Banha University Faculty of Arts English Department نمورج اإلجببه الخبص )بمبدة شعر القرنين السبدس والسببع عشر (تخلفبت الفرقة الثبنيه قسم اللغة اإلنجليزية كلية اآلداة محمد بدر الدين الحسينى حسن منصور/م.د. أ:أستاذ المادة 21-12-2013 :تاريخ اإلمتحان A Guiding Model Answer for Second Grade Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Poetry (Make-Up) Exam Faculty of Arts Prepared by Mohammad Badr AlDin Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour, Ph.D. University of Nevada, Reno (USA) BANHA UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS ENGLISH DEPARTMENT SECOND GRADE FIRST TERM YEAR (2013-2014) TIME: 2 HOURS MAKE-UP EXAM ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Poetry Make-Up Exam Note: Time limit for each question is 1 hour. However, time limit for new timetable program students is 2 hours but for the students of the old one is 3 hours. Therefore, the students of the new timetable program only answer the first two questions, but the students of the old one should answer the three questions. تينما يجة على طالة الالئحة القذيمه،على طالب الالئحه الجذيذه إجببة السؤال األول والثبنى حيث أن الوقت المتاح لهم هو سبعتين . حيث أن الوقت المتاح لهم هو ثالث سبعبت،اإلجببه على جميع األسئله Respond to the following questions: 1. The conventions of courtly love, deriving from twelfth century Provençal poetry, are the usual basis of many Elizabethan poets' imagery, in which these poets attack the artificiality of that tradition. This is manifest in some of the poems, which you have studied this term, that project a definitive expression of these poets attitude toward courtly love. Explain that attitude with reference to four Elizabethan poems? 2. Metaphysical poetry of the 17th century is characterized by a strong dependence on irony and paradox and by the use of the conceit as well as such figures as catachresis and oxymoron. Its strategy of address is typically dramatic rather than narrative or descriptive. Explain this statement with reference to four Metaphysical poems? 3. Ben Jonson's "On My First Daughter" and Henry King's "The Exequy" are poems of grief and loving lament over the death of a daughter and a wife. The power of such poems occasioned by the death of either a daughter or a wife stems from the conflict between the emotional response to personal loss and the intellectual, religious acceptance of death. Explore these ideas in a detailed comparison/contrast essay between the two poems? Good Luck Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab 2 Answers Question 1: The conventions of courtly love, deriving from twelfth century Provençal poetry, are the usual basis of many Elizabethan poets' imagery, in which these poets attack the artificiality of that tradition. This is manifest in some of the poems, which you have studied this term, that project a definitive expression of these poets attitude toward courtly love. Explain that attitude with reference to four Elizabethan poems? Answer: The conventions of courtly love, deriving from twelfth century Provençal poetry, are the usual basis of many Elizabethan poets' imagery. In the Middle Ages, this tradition of "courtly love" concerns the relationship between the great lady and her courtier "servant." Love is treated variously as sickness, servitude, worship, and war. The lover is in agony, the lady disdainful, her beauties idealized by comparisons with nature. The tradition reached the Elizabethan poets through two main sources, Chaucer and Petrarch, whose poems to Laura, filled with religious imagery and praise of the mistress for her spiritual superiority as well as her beauty. Sir Thomas Wyatt's love poems, like most 16th-century love poetry, express the laments of the unrequited or deserted lover rather than the joys of mutuality; and his sonnets introduce many of the topoi that became so popular in the Elizabethan sonnet: sexual love as a hunt, the lover as a ship running aground on the rocks. It should be noted that in his experiments with Petrarch, Wyatt chafed at the indignities suffered by the courtly lover. By contrast, the sonneteers emphasized with relish the travails of the lover, who almost luxuriates in his state of rejection. Wyatt's treatment of the tradition he inherited adapts to it the conditions of his own insecure times. He uses the love convention to speak not only of his lack of satisfaction in love but about his unhappiness at other aspects of ill fortune. The sense of insecurity is expressed in his use of love conventions, in which he explores and comes to terms with the feeling of betrayal. He brings the motif of disappointed love, to bear on the problems of expressing the strong and deep emotions of a sensitive individual, the complexities of a divided mind. Wyatt's poem "They flee from me" combines eroticism with contempt for the beloved's changefulness. The dominant image is of animals, but it is uncertain what animal the poet has in mind: deer, birds, or simply women. The