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متميزه بملتقى كلية الاداب بالدمام
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رد: Third year - 6th level - 0ld plan @.@
UPHILL
by: Christina Rossetti 1830-1894
dOES the road wind up-hill all the way
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
أنبقى في وجهه الريح ؟,صعودا إلى قمة التل ؟
نعم، وحتى النهاية.
وهل رحلة العذاب تبدأ من خط البداية؟
من انبثاق نور الولادة وحتى حلول الظلام. ياصديقي ؟
ألا يوجد سقفا ,نلوذ به عندما تحل ساعات الظلام البطيىة .
ربما لم يجد الظلام مكانا يختبئ فيه من وجهي
سوف لن تفوت ذلك المكان
وهل ألقى عابري السبيل في تلك ألليله؟
الراحلون الذين خلوا من قبلي؟
ا يتوجب حينها أن اطرق الباب,ا و أطلق حسرة استدعاء؟
سوف لن يتركوني عند الباب
فهل أجد راحة بعد العذاب؟
وجزاءا لما لقيت من الصعاب؟
وهل اجد هنالك سريرا؟او أسرة للذين يبحثون عن ملاذ؟
نعم هناك أسرة تسع كل القادمين
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is perhaps best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem Remember, and for the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.
Christina Rossetti, in full Christina Georgina Rossetti, pseudonym Ellen Alleyne (born Dec. 5, 1830, London, Eng.—died Dec. 29, 1894, London), one of the most important of English women poets both in range and quality. She excelled in works of fantasy, in poems for children, and in religious poetry.
Christina was the youngest child of Gabriele Rossetti and was the sister of the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1847 her grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, printed on his private press a volume of her Verses, in which signs of poetic talent are already visible. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. In 1853, when the Rossetti family was in financial difficulties, Christina helped her mother keep a school at Frome, Somerset, but it was not a success, and in 1854 the pair returned to London, where Christina’s father died. In straitened circumstances, Christina entered on her life work of companionship to her mother, devotion to her religion, and the writing of her poetry. She was a firm High Church Anglican, and in 1850 she broke her engagement to the artist James Collinson, an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, because he had become a Roman Catholic. For similar reasons she rejected Charles Bagot Cayley in 1864, though a warm friendship remained between them.
In 1862 Christina published Goblin Market and Other Poems and in 1866 The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, both with frontispiece and decorations by her brother Dante Gabriel. These two collections, which contain most of her finest work, established her among the poets of her day. The stories in her first prose work, Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870), are of no great merit, but Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book (1872; enlarged 1893), with illustrations by Arthur Hughes, takes a high place among children’s books of the 19th century.
In 1871 Christina was stricken by Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder that marred her appearance and left her life in danger. She accepted her affliction with courage and resignation, sustained by religious faith, and she continued to publish, issuing one collection of poems in 1875 and A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881. But after the onset of her illness she mostly concentrated on devotional prose writings. Time Flies (1885), a reading diary of mixed verse and prose, is the most personal of these works. Christina was considered a possible successor to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as poet laureate, but she developed a fatal cancer in 1891. New Poems (1896), published by her brother, contained unprinted and previously uncollected poems.
Though she was haunted by an ideal of spiritual purity that demanded self-denial, Christina resembled her brother Dante Gabriel in certain ways, for beneath her humility, her devotion, and her quiet, saintlike life lay a passionate and sensuous temperament, a keen critical perception, and a lively sense of humour. Part of her success as a poet arises from the fact that, while never straining the limits of her sympathy and experience, she succeeded in uniting these two seemingly contradictory sides of her nature. There is a vein of the sentimental and didactic in her weaker verse, but at its best her poetry is strong, personal, and unforced, with a metrical cadence that is unmistakably her own. The transience of material things is a theme that recurs throughout her poetry, and the resigned but passionate sadness of unhappy love is often a dominant note
The meaning
Does the road wind up-hill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Shall I meet other wayfarers at night? Those who have gone before. Then must I knock, or call when just in sight? They will not keep you standing at that door. Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak? Of labour you shall find the sum. Will there be beds for me and all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come. -- Christina Rossetti
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In this poem, Christina describes life and death in a symbolically way through asking and answering. There are two speakers in the poem, one asking about the way uphill-the apprehensive traveler, and the other answering whom I prefer to regard as one who has experience death. So, the title uphill here indicates approaching Heaven.
