ganges and pour into the oceanand trees turn from green to gold to bare branch a thousand times a day
And the dance begins...
The primal energy infuses everything and nature awakensflowers bloom, waterfalls tumble into immense canyons, and the animals evolve as consciousness races back to its source
Shiva reveals his secret to Matseyendra - Lord of the Fishesthe secret of the ages, the secret of yogaand then turns into a statue at Kayavarohan, awaiting discovery someday by one who seeks awakening
Awakening happens only in the next world, the next, and then the nextbut the promise of awakening is here and nowand without the promise, there is only cold and darkness
But Shiva remains hiding just out of sighthe reveals himself last - if everfor to discover Shiva is to understand the mystery that has no answer
So we create myths: Stonehenge, the Elephant Caves, pyramids, Abu Simbel, the riddle of the Sphynx, the lost cities - Angkor Wat, Machu Piccu, Copan...how were they built, and why? it's quite simple - like Shiva, they have been there since the beginning
And the dance goes on even though worlds collide, the sun burns out and the universe freezesit just awaits the next step
Lord of the Other Universe - the One Beyond - Hari Om!
The dance beginsDance continuesDance never ends
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Western Philosophy19th century philosophy
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Full name
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Born
May 25, 1803(1803-05-25)Boston, Massachusetts
Died
April 27, 1882 (aged 78)Concord, Massachusetts
School/tradition
Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the early 19th century. His teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s, while he was seen as a champion of individualism and prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. As a result of this ground breaking work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".[1] Considered one of the great orators of the time, Emerson's enthusiasm and respect for his audience enraptured crowds. His support for abolitionism late in life created controversy, and at times he was subject to abuse from crowds while speaking on the topic. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man."
The American Scholar:
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.
Summary
Emerson uses Transcendentalist and romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship to nature. There are a few key points he makes that flesh out this vision:
We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself, "a doctrine ever new and sublime".
An individual may live in either of two states. In one, the busy, "divided" or "degenerate" state, he does not "possess himself" but identifies with his occupation or a monotonous action; in the other, "right" state, he is elevated to "Man", at one with all mankind.
To achieve this higher state of mind, the modern American scholar must reject old ideas and think for him or herself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking", "the victim of society", "the sluggard intellect of this continent".
"The American Scholar" has an obligation, as "Man Thinking", within this "One Man" concept, to see the world clearly, not severely influenced by traditional/historical views, and to broaden his understanding of the world from fresh eyes, to "defer never to the popular cry."
The scholar's education consists of three pursuits:
To investigate and to understand nature, which includes the scholar's own mind and person.
To study the "mind of the past": to read literature, to observe art, to study institutions.
To take action and to interact with the world; not to become the recluse thinker commenting from afar.
"The office [the duty] of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances."
Importance
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. declared this speech to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".[1] Building on the growing attention he was receiving from the essay Nature, this speech solidified Emerson's popularity and weight in America, a level of reverence he would hold through out the rest of his life. Phi Beta Kappa's literary quarterly, "The American Scholar", was named after the speech.
The American Scholar: (TEXT)
An address given by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge on August 31 1837, this speech is seen as a fore-runner to Vannevar Bush's article As We May Think. It laid out the aims of scholarship which Vannevar Bush sought to aid via automation of access to Literature.
Because of it's date, the address is now out of copyright, so is reproduced here in full.
Mr. President and Gentlemen,
I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?
In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our association, seem to prescribe to this day, -- the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Year by year, we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character, and his hopes.
It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its
end. The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, -- present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, -- a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, `All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.' In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.
I.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, -- so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, -- in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? -- A thought too bold, -- a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, -- when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become at last one maxim.
II.
The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past, -- in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth, -- learn the amount of this influence more conveniently, -- by considering their value alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, -- the act of thought, -- is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, -- let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; -- cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years.
Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, -- when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, -- we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy, -- with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.
I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, -- only the authentic utterances of the oracle; -- all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.
Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office, -- to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.
III. There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, -- as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe. The so-called `practical men' sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the clergy, -- who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars of their day, -- are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
The world, -- this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power.
It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.
The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, -- with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, -- remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein, and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their merchantable stock.
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town, -- in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is, that it is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of Polarity, -- these "fits of easy transmission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, -- he has always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof. Those `far from fame,' who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.
I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, -- watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; -- must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, -- how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, -- these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, -- this he shall hear and promulgate.
These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, -- happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, -- his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, -- until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; -- that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.
