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Contents
INTRODUCTION TO POETRY 2
There is no Frigate like a Book Emily Dickenson . 10
Dreams Langston Hughes . 12
Virtue George Herbert 14
A Noiseless Patient Spider Walt Whitman 16
The Table Turned William Wordsworth . 18
God’s Grandeur Gerard Manly Hopkins 20
A Piece of Paper Julia Briggs 22
Know Then Thyself Alexander Pope 24
The Old Professor John Alexander 26
How to Kill Keith Doughlas 28
Thoughts After Ruskin Elma Mitchell 30
Since Brass nor Ston William Shakespeare 32
La Belle Dame Sans Merci John Keats 34
At the Time of Partition Moniza Alvi 38
Dover Beach Mathew Arnold 39

(Notes Adapted from Various Sources)

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INTRODUCTION TO POETRY

Poetry is as universal as language and almost as ancient. The most primitive people have
used it, and the most civilized have cultivated it. In all ages and in all countries, poetry has been
written and eagerly read or listened to, by all kinds and conditions of people—by soldiers,
statesmen, lawyers, farmers, doctors, scientists, clergy, philosophers, kings and queens. In all
ages it has been especially the concern of the educated, the intelligent, and the sensitive, and it
has appealed, in its simpler forms, to the uneducated and to children. Why? First, because it has
given pleasure. People have read it, listened to it or received it because they liked it—because it
gave them enjoyment. But this is not the whole answer. Poetry in all ages has been regarded as
important, not simply as one of the several alternative forms of amusement, as one person might
choose bowling, chess and poetry. Rather, it has been regarded as something central to existence,
something having unique value to the fully realized life, something that we are better off for
having and without which we are spiritually impoverished. To understand the reasons for this,
we need to have at least a provisional understanding of what poetry is, provisional, because
people have always been more successful at appreciating poetry than at defining it.

Poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely
than does an ordinary language. To understand this fully, we need to understand what poetry
“says”. For language is employed on different occasions to say quite different kinds of things; in
other words, language has different users.

Perhaps the commonest use of language is to communicate information. We say that it is

nine O’ clock, that we like a certain movie, that bromine and iodine are members of the halogen
group of chemical elements. This we might call the practical use of language; it helps us with
the ordinary business of living.

But it is not primarily to communicate information that novels, short stories, plays and
poems are written. They exist to bring us a sense and a perception of life, to widen and sharpen
our contacts with existence. Their concern is with experience. We all have an inner need to live
more deeply and fully and with greater awareness, to know the experience of others, and to
understand our own experience better. Poets, from their own store of felt, observed, or imagined
experiences, select, combine, and recognize. They create significant new experiences for their
readers—significant because focused and formed—in which readers can participate and from
which they may gain a greater awareness and understanding of their world. Literature, in other
words, can be used as a gear for stepping up the intensity and increasing the range of our
experience and as a glass for clarifying it. This is the literary use of language, for literature is
not only an aid to living but a mean to living.

Literature, then, exists to communicate significant experience— significant because it is

concentrated and organized. Its function is not to tell us about experience but to allow us
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imaginatively to participate in it. It is a means of allowing us, through the imagination, to live
more fully, more deeply, more richly, and with greater awareness. It can do this in two ways: by
broadening our experience—that is, by making us acquainted with a range of experiences with
which, in the ordinary course of events, we might have no contact—more understandingly the
everyday experiences all of us have or by deepening our experience, that is by making us see.

We can avoid two mistaken approaches to poetry if we keep this conception of literature
firmly in mind. The first approach always looks for a lesson or a bit of moral instruction. The
second expects to find poetry always beautiful.

Poetry takes all life as its province. Its primary concern is not with beauty, not with
philosophical truth, not with persuasion, but with experience. Beauty and philosophical truth are
aspects of experience, and the poet is often engaged with them. But poetry as a whole is
concerned with all kinds of experience—beautiful or ugly, strange or common, noble or ignoble,
actual or imaginary. One of the paradoxes of human existence is that all experience—even
painful experience—is, for the good reader, enjoyable when transmitted through the medium of
art. In real life, death, pain and suffering are not pleasurable, but in poetry they can be. In actual
life, if we cry, usually we are unhappy; but if we cry in a movie, we are manifestly enjoying it.
We do not like to be terrified in real life, but we sometimes seek books or movies that will terrify
us. We find some value in all intense living. To be intensely alive is the opposite of being dead.
Poetry comes to us bringing life and therefore pleasure. Moreover, art focuses and organizes
experience so as to give us a better understanding of it. And to understand life partly is to be part
of it…

The difference between poetry and other literature is one only of degree. Poetry is the
most condensed and concentrated form of literature. It is language whose individual lines, either
because of their own brilliance or because they focus so powerfully what has come before, have
higher voltage than most language. It is language that grows frequently incandescent, giving off
both light and heat.

Poetry is a kind of multidimensional language. Ordinary language of the kind that is used
to communicate information is one dimensional. It is directed at only part of the listener, the
understanding. Its one dimension is intellectual. Poetry, which is language used to communicate
experience has at least four dimensions. If it is to communicate experience, it must be directed at
the whole person, not just your understanding. It must involve not only your intelligence but also
your sense, emotions, and imagination. To the intellectual dimension poetry adds a sensuous
dimension, an emotional dimension and an imaginative dimension.

Poetry achieves its extra dimension—its greater pressure per word and its greater tension
per poem—by drawing more fully and more consistently than does ordinary language on a
number of language resources, none of which is peculiar to poetry. These various resources are
connotation, imagery, metaphor, symbol, paradox, irony, allusion, sound repetition, rhythm and
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pattern. Using these resources and the material of life, the poet shapes and makes a poem.
Successful poetry is never effusive language. If it is to come alive it must be as cunningly put
together and efficiently organized as a tree. It must be an organism whose every part serves a
useful purpose and cooperates with every other part to persevere and express the life that is
within it…

Read the poem more than once. A good poem will no more yield its full meanings on a
single reading. One should make the utmost effort to follow the thought continuously and to
grasp the full implications and suggestion. Because a poem says so much, several readings may
be necessary.