The first stanza says that the road uphill is to wind all the way to the very end. Here, the road is like a life’s journey, if you want to seek Heaven, you shall encounter some obstacles or troubles on the way. And in the “end”, which means death, you will find it. Morn symbolic the sun and life while night implies dark and death, you shall pursue for Heaven from born till you die. I think the poets is also telling us that, our life time is just like a day’s journey, it is so short that we should cherish it and make good use of it.
In the second stanza, a “resting-place” for the night indicates death also, because when one is dead, he is usually said as in deep sleep. And heaven here is described as an inn, where one can spend his slow hark hours.
In the third stanza, there are also other travelers on the way which implies that on the way to Eternity, you are not alone and you find company all the way. And the door of heaven is always open to whom has experienced so much on the way there, so you don’t have to stand outside and wait.
In the fourth stanza, after one finishes his service and behave well, he will have a comfortable place to rest, that is, death. “Beds for all who come” ,Beds stand for death or can be interpreted as Heaven.
At the beginning of the poem, Rossetti says "Does the road wind up-hill all the way?/ Yes, to the very end" (1-2). I believe that in these two lines, Rossetti expresses the distress she is feeling with life in general and how she cannot believe it just keeps going on and on. She uses the road as a symbol for the journey of life and she cannot believe it is windy, or difficult the whole way up the hill, or through the path of life.
She goes on to say "Will the day's journey take the whole long day?/ From morn to night my friend" (3-4). In these lines, she is in this dialect with someone and is complaining that the journey of life takes the "whole long day," or in other words, she is in awe that it will take her entire life. In saying this, she is expressing how stressful and difficult she thinks of the journey of life and cannot believe she will have to go through the entire process to get to a peaceful place. I believe the person means from birth to death by their response. I think of the person talking to her as some short little elf-eared man for some reason. I picture him nicer than the men from "Goblin Market," but I think I still picture him as a goblin man because he the one that is giving her these answers that are difficult to hear, but is also telling her how to get to a better place.
The next four lines read:
"But is there for the night a resting place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss them" 5-8
In these lines, Rossetti is asking where the resting place is at the end of the road and my goblin man answers by saying there is a place in the darkness, in the unknown place. Rossetti is searching for this place of what is probably heaven, to get her out of the darkness, seeking shelter as a refuge. Then she asks how she will ever find it, if it is in this dark, unknown place. I think in this part, she is asking how she will know when it is her time to leave this earth. The face that she is asking all these questions about death contributes to the idea that she is looking for peace at the end of life. The man answers by telling her it will be impossible not to see the place once she gets there, like she will know when her time is up, even though it's an unknown area.
Rossetti speaks to this man again:
"Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I know, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at the door" (9-12).
She wants to know if she will be around other who are headed in the same direction towards deaths as she is when she gets to that point. When the man says, "Those who have gone before," I think he is telling her that she will run into those who have already passed on. At first I thought she was asking if she would have to call for death, but after reading it again, I think she is asking if she will have to call on heaven to open the door for her. The man responds by telling her in what seems like a friendly way that no, they will not keep her waiting.
Rossetti goes on to ask this man a couple more questions:
"Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come" 13-16She now wants to know if after the long journey of life, if she will find comfort at the end of the journey, if she will find peace in death. This contributes more to the idea that she is looking forward to some comfort and that she is looking for her peaces at the end of life (or heaven). She is continuing her journey of life by having the idea in her head that it will all be worth it in the end. The man tells her that she will get out of death what she put into life. Rossetti then asks if there will be a place for her after she dies and the man tells her there will be a place "for all who come," which is what I believe to mean, for all who come to heaven.