wild and bestial is contrasted with the tame, courtly, and civilized quality suggested by the words "gentle" and "gentleness." The main rhetorical device is a simple contrast of past with present tense, past joys with present loss. The use of "they" in the first line may point to a sense of desertion by all the speaker's friends, as an ironic contrast between loyal animals and disloyal men. The men are ultimately seen as even lower on the animal scale than the falcons, as the men are compared to lice leaving a dead body. This poem moves between dreaming and waking, fantastic and realistic states of consciousness. It opens with the speaker remembering former love(s). Its first few lines claim that those who once sought the speaker were tamed but "now are wild"; further, "now they range / Busily seeking with a continual change" that the speaker finds problematic. In the second stanza the speaker recalls a time when the beloved caught him in her arms, kissed him, and asked, " 'Dear heart, how like you this?' " The poem shifts abruptly to the present and to reality: "It was no dream: I lay broad waking." Despite the lover's "gentleness" or "gentility," he has been rejected, and his loss leaves him, if not vengeful, at least sardonic. The first stanza establishes the speaker's sense of desertion. The second stanza recalls in minute detail a specific experience, in the light of which a new irony emerges in the third stanza. In this final stanza, the dream-vision of Petrarchan convention is banished. The poet's insistence on reciprocity in affection has been violated, yet he reacts not with vengefulness or even rebellion, but with ironic detachment. He, with his humanity, his gentleness, has kept his part of the bargain. She, however, who once appeared "gentle, tame and 3 meek," has now reverted to her wild animal nature. "Kindly" may be taken both in the sense of "according to nature" and ironically in its modern sense. The suggestion that he should be served better recalls ironically the courtly love tradition of the man's service to his lady on her pedestal, and thus Wyatt drives home again his insistence on reciprocity: Should service be given if not deserved? His conclusion is not, as in the courtly love tradition, and as the poem's opening suggests, one of sentimental agony, but musing, perhaps even amused understatement. One is left with a question: What does one deserve who repays loyalty with disloyalty? Yet there remains some sense of the reality and intensity of loss from the vividness of the scene described in the second stanza. Wyatt's ideal of a reciprocal and permanent love is more of this world than Petrarch's one-sided idealization, and its existence belies a charge against him of cynicism. This poem certainly moves away from the idealized beloved of Petrarchan convention. Influenced by and commenting on the poems of Petrarch, the love-poem tradition in sixteenth century English poetry often presents a conflict between Neoplatonic ideas of beauty—the idea that outward beauty is a reflection of inner goodness and virtue that moves others to be virtuous—and the fact that physical attractiveness stimulates carnal desires that move men and women to cast off the virtues of chastity and sexual restraint. Yet Wyatt, although he often borrows freely from Petrarch, seems unconcerned with presenting the drama of these contradictory drives. Rather, he uses the language of Petrarch to represent a society in which promiscuous sexual pursuits are a given and virtue is largely a matter of social manners, affectations, and pretensions. Sir Philip Sidney's "Ring out your bells" is another poem about love. However, it is the hidden driving force of desire behind the various forms of love that Sidney explores through the filter of his own experiences and feelings. The flattering compliments of Petrarchan love sonnets aimed at courting a lady's favors arise from the same ambitious urges of desire as the hyperboles (conscious exaggerations) used to court a queen or a noble. There is little difference between practices. Furthermore, when the Platonic lover suffers and rages about his mistress's scorn and rejection of his worth and faithfulness, his misery underlines the desire behind his egoistic self-love. Feelings of worth, honor, and personal identity grow from the self-validation gained from recognition or reward for deeds accomplished. Human courtiers such as Sidney felt equally discouraged and frustrated when their valiant efforts were rejected. In the poem, Sidney works within the traditions and conventions of love poetry. However, he rejuvenates them by showing what a few changes can do to hackneyed concepts and images. His double vision, the extended metaphoric comparison of love's trivialities with the solemnity of death, transforms the Petrarchan/Platonic single-vision lyric into a brief model of a mock-heroic romance. This point of view indirectly points out the comical