One starting point for understanding a poem at the simplest level, and for clearing up
misunderstanding, is to paraphrase its content or part of its content. To paraphrase a poem means
to restate it in different language, so as to make its prose sense as plain as possible. The
paraphrase may be longer or shorter than the poem, but it should contain all the ideas in the
poem in such a way as to make them clear to a puzzled reader, and to make central idea, or
theme, of the poem more accessible.

In a paraphrase, figurative language gives way to literal language; similes replace

metaphors and normal work order supplants inverted syntax. But a paraphrase retains the
speaker’s use of first, second third person, and the tenses of verbs. Though it’s neither necessary
nor possible to avoid using some of the words found in the original, a paraphrase should strive
for plain, direct diction.

To aid us in the understanding of a poem, we may ask ourselves a number of questions

about it. Two of the most important are who is the speaker? And what is the occasion? A
cardinal error of some readers is to assume that a speaker who uses the first person pronouns (I,
my, mine, me) is always the poet; a less risky course would be to assume always that the speaker
is someone other than the poet. Poems, like short stories, novels and plays, belong to the world
of fiction, an imaginatively conceived world that at its best is “truer” than the factually “real”
world that it reflects. When poets put themselves or their thoughts into a poem, they present a
version of themselves but that, consciously or unconsciously, is shaped to fit the needs of the
poem. We must be very careful, therefore, about identifying anything in a poem with the
biography of the poet. More importantly, for us the knowledge of the poet’s life may help us
understand a poem. We may well think of every poem, therefore, as a being to some degrees
dramatic—that is, the utterance of a fictional character rather than of the person who wrote the
poem.

A third important question that we should ask ourselves upon reading a poem is what is
the central purpose of the poem? The purpose may be to tell a story, to reveal human character,
to impart a vivid impression of a scene, to express a mood or an emotion, or to convey vividly
some idea or attitude. Whatever the purpose is, we must determine it for ourselves and define it
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mentally as precisely as possible. Only by relating the various details in the poem to the central
purpose or theme can we fully understand their function and meaning. Only then can we begin to
assess the value of the poem and determine whether it is good or poor one.

Guide for Studying Poetry

The following guide will help you to recognize the types of poetry and the techniques a
poet uses to join form and meaning.

Speaker and Tone

1. Who or what is the person’s speaker? In what ways are the poet’s word choices
appropriate to that speaker?
2. What tone does the speaker uses throughout the poem?
Sound of Poetry

1. What pattern can you find in the poem’s rhythm? Does it have a regular meter?
2. What rhymes can you find in the poem? If the poem contains rhymes, what is its rhymes
scheme? If the poem does not rhyme, is it written in blank verse or free verse?
3. Does the poem contain repetition or parallelism?
Imagery and Figurative Language

1. What vivid images does the poem contain?

2. What examples can you find of personification?
3. What similes directly compare dissimilar items?
4. What metaphors equate dissimilar items? Which of these metaphors are implied?
Which, if any are extended?
5. What symbols can you find?
Types of Poetry

1. What events in the poem form a narrative?

2. What personal emotions does the poet express in a lyric?
3. What character or characters speak within the poem to make it dramatic? What situation
makes the character or characters speak?
Patterns of Poetry

1. What patterns does the poem follow in its length, stanzas, line length, meter, and rhyme
scheme? Is the poem’s pattern a traditional one, such as the Shakespearean or
Petrarchan sonnet?
2. Where does the poem depart from traditional patterns in stanza arrangement, line length,
capitalization, and punctuation?
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Reminders for Active Reading of Poetry

1. The title will point out the poet’s main idea or concern.
2. Every poem is presented through a speaker of some kind. The speaker may or may not
be a human being and may or may not be the poet. The poet’s choice of words should be
appropriate to the speaker.
3. The sound of a poem—its use of rhythm, rhyme, assonance, consonance, repetition,
parallelism and onomatopoeia—should suit the poem’s subject and contribute to it effect.
4. Imagery, should make the poem appeal to the senses of the reader. Figures of speech—
such as personification, simile, metaphor and symbol—such as add new meaning to
poem.
5. A narrative poem tells a story. A lyric poem expresses an emotion. A dramatic poem
presents a character in a specific situation.
6. Poems can follow traditional patterns or can be experienced in format.
POETRY ANALYSIS

The object of writing a poem is usually to make a statement using as few words as
possible; Poetic language could be said to have muscle because, in a sense, it is powerful. When
a poet writes, he is trying to communicate with the reader in a powerful way. He uses the
elements of poetry to get his point across, and these elements consist of a variety of ways to use
words to convey his meanings. In the analysis of poetry, then, two important questions the reader
must ask himself are: What is the poet trying to say? How does she or he try to say it?

It is helpful to think of analysis as decoding. Creative writers rarely say what they mean
in a straightforward, obvious way, and this is especially true of poets. However, they are trying
to communicate with readers. In doing so they use a variety of tools to enrich their purpose, and
these tools are the elements of poetry. The combination of elements the poet uses makes up the
“code” of the poem. Analysis means literally picking a poet apart—looking at elements such as
imagery, metaphor, poetic language, rhyme schemes, and so on—in order to see how they all
work together to produce the poem’s meaning. By looking at a poem in terms of its elements,
one decodes the poem.

