[ اللغة الانجليزية ] : ENDLISH STUDENT LEVEL 5 >> 3rd year first semester

[hopeful]

بنات إختبار تحليل الخطاب اليوم .... أحد عنده خبر كيف طريقة الاسئله؟ :(

[مرشدة مغرورة]

هذي مشاركة قديمة للي تسأل عن اختيار الشعر مع حصة :


أتذكر جابت شلون جون دن صور الديث في قصيدته ؟؟
اممم جابت بعد عن الالتر وايش الشيب اللي استعمله
وتشرحين وش سالفته وكذا !
وايش بعد ياربييييي ايه تكلمي عن الستركتشر تبع قصيدة لوكاستا
وو جابت ابيات من هذيك القصيدة اللي فيها nightingale تطلعين التشبيهات وكذا
وجابت ابيات ثانية تشرحينها يعني ..

جابت 7 أسئلة او 8 وتختارين خمس
عموما ً الاختبار ماكان مرره صعب حليوو يعني

وبس هذ اللي أتذكره وبالتوفيق

ادعي لي ربي ينجحني بكل موادي وآخذ درجات زينه
ويارب لا يخيّب تعبنا ولا تعبكم

[مرشدة مغرورة]

و هذا جزء من الكللام اللي منزلته د.حصة للشعر بالياهو



George Herbert Life & Art

George Herbert was born in Montgomery, Wales, on April 3, 1593, the fifth son of Richard and Magdalen Newport Herbert. After his father's death in 1596, he and his six brothers and three sisters were raised by their mother, patron to John Donne who dedicated his Holy Sonnets to her. Herbert was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. His first two sonnets, sent to his mother in 1610, maintained that the love of God is a worthier subject for verse than the love of woman. His first verses to be published, in 1612, were two memorial poems in Latin on the death of Prince Henry, the heir apparent.
After taking his degrees with distinction (B.A. in 1613 and M.A. in 1616), Herbert was elected a major fellow of Trinity, in 1618 he was appointed Reader in Rhetoric at Cambridge, and in 1620 he was elected public orator (to 1628). It was a post carrying dignity and even some authority: its incumbent was called on to express, in the florid Latin of the day, the sentiments of the university on public occasions.1 In 1624 and 1625 Herbert was elected to represent Montgomery in Parliament. In 1626, at the death of Sir Francis Bacon, (who had dedicated his Translation of Certaine Psalmes to Herbert the year before) he contributed a memorial poem in Latin. Herbert's mother died in 1627; her funeral sermon was delivered by Donne. In 1629, Herbert married his step-father's cousin Jane Danvers, while his brother Edward Herbert, the noted philosopher and poet, was raised to the peerage as Lord Herbert of Chirbury.
Herbert could have used his post of orator to reach high political office, but instead gave up his secular ambitions. Herbert took holy orders in the Church of England in 1630 and spent the rest of his life as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury. At Bemerton, George Herbert preached and wrote poetry; helped rebuild the church out of his own funds; he cared deeply for his parishoners. He came to be known as "Holy Mr. Herbert" around the countryside in the three years before his death of consumption on March 1, 1633.
A Priest to the Temple (1652), Herbert's Baconian manual of practical advice to country parsons, bears witness to the intelligent devotion with which he undertook his duties as priest. Herbert had long been in ill health. On his deathbed, he sent the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish the poems only if he thought they might do good to "any dejected poor soul."3 It was published in 1633 and met with enormous popular acclaim—it had 13 printings by 1680.
Herbert's poems are characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school of poets.3 They include almost every known form of song and poem, but they also reflect Herbert's concern with speech--conversational, persuasive, proverbial. Carefully arranged in related sequences, the poems explore and celebrate the ways of God's love as Herbert discovered them within the fluctuations of his own experience.2 Because Herbert is as much an ecclesiastical as a religious poet, one would not expect him to make much appeal to an age as secular as our own; but it has not proved so. All sorts of readers have responded to his quiet intensity; and the opinion has even been voiced that he has, for readers of the late twentieth century, displaced Donne as the supreme Metaphysical poe 
2
Andrew Marvell – A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body

This poem addresses the dichotomy between a person’s Body and Soul, using strong, elegant rhetoric and vivid imagery. Soul and Body are portrayed in a state of mutual entrapment, both being subject to each other’s whims and needs. Marvell alters the conventional structure for poems dealing with this dichotomy by giving the final lines to the body, rather than the soul. The ambiguity in these lines ensures we are left without a clear sense of a victory for one side or the other.

