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أكـاديـمـي فـعّـال
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هااااذي للديالوق
من اللي حطتهوم حصه
Andrew Marvel A Dialogue between the soul and body
In “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body” Andrew Marvell portrays the battle that is waged in every man between his fleshly desires and his spiritual side. Although the soul and the body are mutually dependent, they are not portrayed as a harmonious team but as bitter enemies locked in an anguished debate. The body resents the control of the soul and the soul feels constrained by the body. The clever use of imagery and personification within the illusion of a debate powerfully communicates the unique frustration and anguish experienced by the combatants in this irresolvable conflict.
The opposing arguments are organised into a profoundly patterned poem. The poem is patterned into four stanzas containing end line rhyming couplets. With each line made up of eight syllables featuring mainly strong or masculine end line rhymes. The first three stanzas are made up of five couplets and begin with a rhetorical question, a device commonly used in debating. The opposing arguments are put forward in paired stanzas adding to the impression of a debate. The use of personification, by giving a voice to the soul and the body, dramatically strengthens this impression. The fourth stanza, made up of seven couplets, challenges the
The soul’s frustration at being confined is very skillfully conveyed by using the fleshly aspects of the body to portray its spiritual constraint. The soul cries “With bolts of Bones, that fetter’d stands / In feet; and manacled in Hands”. Things that are very enabling for the body, feet for mobility and hands for touch, are described by the soul as very constraining and a cause of its suffering. The other devices used to constrain the soul are also fleshly parts of the body.
The first two stanzas are paired with the opposing arguments concerning physical aspects and offer a ****************phorical de************************ion of each one’s suffering. The soul has been given the first opportunity to put forward its argument and asks its rhetorical question “O, Who shall from this dungeon raise / A soul enslaved so many ways?” REF Powerful imagery is used in the remainder of the stanza to convey the soul’s feelings of imprisonment and torture. The use of the words dungeon, inslaved,fettered, manacled, chains and tortured creates an explicit image of suffering. When the body speaks it opposes the soul with it s own rhetorical question “ O, Who shall me deliver whole, / From bonds of this tyrannic soul?” REF The image of the body being controlled by the soul is cleverly illustrated with the assistance of words like deliver,bonds,tyrannic, impales and precipice.. The opposing arguments put forward by the soul and the body in the first two stanzas clearly indicate the contrast between the senses and desires of the flesh and the spirit. The suffering experienced by each during their struggle is expressed using strong physical imagery.
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FROM: http://www.crossref-it.info/********...l-Poetry/4/275
The dialogue form
The dialogue is a form of poetry which is not often used. However, Marvell did write several: A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure; Clorinda and Damon; A****************s and Thestylis are other examples, the first like this one, a moral debate; the other two, pastoral poems with some religious significance. It is best to see this dialogue as being like a first class cricket match. Both sides get two innings, alternately. At the end, we have to declare the match drawn. Marvell, though clearly favoring the Soul, does not give either side the match-winning argument.
Soul says
The soul opens the batting with a powerful complaint: it is not only being imprisoned in the body, but tortured by it. The image of the soul being imprisoned is typically Platonic. Its move is to escape through the death of the body. Marvell plays with several parts of this extended conceit: ‘blinded with an Eye’ makes a nice paradox. The organs of sense blind (and bind) the soul to heaven, keeping it bound to sense impressions. Blinding was a common form of torture, as was constant sound. The worst part is ‘a vain head’, meaning stuffed with idle, fruitless thoughts, and a ‘double Heart’, because divided.
Body replies
The body is not too well pleased with this onslaught, and accuses the soul of driving it around, when all it wants is a quiet life. It even has to get up and walk upright! (‘mine own Precipice I go’). The soul makes it restless with its own restlessness. It feels possessed by ‘this ill spirit’.
Soul’s response
The soul's response is to enlarge on the ‘double Heart’. It has its own grief through being trapped in the body and has to bear the body's grief as well. We might say in modern terms, the soul here is both the psychology and the spirituality of human existence: the psychology derives from the body; the spirituality, from its heavenly origins. Left to itself, it would escape the body by letting it die; but the body's concern is to keep itself alive, and the soul is forced to help it do that. Again, Marvell makes the most of this paradox in his imagery: ‘Shipwreck into health again’; ‘what worse, the cure’.
Body concludes
The body is allowed its second innings. It lists the psychological suffering the soul forces on it through hope, fear, love, hatred and so on. The list goes on through the whole stanza. It climaxes with the paradox:
What but a Soul could have the wit
To build me up for Sin so fit?
Only the soul has given it the consciousness of sin. Left to itself, it would live like the animals in instinctive, undifferentiated being. The final image is one that Marvell was to take up several times in his ‘Mower’ poems: the body is like an undifferentiated tree growing naturally; the soul like an architect (or topiary gardener, as we might say), which trims and prunes it into all kinds of outlandish and unnatural shapes.
The key question
The final question is a real dilemma, then: Marvell has been working slowly towards it. Do human beings live ‘as Nature intended’, however shapeless that life might be morally or intellectually? Or do we raise ourselves through, allowing our ‘souls’ or spirits to restrain and shape our lives according to some overall design? Marvell does not push through to the soul's early conclusion: its wish for death as escape. He recognises life is something that has to be accepted, however problematic it is.
Investigating A Dialogue between Soul and Body- Read through A Dialogue between the Soul and Body
- Pick out some of the images and work them out
- Compare Marvell's Platonism here with that of Vaughan in his Ascension - Hymn
- What are the differences in the way they express their desire to escape earthly existence?
- What is ****************physical about this poem?
- Compare Marvell's attitude to the body to Donne's.
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