ELEMENTS OF POETRY

Denotation and connotation: Words in poems have denotations, or literal, easy-to-

understand dictionary meanings, and connotations, or figurative, less specific and less direct
meanings. The latter is the more important in poetry than the former. The figurative, or
connotative, meaning of a word means everything that the word might imply besides its direct
dictionary meaning.
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For example, the literal, denotative meaning of the word apple is something like this: it is
the fruit of the apple tree, anywhere from gold to dark red in color, and it has seeds and a sweet
taste. The literal meaning of a word, its denotation, can usually be defined in simple, clear
language, and can be understood right away.

The connotative meaning of a word, however, is much different. A red apple in a poem
is never merely a red apple, but probably implies a lot of different things. The red color may
symbolize passion, fertility, anger—anything one can associate the color red could be a possible
meaning. The apple itself could symbolize the Tree of Life, it could symbolize knowledge,
Adam and Eve and their Fall from Grace, the forbidden, or sir Isaac Newton, perhaps a
combinations of these things. In this way, a poet uses a word or an idea in a poem to express a
variety of ideas at one time, and deepen our experience.

Imagery

Images are very concrete “word pictures” having to do with the five senses—touch,
smell, taste, sound; images make readers experience things vividly. To figure out the imagery in
a poem, the reader should first make a list of every single mental picture, or visual image that
comes to mind as he reads the poem. He can then go back and find other kinds of ideas that have
to do with physical sensation he sounds, tastes, smells and so on. Finally he/she can go back and
think about all the ideas these different images could imply—figure out their connotations, in
other words.

Importantly poets often place images in opposition to each other. This creates what is
known as “tension”. Tension is often an important clue to the meaning of a poem; it also creates
drama and interest and is a key to paradox (see below). One should look out for strange contrasts
in images in the process of analyzing poems, and think about the responses they arouse. Images
can be part of similes and metaphors, though they are not always.

Figurative Language

Figurative language involves a comparison between two things—a literal term, or the
thing being compared, and a figurative term, or the thing to which the literal term is being
compared. Figurative language is a way of describing an ordinary thing in an unordinary way.

Simile

A simile is a comparison that is not made explicitly—that is, it is not made clearly and
directly and is not made with clues such as “like” or “as”. It is, instead, an indirect comparison
between two things that are basically unlike. In metaphor, the figurative term is substituted for or
identified with the literal term, the thing being compared. This is done to make the meaning of a
poem more forceful.
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For example, the expression “the apple never falls far from the tree” contains a metaphor
in which parents or family (literal term) is compared to a tree (figurative term), while child
(literal term) is compared to an apple (figurative term). The metaphor expresses that children are
never very different from the parents or family from which they come.

Personification

Personification is a kind of a metaphor, and it means to speak of an impersonal thing, such as a

season, a natural element, any object, etc., as though it were a person.

Synecdoche

Synecdoche is a way of naming a thing: the word for a part or a thing is substituted for the
whole. For example, in the sentence, “I brought a new set of wheels this morning.” The word
“wheels” is substituted for the word “car”, wheels are part of any car; here the part is substituted
for the whole.

Metonymy

Metonymy is a way of naming a thing: a thing closely related to the thing actually meant is used
to name it. For example, “He came from excellent blood” substitutes the term “blood” for
“family”, and expresses the idea that an individual comes from a “good” family, perhaps a noble
one. “Blood” and “family” are related because families are made up of people who have similar
characteristics; people have blood, and people in families, being related to one another, are often
said to share the same blood. Furthermore, “blood”, a biographical thing, is not part of a
“family”, which is a cultural institution. However, blood, part of the human body, can be
substituted for “family”, a group of biologically related bodies. Thus the figurative term “blood”
is substituted for the literal term “family”.

Symbol

A symbol means what it is, but at the same time it represents something else too. For example,
“the straw that broke the camel’s back” is a symbol of a last, remaining bit of patience with a
difficult ongoing situation.

Allegory

An allegory is very similar to a symbol. Allegory is a narrative or description that has a second
meaning beneath the surface one. Although the surface story or description may have its own
interest, the author’s major interest is the ulterior meaning. What this means is that in addition to
the surface meaning of the poem there is also a more important, deeper meaning. Allegories
relate especially to subject matter from the bible and from mythology. For example, a garden in a
poem may not be just a garden, but it may represent also the Garden of Eden and all of the ideas
that accompany the idea of the Garden of Eden become potentially important in the poem. These
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might include ideas such as the seven days of creation, paradise, utopia, the Fall of Man,
disobedience, human rationality, God’s power, Eve’s origin as Adam’s rib, and so on.

Paradox

A paradox occurs when two things that should not be able to exist at the same time are said, in a
poem, to exist at the same time. For example, it is impossible that it be both night and day, both
spring and fall, both past and present at the same time. If, however, one were to say that night
and day coexist in a poem, one would be expressing a paradox. Because human beings
frequently experience two or more emotions at the same time (mixed feelings, ambivalence) or
can see things from two points of view at the same time, they often use a paradox in poetry to
express such a situation. For example, if a poem were to say that the speaker of the poem is
experiencing the past and the present at the same time, this may mean that his memories of the
past are so vivid that the past seems to be existing in the present.

Overstatement and Understatement

Overstatement is very similar to exaggeration. To say “you’ll tear down that house over my dead
body!” is overstatement; what is actually meant is that the speaker will do everything in his or
her power to prevent the house from being torn down. He will probably not, in fact, submit to
death in order to prevent that from occurring.

Understatement is the opposite of exaggeration—one states less than one’s full meaning. To say
“it is on warm side in July and August on the Gulf Coast” would be an understatement. In fact, it
is blazingly hot on the Gulf Coast.

Irony

Irony is a situation in which one thing is said but another thing is actually meant, or in which the
outcome of a situation is the opposite of what one would have expected it to be.