exaggerations, trivialities, and abuses. Ironically, the final prayer might well express the poet's own desire: "Good lord, deliver us" from poets who abuse poetry. Sir Walter Ralegh's "Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen" is, also, an anatomy of love—its central theme is the difference between true love and false love: False love is hidden in a swirl of superficial verbiage; true love is painfully silent. Ralegh's argument follows traditional Renaissance themes and conventions. For instance, he emphasizes the traditional Elizabethan view of humankind as torn between passion and reason, emphasizing that his passion would lead him to write love poems, and praise the queen's saintly perfection, beauty, and glory in order to win her affection or at least to entertain her. In contrast to despairing lovelorn poetic narrators, he has let reason dominate for the queen's sake. Revealing his affection openly would not only be indiscreet and subject to misinterpretation, given her high rank and the fact that so many others are also charmed by her, but would also be a denial of the depth of his true affection, which, like deep waters, is so strong that he must be silent. Another poetic convention of courtiers is exaggerated praise of the beloved, who here is acknowledged to be beyond the reach of mortals. 4 Question 2: Metaphysical poetry of the 17th century is characterized by a strong dependence on irony and paradox and by the use of the conceit as well as such figures as catachresis and oxymoron. Its strategy of address is typically dramatic rather than narrative or descriptive. Explain this statement with reference to four Metaphysical poems? Answer: The term metaphysical was applied to a style of 17th Century poetry because of the highly intellectual and often obscure imagery involved. The poets of this movement reacted against the traditions, rules, and conventions of Elizabethan love poetry to create a more witty and ironic verse. Their verse was more passionately intense and psychologically probing than that of the Elizabethan poets. Instead of writing smooth lines comparing a woman's beauty to something traditional such as a rose, these poets wrote colloquial and often metrically irregular lines, filled with difficult and more searching comparisons. A comparison of this nature is called a conceit, which came to refer to a striking parallel of two highly unlikely objects, such as the sun partly hidden by a cloud to a lover's head reclining on a pillow. Certain Petrarchan conceits were often used in Elizabethan poetry during this time. They included a lover as a ship tossed by a storm, shaken by his tears, frozen by the coldness of his love. New, rather than traditional, and drawn from areas not usually considered "poetic" (commerce and science, for example), metaphysical conceits usually strike the reader with an effect quite different from the Petrarchan conceit. Ben Jonson's elegy, "On My First Son," is an example of that type of poetry which poignantly stages the tension between the "poet's" wish for this intellectual consolation and his emotional expressions of paternal grief. By seeking reasons for the death of his "loved boy," the father reveals his own religious doubts, which test and contradict both the Christian teachings of acceptance and the literary decorum of the elegiac form. The "poet" ends by incorporating into the poem a formal epitaph, narrated by the boy himself, which punningly equates the boy with the father's other "creative" work, his poetry. However, rather than finding closure, the poet's final moral lesson or "turn" masterfully expresses the complexity of his response and the painful coexistence of bitterness alongside Christian wisdom. The opening line's apostrophe to the dead son ironically both acknowledges his passing while calling him back into existence for this final paternal address, a circular structure completed by the boy’s speaking his own epitaph at the poem's end. The remainder of the first quatrain then contains the father's attempted explanation for the boy's early death and his assumption of blame, believing perhaps that, rather than loving the son in the present according to the teachings of Saint Augustine and others, he instead invested too much in "hope of thee" for the future. The commonplace theological imagery of monetarism, in which the child is lent by a "just" God and must be paid back on the "just day," is combined with the Christian doctrine of children being born innocent and gaining sin through bodily existence as they "age," another traditional elegiac trope that is expanded in the next quatrain. However, the second quatrain begins with an emotional outburst, in which the opaque syntax reveals the tension between control and grief. To "lose all father" could mean either to "lose" or relinquish willingly all feelings of fatherhood and thus freely give up the child, but it could also mean that the "poet" might unleash or "loose" the manly control of being the adult and instead become an emotional child by expressing his wild grief. Such connotations show the poet's ambivalence, and his emotional subtext also disrupts the verse form, displacing the caesura and providing the first dramatically enjambed line in the poem. After this outburst, though, the rhetorical questions of the second quatrain argue for acceptance of death. This apparent acceptance introduces both the poet's punning tribute to his son, "his best piece of poetry," in which he equates procreation with poetic creation, and a moral lesson, which counsels the reader (and the 5 poet) not to invest emotionally in these worldly possessions. Yet even in this closure the linguistic instability of the "quibbles" or puns may not only highlight Jonson's distinction between paternal "love" and the nonmaterial, Christian "like" in the final line, but also undermine the consolation that the poem offers as a whole. Through the "natural" pun of the shared name, Jonson the poet apparently buries not only his son in the grave but also himself, as well as his future hopes for his other "creations"—his poems, such as this one. In "Song: To Celia," Ben Jonson addresses his lady in an effort to encourage her to express her love for him. Jonson includes conventional imagery, such as eyes, roses, and wine, but employs them in inventive ways. As a result, the poem becomes a lively, expressive song extolling the immortality of love. It is an example of poetic device applied to erotic praise. On close inspection of the poem the placement of the adverbs with the metaphors make it somewhat ambiguous; for example the placement of "only" in the first sentence is unclear whether it is referring to "Drink to me," or "with thine eyes." The result of this ambiguity is that the poet is providing the lady with a set of alternatives and leaving it up to her discretion to choose her own actions, any of which will be acceptable to him. The poet's ambiguity, then, makes him gallant. He promises the positive act of pledging his eyes in return for her gaze. The first half of the poem is a witty series of variations on the lover's pledge. Traditionally, a lover would toast his or her love and drink a glass of wine; here, the poet asks only for a pledge from Celia's eyes—a loving look—that he promises to return in kind. Even better, if she will "leave a kiss but in the cup" (that is, pledge a kiss), he will forget about wine. The pleasures of Celia's love are a more profound intoxication, a greater sensual delight, than alcohol. The second quatrain starts more seriously. The poet claims his thirst is not physical, but that it arises from the soul, and that it can only be quenched with a "drink divine." This image flirts with the Christian concept of the "water of life" found in John 4: 8-15, and it seems inappropriate in a sensual love lyric. The Christian sentiment, however, is undercut by the following reference to "Jove's nectar." Jove may be divine, but he is a pagan god who is known for his sensual, and specifically sexual, self-indulgence. Jonson claims that he would reject Jove's cup if he could drink from Celia's. The second octet is a flashback. The poet had sent Celia a "rosy wreath" as a lover's token. He claims that he sent it not to honor her (obviously such a paltry, mortal token could not do justice to Celia's beauty), but in the hopes that the wreath would live forever in Celia's presence—she being a font of life, light, and joy. The last quatrain tells of the poet's rejection. Celia sent the token back. The poet believes that she has breathed on the wreath and that her sweet smell still clings to it, but this is his fancy, his attempt to wring a compliment, and perhaps hope, out of his rejection. The poem ends on a slightly sad note as the poet tries to console himself, and perhaps even delude himself, regarding his rejection. The dialectic tension between the realistic and the ideal is manifested in the greater scale of the poem by the contrast between the first and second octet. The first octet depicts a scene set in the present. The poet is with his lover, and he begs a pledge that is both physical and spiritual. It is an ideal, if unconsummated, moment of love. The second octet, however, is set in the past. The poet is physically separated from his love, and his love token is rejected by her. The events that preceded the opening octet then were less than hopeful, but the poet persists in his idealization despite the rejection. The poem itself becomes an emblem of this fruitless drive toward the ideal; with its perfect iambs, it encapsulates and elevates what may be a failed relationship. Edmund Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose" marks a movement away from the seriousness of metaphysical poetry to a form reflecting less weighty subjects. The rose, personified as a creature able to deliver speeches 6 and die on command, must urge the