In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, -- free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, "without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution." Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, -- see the whelping of this lion, -- which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, -- by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
Yes, we are the cowed, -- we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, -- darker than can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my audience in stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light, that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day are bugs, are spawn, and are called `the mass' and `the herd.' In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, -- one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, -- ripened; yes, and are content to be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, -- full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man's light, and feel it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live in him.
Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money, -- the "spoils," so called, "of office." And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strown along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, -- more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying, that we have come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another; we drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say, of nearer reference to the time and to this country.
Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in the leading idea may be distinctly enough traced.
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness, -- "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would desire to be born in, -- is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state.
One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, -- is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; -- show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; -- and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have differently followed and with various success. In contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
There is one man of genius, who has done much for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated; -- I mean Emanuel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have difficulty, which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the connection between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible world. Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of isanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual, -- to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; -- tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, -- but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, -- some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, -- patience; -- with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; -- not to be reckoned one character; -- not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, -- please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy.
Epithalamium (from Greek; epi- upon, and thalamium nuptial chamber, sometimes also spelled "epithalamion") specifically refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride. Or, specifically, written for the bride on the way to her marital chamber. The word derives from the Greek epithalamios which means "of a wedding", epi (of) + thalamos (bridal chamber.) This form continued in popularity through the history of the classical world; the Roman poet Catullus wrote a famous epithalamium, which was translated from or at least inspired by a now-lost work of Sappho.
History
It was originally among the Greeks a song in praise of bride and bridegroom, sung by a number of boys and girls at the door of the nuptial chamber. According to the scholiast on Theocritus, one form was employed at night, and another, to rouse the bride and bridegroom on the following morning. In either case, as was natural, the main burden of the song consisted of invocations of blessing and predictions of happiness, interrupted from time to time by the ancient chorus of Hymen hymenaee. Among the Romans a similar custom was in vogue, but the song was sung by girls only, after the marriage guests had gone, and it contained much more of what modern attitudes would identify as obscene.
Development as a Literary Form
In the hands of the poets the epithalamium was developed into a special literary form, and received considerable cultivation. Sappho, Anacreon, Stesichorus and Pindar are all regarded as masters of the species, but the finest example preserved in Greek literature is the 18th Idyll of Theocritus, which celebrates the marriage of Menelaus and Helen. In Latin, the epithalamium, imitated from Fescennine Greek models, was a base form of literature, when Catullus redeemed it and gave it dignity by modelling his Marriage of Thetis and Peleus on a lost ode of Sappho.
In later times Statius, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris and Claudian are the authors of the best-known epithalamia in classical Latin; and they have been imitated by James Buchanan, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Jacopo Sannazaro, and a whole host of modern Latin poets, with whom, indeed, the form was at one time in great favor.
The names of Ronsard, Malherbe and Scarron are especially associated with the genre in French literature, and d'Iarini and Metastasio in Italian. Perhaps no poem of this class has been more universally admired than the pastoral Epithalamion of Edmund Spenser (1595), though he also has important rivals - Ben Jonson, Donne and Francis Quarles. Ben Jonson's friend, Sir John Suckling, is known for his epithalamium "A Ballad Upon a Wedding." In his ballad, Suckling playfully demystifies the usual celebration of marriage by detailing comic rustic parallels and identifying sex as the great leveler.
At the close of In Memoriam A.H.H., Tennyson has appended a poem, on the nuptials of his sister, which is strictly an epithalamium.
E. E. Cummings also returns to the form in his poem Epithalamion, which appears in his 1923 book Tulips and Chimneys. E.E.Cummings' Epithalamion consists of three seven octave parts, and includes numerous references to ancient Greece.
The term is occasionally used beyond poetry, for example to describe Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream
THE LOVER BESEECHETH HIS MISTRESS.NOT TO FORGET HIS STEADFAST FAITHAND TRUE INTENT.
ORGET not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant ; My great travail so gladly spent, Forget not yet ! Forget not yet when first began The weary life ye know, since whan The suit, the service none tell can ; Forget not yet ! Forget not yet the great assays, The cruel wrong, the scornful ways, The painful patience in delays, Forget not yet ! Forget not ! oh ! forget not this, How long ago hath been, and is The mind that never meant amiss Forget not yet ! Forget not then thine own approv'd, The which so long hath thee so lov'd, Whose steadfast faith yet never mov'd : Forget not this !
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/wyattbib.htm
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