Tone

Tone consists of the attitude of the speaker toward his subject matter. It involves negative
practice working, with the other elements—especially under and overstatement, language, irony,
imagery, the meanings, and connotations (implications) of words—of poetry to judge the tone of
a poem. In assessing tone, nevertheless, one might begin by asking oneself the following
question: is the speaker involved or detached (uninvolved, unemotional)? How does he seem to
feel about his subject matter? Is the speaker serious or joking, ironic or straightforward,
condemning, approving or dispassionate, lighthearted or depressed, loving or angry? Does the
tone change as the person progresses? Is the tone mixed? For instance, is the speaker at once sad
and apprehensive, happy and nostalgic, loving and angry?

(Notes Adapted from various sources)

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There is no Frigate like a Book

Emily Dickenson

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

Note:

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is an American poet, who lived much of her life in
reclusive isolations. While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her
poems were published during her lifetime. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and
immortality, which are the two recurring topics in letters to her friends. She is known for her
poignant and compressed verse. The strength of her literary voice, as well as her reclusive and
eccentric life, contributes to a sense of Dickinson as indelible on the American literary scene.
Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic
brilliance, and a lack of high polish. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and in the
intellectual context of her work, she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original. She
habitually worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads.
In There is No Frigate Like a Book, Dickinson is considering the power of a book or
poetry to carry us away, to take us away from our immediate surroundings into a world of
imagination. To do this, she has compared literature to various forms of transportation: a boat, a
team of horses, and a wheeled land vehicle. But she has been careful to choose kinds of
transportation, and names for them that have romantic connotations. The average word has two
components: denotation and connotation; denotation is the dictionary meaning of the word and
connotation is its overtones of meaning. Connotation is very important in poetry, for it is one of
the means by which the poet can concentrate or enrich meaning—say more in fewer words.
Dickinson’s use of ‘frigate’ suggests exploration and adventure; coursers’ beauty, spirit
and speed; chariot’s speed and the ability to go through the air as well as on land. How much of
the meaning of the poem comes from this selection of vehicles and words is apparent if ‘frigate’
is substituted with steamship, ‘coursers’ with horses and ‘chariot’ with streetcar.

Questions:

1. What figure of speech is basic to this poem?

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2. What is lost if ‘miles’ is substituted for ‘lands’ or ‘cheap’ for ‘frugal’?

3. How is ‘prancing’ appropriate to poetry as well as to coursers? Could the poet without
loss have compared a book to coursers and poetry to a frigate?
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Dreams
Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

Note:

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was an Afro-American poet, social activist, novelist,

playwright, and a columnist. He was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance and made
the African American experience the subject of his writings. He is particularly known for his
insightful, colorful portrayals of Black life in America from the twenties through to the sixties.

Dreams is only eight lines long but offers some basic introduction: Keep hold of your
dreams, because without them the world can be a brutal place. Life is meaningless in the absence
of dreams, which provide reason and a goal for achieving success in our endeavors. Without
dreams life is a ‘broken-winged bird/that cannot fly’. The hobbled and downtrodden bird is a
physical symbol of the discriminations and struggles that African Americans face. A short
compact poem, it has two types of figurative language, personification and metaphor.

Questions:

1. Summarize the poem.

2. Discuss the writer’s use of figurative language.
3. Does the theme of this poem have a universal significance? Give your reasons?
4. What is the symbolic meaning of ‘life is a broken-winged bird’?
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5. How does the fact that the poem was written by a person of color give it a special
poignancy?
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Virtue
George Herbert

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like season'd timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

Note:
George Herbert (1593-1633) was a British poet, orator and a priest of the Church of
England. A major religious poet, who was notable for the purity and effectiveness of his choice
of words, Herbert’s poems have been characterized by a deep religious devotion, linguistic
precision, metrical agility and ingenious use of context.
Virtue at a superficial glance seems to be a poem that doesn’t offer much other than a
platitude, that everything in life dies but the virtuous soul lives. The thought and expressions
seem hackneyed. The poet talks about ‘sweet day’ but then, after describing its attractive
qualities, moves to an idea of the end of the day, of the day ‘dying’. He then goes on to describe
the beauty of a fire, but this will also die, just as spring, a season associated with rebirth will die.
In the final stanza, however, he asserts that the ‘sweet’ and ‘virtuous’ soul will live.
There is then an obvious tension between images of attractive things and idea of death;
something reassuring, like a ‘sweet day’ is set against an idea that is threatening or disturbing.
The broad contrast, therefore, is between the sense of beauty of life and a sense of how things
must die. As such, it is more than just a poem about a ‘sweet day’, it is exploring large questions
of life and death.
Herbert in this poem reflects on the superficial nature of earthly things. Eternal values
matter more than sensory delights. None of this is directly said; everything has been conveyed by
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implication and suggestion. No argument can be extracted from the poem. If a meaning has been
derived, it is because the poetic images have created these impressions. A substantial theme is
dealt within a brief canvas; the transitoriness of earthly pleasures.