woman—beautiful but fragile, tangible but tenuous—to "Suffer herself to be desired / And not blush so to be admired." Waller employs ambiguity in the word "suffer." The young woman must allow herself to be admired, but the word "suffer" also implies that she might feel distress at such a request. The speaker's petition also poses a paradox. The woman who so readily blushes has cheeks the color of roses, but to cease blushing and accept the man's advances readily, as the speaker suggests in line 15, would take away the blush and would make her pale and thus, appear less like the rose. Waller addresses his mistress in a forthright manner. She is not portrayed as an unattainable, chaste goddess, but rather a maiden who must be confronted with her hesitation and chastised for her shyness. Such poetry celebrates the minor pleasures of life and is often more about the speaker than the lady who receives the address. Thus, Waller's gentleman is frank in commanding the rose to die so that his lady may "read" her own fate: "Then die, that she / The common fate of all things rare / May read in thee." His urgency in bidding her to "come forth" and permitting herself "to be admired" hints that his regard is fleeting and superficial. The poem's carpe diem theme encourages the young maid to accept the speaker's advances while there is still time. However, Waller's subtle satire also raises questions about love and beauty. The lover in "Go, Lovely Rose" implies that time is beauty's enemy. Death is the "common fate of all things rare." The lover of "Go, Lovely Rose" is impatient. Perhaps his interest in the young woman will be as short-lived as her beauty or as her youth. The poem ends as it began, with an appeal to one who is "sweet and fair." The woman must accept his advances while she can. Time is short, as he reiterates in the closing couplet: "How small a part of time they share / That are so wondrous sweet and fair." The poem is a call to action, since his interest and her beauty may both be short-lived. Robert Herrick "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" is a carpe diem poem, which means "seize the day." In this sense, virginity is not literal, but is merely a metaphor for a kind of innocence combined with receptivity that should be exercised as much as possible before it is lost, which with experience it will be. The sexual theme is obvious but not simple. It can be understood very differently, depending on what one takes to be the sex of the reader. The gathering of rosebuds can be a metaphor for defloration; the rising of the sun, a metaphor for male erection; and "spend," a term for ejaculation. This reading is not merely sensual; it is also sexually threatening. Defloration is rape—that is, taking the flower of virginity from an unwilling victim. The reference to the personified sun is a reference to Apollo, famous for his attempts at ravishment. In a certain sense, then, the phrase "To the Virgins," could be understood to be a call to attack. In this sense, the "ye" addressed would be male, and the loss with which the poem is concerned is that of male potency: Women will be old before pleasure can be taken of them, the "sun" will set too soon, the energy of youth will pass, and sexual drive with it. As "Old Time" also appears personified, it is important to remember that Chronos, the god of time, seized power by castrating his rival. If, on the other hand, one reads the poem as addressed to female virgins, then to gather rosebuds, in a sense, is to retain the flower of virginity, to gather it to oneself. The twin of the sun god, Apollo, is the moon goddess, Artemis, who is also the goddess of virginity. With the setting of the force of male dominance, the twin force of female celibacy rises. In this sense, it is virginity, one of the few forms of currency a woman had, that is to be hoarded, not lost or "spent." When marriage is promoted in the fourth stanza, Herrick is not making a moral distinction between fornication and sex within the sanctity of wedlock. Instead, marriage is proposed as an alternative to both sexual violence and sexual withholding, both of which are asocial and nonproductive. The injunction to "go marry" instead of to "tarry" in this sense has to do with not getting caught up in a vicious circle of mutually exclusive possibilities, but to move and grow into something that is beyond either of them. Thus the poem is 7 expressing a concern about the state of society. This concern also surfaces in the third stanza if one reads "age" and "times" to refer not to an individual's years but lo the eras of humankind. Read this way, the lines suggest that only in the first age, the youth of a civilization, is it at its best; what follows is only a decline. It is here that one gets a sense of Herrick's lament for his own times and what he thinks has been lost. Question 3: Ben Jonson's "On My First Daughter" and Henry King's "The Exequy" are poems of grief and loving