The Soul’s incredibly visceral, visual self-portrait as a tortured prisoner in Stanza 1 provides an affecting introduction to its argument. The idea of the Soul strung out, ‘manacled in hands’ and ‘fettered’ by feet, is made even more stirring by sound effects in the line. The alliteration that links ‘bolts’ and ‘bones, ‘feet’ and ‘fettered’, and the repeated ‘an’ sound stressed in ‘manacles’ and ‘hands’, reflect the image described through thee idea of pairs – each part of the soul has an equivalent part of the body, which connects to it and fastens it down. The effect continues through the stanza with ‘blinded’ and ‘eye’, ‘deaf’ and ‘drumming’. The wonderful, graphic line ‘Of nerves, and arteries, and veins’ is fragmented by caesura into a symmetrical pattern of 1 foot, 2 feet, 1 foot – suggesting the entwining of strands of thread, or the rigid form of the body cutting up the shapeless soul. The stanza ends with a rhetorical flourish, demonstrating confidence and wit. The iambic tetrameter is altered by a spondaic substitution that emphasizes ‘vain head’. This pairs with ‘double heart’ to give a conclusion that sounds decisive and satisfying. The ending encourages us to unpick the meaning of ‘double heart’ – it implies both ‘excessive amounts’ – uncontrollable feeling, and being prone to changes of mood’, as in two-faced.

The Body’s lament of Stanza 2 takes a similar argument. The connotations that attach the word ‘tyrannic’ put in motion a whole set of images in the readers’ mind – political might and oppression, rebellion and violent punishment similar to the torture described in stanza 1. We notice throughout the poem that both entities use the same arguments against each other. On a deeper level there is a lack of clarity about which human traits are accountable to which part of the human. The meanings suggested by ‘double heart’ seem to reproach the Body for over-feeling – yet here in Stanza 2 the ‘heat’ of passionate emotion is ascribed to the Soul, which ‘warms and moves this needless frame’. On a fundamental level, Marvell suggests that there is unity between these two seemingly opposite forces, such that their respective actions are inseparable form one another.

The final lines of Stanza 2 play on religious and superstitious imagery to demonstrate wit and mastery of rhetoric. Line 18 echoes but inverts the theological paradoxes found in devotional works of Herbert and Donne, which state that a person must die (in a spiritual sense) in order to live. Lines 19 and 20 portray the Body as a troubled spirit, forced to stalk the earth, ‘never rest’, as a result of being ‘possessed’ by a soul. There is irony in the fact that the soul is a person’s access to heaven, yet here it keeps the body grounded in a kind of purgatorial state. The transition to the third Stanza, with the Soul’s questioning of ‘magic’, goes almost unnoticed after the Body’s discussion of ‘spirits’ and being ‘possessed’. The fact that Soul and Body adopt one another’s images and manners of speaking is further suggestion that the two voices come from the same fundamental source.

The Soul’s ironic presentation of sickness in Stanza 3 pivots on the idea that the soul is on a journey to heaven – as seen in Marvell poems such as A Drop of Dew, the soul feels uncomfortable on earth. Therefore for the Soul every bodily sickness hurts double – first in sympathy for the pain of the body, and then in frustration after restored health ‘shipwrecks’ the Soul’s efforts to reach heaven through death. The body then twists the idea of sickness again, casting all emotions as forms of disease. The steady accumulation achieved through listing is strengthened by the lack of enjambement, maintaining the crisp rhetorical sound, and giving the effect of a doctor’s formal list of diagnoses. The resultant view of human life that emerges is as an impossible struggle against the pain of emotion, a siege of paradoxes and an inner battle between the elements of a person. It’s strange that such a chaotic picture should emerge from such ordered, controlled verse.