Questions:

1. Explain ‘the bridal of the earth and sky’?

2. What figures of speech are used in this poem?
3. What is the use of refrain in a poem?
4. How are the four stanzas interconnected? How do they build to a climax? How does the
fourth stanza contrast with the first three?
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A Noiseless Patient Spider

Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Note:

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an American poet, an essayist and a journalist. He is

among the most influential poets in American canon, generally considered the most important
American poet of the nineteenth century. He wrote in free verse (not in traditional poetic forms),
relying heavily on the rhythms of common American speech. His verse collection Leaves of
Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature. Whitman aimed to transcend
traditional epics and eschew normal aesthetic forms to mirror the potential freedoms to be found
in America. Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, writing the collection
Drum Taps in connection to the experiences of war-torn soldiers. He is called the Bard of
Democracy. Being a humanist, he was part of the transition between transcendentalism and
realism, incorporating both views in his works.
A Noiseless Patient Spider is a fine short poem divided into two short stanzas. The first
observes the spider of the poem’s title, and the second considers the poet’s own soul and the way
it is undertaking a similar attempt to build ‘gossamer’ bridge between things, much as the spider
builds a web. The poem is a lyric in which the poet has used metaphor, symbol, and
personification to construct the essential meaning of the poem. Figurative language is often
found in poetry, a fresh comparison can strengthen an argument, can capture the reader’s
attention, can make the reader ‘see’ the point being made vividly. Whitman’s unusual spider—
soul metaphor in itself lends force to his idea because of its originality.
The first stanza of the poem is essentially literal—the close observation of a spider at its
tasks. In the second stanza, the speaker in the poem explicitly interprets the symbolic meaning of
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what he has observed: his soul is like the spider in its constant striving. But the soul’s purpose is
to find spiritual or intellectual certainties in the vast universe it inhabits. The symbol is the
richest and at the same time the most difficult of the poetic figures. It may be roughly defined as
something that means more than what it is; it functions literally and figuratively at the same time.

Questions:

1. What does Whitman mean by using ‘the noiseless patient spider’ when depicting his own
soul?
2. If the basic for Whitman’s poem is a metaphor, what might he be trying to convey
metaphorically to the reader about his view of life? Why did he choose this particular
metaphor?
3. Explain ‘ductile anchor’ and ‘gossamer thread’.
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The Table Turned

William Wordsworth

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,

A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

 19

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Note:

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) British poet and literary critic, at the end of the eighteenth
century. He helped found the Romantic movement in English literature with his joint publication
with S.T. Coleridge Lyrical Ballads in 1798. As a young man Wordsworth developed a love of
nature, a theme reflected by many of his poems.
The Tables Turned is an almost purely didactic poem. The statements it makes about nature
and art are meant to be taken at their face value as general truths about life. Some awareness of
the political and aesthetic background at the time it was written—the last decade of the
eighteenth century—helps understanding of the poem. There was at this time a revolt against
formal education and influence of books, in favor of a return to the direct perception of nature.
Wordsworth owed much to the thought of Rousseau and the libertarian ideals which had inspired
the French Revolution. He professed at this time a blind and an almost mystic belief in the power
of nature to educate the mind and edify the soul, unaided by human effort. That he later came to
abandon this belief does not affect the ardor with which he expressed it in the poems of this
period.
In the first and second verses, his friend is urged to give up the unprofitable study of books
and enjoy the beauty of the evening. In stanzas three and four, the same idea is repeated with
emphasis: books are a dull and endless strife; there is more wisdom in the linnet’s song, while
the throstle is ‘no mean preacher’.
Wordsworth does not tell what the linnet’s wisdom consists of, nor the precise quality of
nature’s teaching. But in stanza five he tells of nature’s power to bless us, of the wisdom which
comes from health and the truth which comes from cheerfulness. The concluding three stanzas
are a famous statement of Wordsworth’s philosophy. The statement of Wordsworth’s belief is
bare and almost without imagery; the form is simple. On rational grounds, the argument is only
too easy to confute; it is indeed one of the recurring fallacies of all so-called returns to nature that
the human intellect is used to argue against the human intellect. There is thus an inevitable basis
of insincerity; Wordsworth would not have been himself if he had no intellect, and it is vain for
him to argue against the use of the intellect.

Questions:

1. How does Wordsworth establish nature to be the best guide and teacher?
2. Is Wordsworth’s perspective about nature an acceptable one?
3. Explain “one impulse from a vernal wood”?
 20

God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manly Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Note:

Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844-1889) was a British poet and Jesuit priest. Two of his major
themes were nature and religion. His earliest poems express a Keatsian sensuousness. Always
scrupulous and self critical, Hopkins never reconciled writing poetry and serving God. When he
joined the Jesuits, he symbolically burned his poems though he sent some copies to his friend
Robert Bridges for safe keeping.
The sonnet form was favored by Hopkins. He appropriated the form of Petrarchan sonnet.
This form of the sonnet consists of two parts: the first consisting of eight lines is called an octave
and the second consisting of six lines is called sestet. The sestet provides a resolution to the
issues or questions raised in the octave. God’s Grandeur is a Petrarchan sonnet. It is one of
Hopkins’ several poems which embody a sacramental Christianity perfectly in accord with deep
ecology. It is an illustration of the perfect matching of his religious vocation with his poetic gifts
and love of nature. The word ‘charged’ in the opening lines plunges the reader into Hopkins’
distinctive poetic and religious world. The primary meaning is, of course, electrical. It suggests
that God flows through the world as an energizing current, that everything in creation is
connected to everything else, part of the same circuit and also to God, the source. It also suggests
that the world is a huge ‘battery in which creative energy lies latent, in which is stored an infinite
potential for renewal. All process, natural and human, are dependent on this energy, which can
be manifested in various ways. Hopkins chooses examples from the world of human industry
rather than the natural world, since his main theme in the poem is man’s misuse of what God
 21

provided specifically for his use. Man has the freedom to disconnect himself from the divine
circuit, and this he has systematically done, especially since the industrial revolution. The sacred
flame was entrusted to man, and he has seared the world without it. Oil has been extracted not
only from plants but from the earth itself, and smeared over everything. The sestet testifies to
that in nature, which seemed to Hopkins inextinguishable. In God’s Grandeur, Hopkins seems to
doubt man’s capacity, try as he may, to do any permanent damage to the earth but in his other
poems, he becomes progressively less confident, and holds man as the culprit.