In every line of this poem, Rossetti is expressing how difficult her life is and how much she wishes for peace. She only seeks peace through the idea that she will one day reach heaven and is asking all these questions in hopes that she will find that peace by making it there one day. She answers her own questions by saying that you only get out of the after-life what you have actually put into life. This could have been a turning point for her in her life to maybe be a better person or just to be more religious in general so that she could get the escape of heaven when she dies. One thing is definitely true throughout this poem though, and that is the fact that she is writing about how difficult her life is and she is seeking some sort of release from it one day, that release being heaven.
The theme of this poem is that death is a way to leave for another world where we can find peace and comfort, so it is not terrible. The structure of this poem is arranged as a dialogue between a anxious traveler and a calm responder, so we readers may have a feeling that one is quite near to death and he is frightened while the other appears composed because he has experienced death, and he is trying to ease the seeker’s anxiety.
Every stanza begins with a question and ends with its answer, it seems that every question about death has an answer, so one doesn’t have to worry about that. And there many phrases indicating that death is not terrible at all. For examples, “of labor you shall find the sum” and “beds for all who come” tell us that if one finish his labor and do good things when he is alive, he can have a good ending of his life. And all men are equal in the sight of God, so none of them will be ignored.
Imagery and symbolism
The road - In Up-hill, the road symbolises the journey the speaker takes. Instead of being straight, the fact that it is ‘winding’ and ‘up-hill’ suggests that the path is long and difficult. However, that there is actually a road leading up the hill indicates that plenty of others have already taken the route that is being contemplated. The speaker will not have to carve or find her own path since it has already been revealed to her.
The road can be interpreted
• Literally, as a long walk to an unseen destination
• Metaphorically, as representing the path that life takes
• Symbolically, as the way to live spoken of in the Bible. See Aspects of Literature > Big ideas from the Bible > Path, way and Journey of faith, Exodus, pilgrims and sojourners.
The inn - The traveller is told that she ‘cannot miss that inn’ (line 8) that stands at the top of the hill and offers rest for those who have spent the entire day climbing. Literally, the fact that it stands out in the darkness of the night indicates that the light that it sheds is powerful and will not be overpowered. Metaphorically the ‘inn’ represents security. Against the context of the Bible, the idea of a place of welcome and rest echoes two allusions:
1. The description of the ‘rooms’ in heaven prepared for believers (as referred to in A Convent Threshold), taken from John’s Gospel. Jesus comforts his disciples with the promise:
My Father's house has plenty of room; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. John 14:2-3 TNIV
2. The inn which Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary sought for rest and a chance to give birth to Jesus. Although there was ‘no room for them in the inn’ (Luke 2:7) the poem gives assurance that there will be space for the speaker.
The door - The traveller asks whether s/he will have to ‘knock’ the door of the inn when s/he reaches it or whether s/he will be kept waiting for admittance. S/he is reassured that the door will be opened upon arrival and that ‘those who have gone before’ will be ready to greet him/her (lines 10-12).
If the poem is to be understood in a Christian context, Rossetti can be seen to take the image of the door from two references in the New Testament:
1. In Luke 11:9-10 Jesus encourages people to turn to God with their concerns:
So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives; those who seek find; and to those who knock, the door will be opened. TNIV
2. In the last book of the New Testament, Revelation Jesus is depicted as a friend ready to share with those who ask for him:
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them and they with me. Revelation 3:20 TNIV
In this passage, the door spoken of refers to the acceptance of Jesus in the human heart. In Up-hill, the one knocking at the door is not Jesus but the traveller. However, the responsibility for creating an environment in which the door is ready to be opened lies with the individual - it is the speaker’s choice whether or not to persevere on the journey in time to reach the inn.
Beds - The traveler is promised ‘beds for all who come’ (line 16) to the inn. The image of beds indicates rest, comfort, shelter and security. After a long struggle, the idea of resting is all that the speaker can look forward to.
The idea of beds also points to Rossetti’s engagement with a doctrine spoken of as ‘soul sleep’. This doctrine teaches that when Christians die, instead of going to straight to heaven, they experience a period of rest and sleep in preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus, at which point they will be taken up to heaven and be rewarded with eternal life. This doctrine is also apparent in Rossetti’s poem Song(When I am dead
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