Even stranger is the enigmatic final image. Spoken by the body, it could describe the Soul (the ‘architect’) breaking and shaping the Body (the ‘tree’ or ‘forest’), in order to ‘build [it] up for sin’. Yet the intelligence suggested by ‘architect’, and the symmetry and beauty suggested by ‘square’, leave us with a sense of order and creation as well as brutality and destruction. The line could be read as a distillation of the process described by the rest of the poem – that by being subjected to the awkward contraries of life, a person is prepared for the building of something new
The Altar
http://www.thingsrevealed.net/altar1.htm
by George Herbert
A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.



since it's shape echo's the meaning of the verse. It has been noted that it was only eighty years after Herbert's composition that Joseph Addison made the judgment that such a shape poem was "garish and silly." Yet Herbert was a man of an earlier century and really another era. Up until the sixteenth century the western European view of the world was characterized by what Michel Foucault has called the "doctrine of signatures" described below:

Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 17, (New York: Vintage Books, 1970))

No wonder that Addison could not appreciate Herbert's shape poems. Addison had actually entered the eighteenth century, while Herbert's style reflected that of the sixteenth century. With such a poetic device there was a complementary resemblance between the form of the text and the theme of the poem. In The Altar there even seems to be an internal visible structure that complements the externally implied meaning. When we isolate the capitalized words from the poem we see the poetic theme in outline form.


 

ALTAR
HEART
SACRIFICE
ALTAR



It has been said that George Herbert's poems are actually a record of his private devotional life. Thus the altar metaphor should provide insight to his personal relationship to God. The most elementary Biblical definition of an altar is as follows: A structure for offering a sacrifice to worship and serve God. To "reare" a structure is to raise it up on end which is far more difficult when it is "broken." This brokenness appears to be an expression of a heart felt sense of inadequacy. In line two we learn that the metaphorical altar is actually the poet's heart. A servant often is called upon to render service to his Lord in spite of personal pain, and so he attends to the task with tears. Yet there is reason to believe that this servant recognizes the need to bind together his brokenness using tears as the binding cement. Tears are often the metaphorical binding element in personal relationships. A funeral is a time to mourn the loss of a loved one, but also the time to cement together the lives of those who care enough to weep with us. This calls to mind the shortest verse in the Bible expressed at the grief of Mary for the death of her brother Lazarus. It is simply recorded that, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). Herbert, with tears like Mary, "reares" the altar of his heart to his Lord. The tone of these introductory lines is one of emotional brokenness.

A heart is something created by God with natural inclinations, desires, and passions. This led the psalmist to say, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:14). Only the hand of God can frame a man. In contrast to this conception of the heart is the word "workman" in which is compounded the idea of man's work. Herbert's altar has not been framed by the work of man's tools. Some of Herbert's ideas on the nature of an altar seem to be an allusion to, and interpretation of certain Old Testament ideas. One of the first incidents associated with an altar was the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. One of the direct descendants of Cain was Tubal-Cain, "who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron" (Genesis 4:22). The stigma associated with Cain's faithless offering was passed on to his descendants who symbolically continued his self righteous work through their tools. Therefore, when God later gave a commandment concerning the making of altars he sought to make it evident that true worship was based on faith and not the works of man.
'If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it.' (Exodus 20:25)
Herbert is not a "self made man" and thus, he offered up what God had already made.

The stone described by Herbert was a homely metaphor familiar to everyone of his time. A stone may be large or small, heavy or light, hot or cold, but whatever else it may be, it is dead. This understanding would also be true for the Old and New Testament scriptures. The Biblical view was that after The Fall, man's spiritual heart was dead like a stone. The heart was originally conceived to be alive to the will of God, but through Adam's sin it died. There is a paradox that it was with such a broken and dead stone that Herbert sought to build an altar for worship. And further, it is with the heart that God required true worship. Therefore, the heart desired by God can not be one natural to man, but one cut by the hand of God. The paradox was resolved by God as promised in the scriptures.
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. (Ezekiel 36: 26,27)

Only God's power can "cut" a true heart.
In lines nine through sixteen there is a change of tone which can be called trusting hope. This change is due to his confidence that God can change his heart. Herbert realizes that the parts of his once "hard heart" are still the same, but now they are directed toward a new end. The heart's natural parts now meet in his unified frame to praise the name of God. The frame metaphor probably should be understood as descriptive of his personal makeup. Herbert finally extends his stone metaphor to the place where he has fulfilled the symbolic words of Christ concerning the stones. That is to say, we may have an allusion to the words of Christ at his Triumphant entry to Jerusalem. At that time when the "crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen ... some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples!" Jesus replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out" (Luke 17:37-40). So it was with Herbert. If he happened to hold back the words that should rightfully glorify God the previously stony parts of his heart would rise up to praise Him who changed them.
The Lord will look with favor on a man's offering if it is one from the heart. This is beautifully illustrated by David in his penitential psalm.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Psalm 51:17)

Brokenness of spirit is the opposite of worldly pride. Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). Such a humble life will be in fullest possible submission to God. Therefore the kind of sacrifice that God desires and that which He will bless is a life in submission to the will of God. The apostle Paul explained the ultimate goal of Biblical sacrifice.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1,2)
With such devotion Herbert is faithfully expectant that God will sanctify the altar of his heart. God can and will set apart a life that is in submission to Him as though it were His very own. The altar metaphor has indeed provided insight to George Herbert's personal relationship to God.