Questions:

1. What is the theme of this sonnet?

2. Explain the simile in line 2 and symbols in line 7-8 and 11-12.
3. Explain ‘reek his rod’; ‘spent’, ‘bent’.
4. How does the poem comment on man’s relationship with the nonhuman world?
5. Analyze the poem in the context of environmental studies and ecocriticism.
 22

A Piece of Paper
Julia Briggs

I saw this black piece of paper

And it looked
Kind of lonely,
Like it needed someone
To talk to.

So I started to talk.
I told it about
School and trivial things,
And my need
For someone to talk to,

And in return
It told me about trees
And Autumn
And where it had come from.

The paper looked sad

When it told me about the
Wind in the trees
And the coming of man
Who had felled the tree,
And I felt ashamed.

Then I got angry.

I had problems enough
Without
Guilt.

I tore up the paper.

I tore up myself.

Note:

Julia Briggs is a British art historian, lecturer, tutor and writer. Her ongoing research and
conference papers explore the interplay between material culture, patterns of consumption,
identity, thought and practice in the early modern period.
 23

Some poets regard poetry as a way of discovering what one did not know, a means of exploring
one’s own experience. In its exploration of experience poetry can take anything for its subject
matter as Briggs does here. The poem begins with a simple everyday object, but what interests
the writer is not the description of the object itself but an exploration of the kind of thinking that
the simple object has provoked. The poem can be described as a thought adventure, exploration
of the mind. A Piece of Paper presents the message through a thought-provoking conversation
between a piece of paper and a child. This piece of black paper can present different things:
racial prejudice or slavery; man’s disregard for the environment and deforestation; a reflection of
the poet herself. The loneliness of both the paper (which has been personified and the narrator is
made to connect with the speaker’s guilt and powerful emotions). The change of mood in the
poem helps construct the experience being described. The poem is about environment,
deforestation and emotions.

Questions:

1. Explain how Julia Briggs presents her thoughts and feelings after seeing a piece of paper.
2. What happens in the poem?
3. How has the writer organized the poem and how does she use language for effect?
4. What feelings has the poem evoked in you? Has it made you aware of the relation
between man and his environment?
 24

Know Then Thyself

Alexander Pope

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall:
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Note:

Alexander Pope(1688-1744) was a poet and satirist of the English Augustan period. He is
one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors. The acknowledged master of heroic couplet
and one the primary taste makers of the Augustan age; he was known for having perfected the
rhymed couplet and turned it to satiric and philosophical purposes. His mock epic The Rape of
the Lock derides elite society, while An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man articulate many
of the central tenets of 18th century aesthetic and moral philosophy.

An Essay on Man from which this excerpt is taken, is didactic and wide reaching and was
meant to be part of a larger work of moral philosophy. Its four sections, or “epistles”, present an
aesthetic and philosophical argument of the existence of order in the world, contending that we
know the world to be unified because God created it. Thus, it is only man’s inferior vision that
perceives this disunity, and it is each man’s duty to strive for the good and the orderly. The
essay, as with much of Pope’s poetry is written in heroic couplets and except the first verse
paragraph of the second book, neatly summarizes some of the religious and humanistic tenets of
the poem. The poem in totality is a rationalistic effort to justify the ways of God to man
philosophically. The first epistle surveys the relations between humans and the universe, the
 25

second discusses humans as individuals. The third addresses the relationship between the
individuals and society, and the fourth questions the potential of the individual for happiness. An
Essay on Man describes the order of the universe in terms of a hierarchy, or chain of being. By
virtue of that ability to reason, humans are placed above animals and plants in this hierarchy.

Questions:

1. Define heroic couplet.

2. Paraphrase this excerpt in your own words.

3. How can we say that man is ‘the glory, jest, and riddle of the earth’?
 26

The Old Professor

John Holmes

It isn’t the young men sprawling in chairs I mind,

Though when I was a student we sat straight.

It isn’t that I mind much the coughing, or cutting,

My classes, or their ignorant ignorance of the past.

When I was a student, we said Sir, stood to recite,

It isn’t that I mind ideas. I had some, too,

And was told it wasn’t right, and it wouldn’t do,

And it couldn’t be, and I had them, just the same.

It isn’t the clothes. It isn’t the swing music.

But sometimes I walk the college streets at night,

Hands rammed into topcoat pockets, collar up,

Kicking the leaves before me, cursing the College,

Cursing the dull dear young indifferent damned,

The boys and girls who never wanted to know,

And never will, but can be passed in the course.

Note

John Holmes (1904-1962) was an American poet and a critic. He was a professor of
literature and modern poetry at Tufts University. Holmes brought to Tufts some of the best of the
contemporary poets, who talked and read their works both to his classes and to the entire student
body.
 27

Probably more poets teach in colleges than earn a living in any other profession. In time, a
poet writes about everything that occupies his mind; his students occupy much of a professor’s
mind, time and energy—his emotions too. The Old Professor cannot be claimed to be a great
poem, but as it reflects life, it is a poem and not mere verse. The poem is self-explanatory.

Questions:

1. What does the professor not mind?

2. Are you one of ‘the dull dear young indifferent damned…who never wanted to know?

3. What is the tone of the poem?

4. Can you connect with “the young men sprawling in chairs” and their “ignorant
ignorance”?

5. What is the significance of the writer’s choice of the word ‘sprawling’?

 28

How to Kill
Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,

a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears

the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust

of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.

The weightless mosquito touches

her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

Note

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) British poet. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted
immediately, and was posted to Palestine in 1941, when his tank regiment began fighting in El
Alamein in 1942, Douglas was instructed to stay behind as a staff officer, but he made his own
way to the battlefield, an experience which he recounted in his prose memoir Alamein to
ZemZem, he later took part in the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, and was killed three days
later.
 29

His work is notable for his irony, eloquence, and fine control in expressing the misery and
waste of war. His war poems are described by critics as sincere, honest, emotionally reticent,
descriptively precise, detached but compassionate and unpretentious. There is no self-pity in his
verse and very little that is melodramatic. He did not believe he would survive the war, and in
some of his poems, Douglas implied that time was not on his side, that he does not have time to
complete what he felt he needed to say. His thirty seven war poems which form the bulk of his
verse were written between 1941-1943.