lament over the death of a daughter and a wife. The power of such poems occasioned by the death of either a daughter or a wife stems from the conflict between the emotional response to personal loss and the intellectual, religious acceptance of death. Explore these ideas in a detailed comparison/contrast essay between the two poems? Answer: Ben Jonson's "On My First Daughter" mourns the death of his daughter Mary, who has lived only a brief 6 months, while Henry King's "The Exequy" mourns the death of his wife Anne, who died seven years after they were married, having borne him five children. The power of such poems occasioned by the death of either a daughter or a wife stems from the conflict between the emotional response to personal loss and the intellectual, religious acceptance of death. In Ben Jonson's poem, the first couplet is quietly but profoundly moving. The precision of the word ruth restrains the sentimentality inherent in the occasion, while the private loss the parents feel is evoked by the gentle nostalgia of the second line. By focusing on the parent's loss and by finding in the daughter's death evidence of their vulnerability—the passing of their daughter represents also the passing of their youth and reminds them of their own mortality—the opening couplet prepares for the religious consolation which forms the center of the poem. Significantly, the daughter's reception into a Christian afterlife comforts each of the parents in a particular way. By submitting himself to God's will, "all heavens gifts, being heavens due," the father's grief is lessened. The baby's glory in joining the "virgin-traine" of "heavens Queene, (whose name shee beares)," relieves "her mother's teares." This individualizing of the grief each parent feels and the comfort each finds helps personalize and make intimate what might easily be a conventional response to the death of an infant. After finding religious consolation in the safety of the child's soul, Jonson turns to his daughter's small body. The "fleshly birth," until it is reunited with her soul at the Resurrection, will remain in a grave, "Which," he pleads in the final line, "cover lightly, gentle earth." This hope that the earth not weigh heavily upon a dead body is a persistent motif in classical epitaphs. Jonson's concern with his daughter's "fleshly birth" betrays his human grief even in the midst of sincerely felt religious consolation. The understated but strong tension between his acceptance of God's will and his feeling of personal loss is developed in the poem's oppositions of heaven and earth, soul and flesh. These oppositions finally yield to a larger opposition, unreconciled in the poem and indicated by implication rather than direct statement, between the poet's intellectual assurance of his daughter's ultimate resurrection and his irrational, emotional concern for her little body. Precisely because it recognizes these conflicting emotions, the poem is a deeply affecting and honest account of the grief occasioned by the loss of an infant. Thematically, Henry King's "The Exequy" begins with a statement of mourning and loss (lines 1-80), followed by passages of acceptance and reconciliation in which the speaker comes to terms with his grief (lines 81-114). The concluding section (lines 115-120) looks to the future in the spirit of hope and acceptance. King's elegy includes a genuine sense of personal loss and grief. The speaker refers to the youth of his bride, suggesting that death overtook her before she had reached the halfway point of life. In another passage, the speaker refers to himself as older and, therefore, reasonably expects that he would be first to die. The tone 8 remains restrained and dignified. The resolution to look toward the future is achieved only through the moving theme stressing that the speaker will join his wife in death. The poem also develops a meditation on time. The first is the time of Judgment Day, when the speaker asserts that his wife will be resurrected entirely. The vision of Judgment Day is coherent with the belief in bodily resurrection, common in 17th century, and also accompanied by another contradictory one: that the soul of the deceased had gone to heaven and would rejoin the body at a later time. King derives comfort from the hope of a final and permanent reunion in the distant future. More vividly expressed is the speaker's contemplation of his death, when he will join her in the grave. Picturing the inevitable movement of his own allotted time, he designates each passing minute and hour as moving him measurably toward his goal. Even a night's sleep brings him eight hours closer to his destination, a westward journey toward death. Each pulse beat marks his movement toward the end of life. The prospect of his own death becomes not a subject for grief but a welcome assurance and a means of reconciling the speaker to his wife. 9
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