How to Kill is one of his most anthologized poems. In it, Douglass discusses death based on
his combat experience—how easy it is to kill and be killed: “Being damned, I am amused/ to see
the centre of love diffused/ and the wave of love travel into vacancy./How easy it is to make a
ghost.” In the poem, Douglas assumes a calm pose, with the poem’s disturbing title conflating
the ordinariness of an instruction manual with the act of killing an enemy soldier. Douglas’
‘extrospection’ is detached by the speaker’s negotiation of military technologies: the speaker is
numbed by the confinement and distance his tank affords as he observes the soldier he must kill
through the partitioning ‘dial of glass’ of the tank’s sights. Such technology has made killing
simple, it is “easy” now “to make a ghost”.

The speaker’s loss of innocence—‘a child turning into a man’—is reinforced by his reliance
on comforting ‘fairytale’ imagery indicative of his evaporating childhood and the difficulty he
has rationalizing his experiences: the act of shooting the enemy soldier is described as ‘sorcery’.
A personal emotional response is expected but never comes: in the second stanza, the
enjambment separating ‘I cry/Now’ plays with the meaning of ‘cry’ in order to disappoint the
reader’s desire for introspection.

Questions:

1. What is the mood of the poem?

2. What is the tone adopted by the poet?

3. Discuss the imagery used in this poem.

 30

Thoughts After Ruskin

Elma Mitchell

Women reminded him of lilies and roses.

Me they remind rather of blood and soap,
Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,
Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:
Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,
Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,
Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,
Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverizing,
– All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.
Their distant husbands lean across mahogany
And delicately manipulate the market,
While safe at home, the tender and the gentle
Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,
Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,
Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,
Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,
Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,
Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners
Around the snags of furniture, they straighten
And haul out sheets from under the incontinent
And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,
Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,
Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,
Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,
Contorting wool around knitting needles,
Creating snug and comfy on their needles.
Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices
Raised to convey across the hullabaloo, …..
And when all’s over, off with overalls,
Quick consulting clocks, they go upstairs,
Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,
And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,
Their essences of lilies and of roses.

Note:

Elma Mitchell (1919-2000) British poet. Read and wrote poetry from childhood, but did
not publish it until late 1960. She first came to public attention in middle life, when her
 31

devastatingly original poem Thoughts After Ruskin appeared in the 1967 PEN anthology. While
this poem has been deservedly much anthologized, it has served to deflect attention from the
quality of Mitchell’s whole oeuvre of heart-rending, compassionate, compelling and
rhythmically skillful verse.
Thoughts After Prayer presents a quirky original view of the nature of women, and, as in
all Mitchell’s work, links the apparent trivial minutiae of domestic existence with the most
urgent human concerns. The poem has become by far her best known poem, but unsentimental
and compassionate insight into the human condition features in all her work.
John Ruskin was the most celebrated writer and art critic of the Victorian age. He viewed women
in a romanticized and idealized manner and his own relationships with them were extremely
problematic. The ‘after’ in the title is something of a joke, as the poem is no imitation of
Ruskin’s view on the place of women in the world. The opening of the poem takes a traditional,
condescending view of women as smelling of ‘lilies and roses’ and then confronts the reality of
women’s existence in muscular descriptions full of energy, urgency and violence.
Notice the astonishing number of dynamic action verbs describing what ‘tender’ and ‘gentle
women really do’. ‘Gutting’, ‘stuffing’, ‘zipping’ and ‘spooning’ are just four of about thirty you
could find in the poem. The poem ends with women conscious of the imminent arrival of
husbands home from work rushing to transform themselves into the ‘essence of lilies and roses’.

Questions:
1. What is the purpose of this poem?
2. How has the poem impacted on you?
3. Is this merely a feminist poem or is it an objective, disinterested piece of writing?
 32

Since Brass nor Stone

William Shakespeare

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea

But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Note
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) British poet and dramatist known as the Bard and
often referred to as England’s national poet. He wrote 39 plays, 154 sonnets and two long
narrative poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language. The sonnets
are presented as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passions, procreation, death
and time.
Since Brass nor Stone is an example of what is known as a Shakespearean sonnet. It
consists of three quatrains (4-line verses), followed by a rhymed couplet (2 lines). In this form of
the sonnet, emphasis is inclined to fall on the final couplet, which often assumes the appearance
of sententious tag affixed at the end.
In this sonnet, Shakespeare is writing on a theme which occupies many of his sonnets—
the cruelty of time. His love will inevitably be devoured by the ravages of time, and the only
hope of securing immortality is through his Shakespeare’s verses. The only hope, he concludes,
lies in the miraculous preservation of his love’s memory through the immortality of his verse.
The poem is rhetorical in style. It consists of a series of five questions, all expanding a single
idea, and all resolved in the final couplet. It is the sonnet of a dramatist accustomed to writing for
oral declamation. The imagery of the poem stresses the contrast between the extreme frailty and
evanescence of beauty, which is flower-like and soft as a breath, and the ruthless strength of
time, against which even brass, stone and steel are powerless.
This is a rhetorical poem, and it is also formal, a variation on an often repeated theme, it is a
love poem, but it is not all particularized; the emotion behind it, though its strength and sincerity
cannot be doubted, even if it is passion, is generalized.
 33

Question

1. What is a Shakespearean sonnet?

2. Analyze the imagery of this poem?
3. Write a summary of the poem in simple English.
 34

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful—a faery’s child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

 35

And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

 36

Thee hath in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

Note

John Keats (1795-1821) British Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second
generation of Romantic poets along with Byron and Shelley. The poetry of Keats is characterized
by sensual imagery. This is typical of Romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme
emotions through the emphasis of natural imagery. He took on the challenges of the wide range
of poetic forms from sonnet, to the Spenserian romance, to the Milton’s epic, defining anew their
possibilities. A lyric poet, he devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked by
imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.
He has become the epitome of young, beautiful, doomed poet.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which translates as the beautiful woman without compassion was
written in 1810 and published in 1820. The poem is written in the form of ballad—a narrative
poem written in four line stanzas—originally meant to be sung. A traditional medieval verse
form, it was revived and appropriated by the Romantics. This ballad is set in medieval times,
which is a manifestation of the Romantics’ love for the past and faraway places. La Belle Dame
is an example of ‘femme fatale’—a fatal woman—who has the power to destroy. The femme
fatale is an aspect of the Gothic side of Romanticism.

The poem is an allegory, that is, it has two levels of meaning: a superficial one and the core
meaning, which lies below. On the superficial level, it is about a beautiful woman enticing a
knight and willfully leading him to destruction. At this level, the poem is regarded as an oblique
 37

expression of some aspects of Keats’ feelings for Fanny Brawne, who jilted him. On another
level, the woman is seen as the muse who inspires the poet, and when the moment of inspiration
fades away, he finds himself in the cold world of reality which he finds difficult to adjust to after
his glimpse of the ideal world. Earlier critics saw the lady as a Circe, deliberately leading men to
their destruction, while the later critics and poets, such as Robert Graves, see the poem as a
celebration of the poet’s destruction by his muse: “that the Belle Dame represented love and
death by consumption and poetry can be confirmed by the study of romances from which Keats
developed the poem.” The critic K.M. Wilson identifies her as ‘The demon poesy”, thus showing
that this is a poem about literary composition; an ars poetica poem.

Questions:

1. Analyze the poem as a typical Romantic text.

2. How is the poem structured?
3. Discuss the sensuous imagery of the poem?
4. What does the ‘cold hills’ side signify?
5. Discuss the poem as an allegory.
 38

At the Time of Partition

Moniza Alvi

A line so delicate a sparrow might have picked it up in its beak;

A line between birth and non-being.
A line that would bring death to so many.

Note:

Moniza Alvi (b. 1954) British poet of Pakistani origin. Her father moved to England with
his British wife when Alvi was a few months old. She did not return to Pakistan until after her
first book of poetry was published.

Alvi’s poetry is imbued with a spirit of duality, partition, fractured identity and
transformation: her early poetry was concerned with homelands—real and imagined. In these
poems, she imagines what it would have been like never to have left, to have grown up in
Pakistan rather than having left and become a different person. Her later work explores the
interplay between inner and outer world, imagination and reality, physical and spiritual
experience.

Alvi’s themes of division and identity are evident in her fascination with otherness, and
predilection for the surreal. Her imagery can render the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.
She has published eight collections of poetry for which she has been nominated for various
prizes, including three T.S. Eliot prize shortlisting.

This excerpt is taken from At the Time of Partition (2013), a long poem in twenty parts,
which as she reveals in her introduction to the poem, is based on her grandmother’s journey from
India to the newly created Pakistan in 1947. She weaves a deeply personal story of fortitude and
courage. She captures the trauma of a nation in this story of departure, migration and setting in a
new country. The twenty poems which flow into each other create a simple haunting and lyrical
narrative, welding the personal and the public. This poem, ‘The Line’ which is the opening
poem, marks many lines—the physical lines drawn between two countries, the line of heredity
and the family story. Alvi examines the time, finally the poem apotheosizes the line: the line was
its own religion/it seemed to have become the thing. The poem that follows focuses on the
consequences of the line.

Questions:

1. Detail your reaction to this poem.

2. What do you understand by ‘a line between birth and non-being’?
3. How does ‘a line so delicate’ continue to impact on our lives?
 39

Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
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So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Note:
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) British poet and a cultural critic. He is worked as an
inspector of schools. He has been characterized as a sage writer, someone who chastises and
instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.
Dover Beach published in 1867 depicts a nightmarish world from which the old religious
verities have receded. It is held up as an early example of the modern sensibility. The poem was
inspired by two visits, he and his wife made to Dover. Many critics claim it to be a honeymoon
poem. The poem was written at a time, when religion was under tremendous pressure from the
sciences and evolutionary theory.
It is an open ended poem providing no definite answer, only suggesting a way to make
sense of life. Arnold sees the life ahead as a continual battle against the darkness and, with the
death of Christianity and the demise of the faith, only the beacon of interpersonal love can light
the way. Dover Beach is a complex poem about the challenges to theosophical, existential and
moral issues.
Important questions surface in this poem: what is life without faith? How do we gauge
happiness and loneliness? What gives life meaning? The first stanza starts with a straightforward
description of the sea. A certain melancholy flows into the second stanza. The allusion to
Sophocles brings a historical perspective to the poem. The tide mentioned becomes a metaphor
for human misery. Stanza three introduces the idea of religion. Faith is at its low tide, on its way
out, where once it had been full. The vacuum so created must be filled. The speaker suggests in
stanza four that only strong personal love between individuals can withstand the negative forces
in the world. Staying true to each other can bring meaning to an otherwise confused and
confusing world. Wars may rage on, the evolutionary struggle continue, only the foundation of
truth within love can guarantee solace.

Questions
1. What is the main theme of this poem?
2. What is the mood of the poem?
3. What is the sea of faith?
4. Analyze the figurative language used in Dover Beach?
5. Explain the last three lines. What is the ‘darkling plain’? And the ‘ignorant armies’?
6. Sum up your sense of the poem as a whole?