[مرشدة مغرورة]

الباقي بنزله اذا جيت من الكلية ان شاء الله

[hopeful]

شكراً جزيييلاً مرشدة جزاك الله الف خيييير

[Princess Sara]

بنات ملزمة الفكر حق شمس الدين صديقتي تقول بمكتبة الفجر مافي الا ملزمة لميا تتوقعون نفسها؟؟

[مرشدة مغرورة]

Who are the metaphysical poets?

The metaphysical poets were a small group of English lyric poets of the 17th century who had similar styles and concerns. Their fresh and sophisticated approach to the writing of lyrics was marked by an intellectual quality and an inventive and subtle style, with the use of the metaphysical conceit (a figure of speech that employs unusual and paradoxical images). Of this group of poets the work of only two will be covered in this short course: John Donne (1572-1631) and Andrew Marvell (1621-1628). Some of the others were Crashaw, Cleveland, Cowley and Vaughan.
The term "metaphysical poets" was first used by Samuel Johnson (1744), who said that "the metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show learning was their whole endeavour." He also said of their poetry that "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions…."
Donne, regarded as one of the chief poetic innovators among the metaphysical poets, was reacting against the 16th century (Elizabethan) love lyrics, which embodied courtly-love conventions which idealized women. Donne did not use the sonnet form for his love lyrics - a significant break with the tradition found in earlier poets such as Sidney and Spenser. He used colloquial language, he abandoned (and sometimes satirized) the courtly mode and focused on individual experience in a way that offered a less static notion of love than many previous poets. However, his view is often a somewhat egotistical view, with the stress on male ownership of women, defining "maleness" against "femaleness" and suggesting the primacy of the man rather than an equal partnership in love. In a sense, the achievement of Donne was to resituate the love poem outside the boundaries of the palace, as it were - that is, outside the courtly tradition. Sanders speaks of Donne's poetry in terms of "the self-exploratory role-playing and the swaggering behind a defensive mask; the perfection of art bordering upon human nullity; the treacherous manipulation of irony and the spectacle of the ironist betrayed" (50).
For centuries Catholicism had dictated both secular and religious values throughout Europe, but the Reformation had offered a different, Protestant, view of the world, and the metaphysical poets were helping to establish this view. Seventeenth-century metaphysical lyricists wrote as though they were turning new ground, and their individual style developed partly in response to the task of situating the English lyric more firmly within the relatively new tradition of Protestantism.
The emphasis on individual experience mentioned above in relation to love poetry was also an important element of Protestant religious experience. The religious controversies in England (and elsewhere) revolved around matters of the individual conscience in religious matters, as opposed to the supremacy of the Church's authority.
In the work of a key metaphysical poet such as Donne religious poetry and love poetry were not mutually exclusive, and each might contain elements of the other. According to the twentieth-century poet TS Eliot, this reflected the more flexible cultural pattern of Donne's time. Eliot calls this new fragmented sense of life "the dissociation of sensibility", when "the integration of thought and feeling began to disappear from literature" as well. As Eliot says,
thought to Donne was an experience: it modified his sensibility...
the ordinary man [today]... falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these
two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise
of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these
experiences are always forming new wholes.
(The Metaphysical Poets, 287)
Not surprisingly, the themes of rebellion and instability are prominent in 17th century English poetry. Many of the metaphysical poets wrote against the backdrop of revolutionary political developments: continuous internal conflict, the impeachment and beheading (1649) of King Charles I, and the Civil War which followed this and produced, for a while, a radically changed form of government which excluded kingship (1642-1660).
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), another of the Metaphysical poets, in 1657 was appointed as an assistant to the blind Latin secretary for the Commonwealth, John Milton (who wrote Paradise Lost, which you will be reading during your English 278 course). Milton supported the beheading of the King and the establishment of the Commonwealth under Cromwell. After the restoration of kingship in 1660, Marvell helped to save Milton from jail. Most of Marvell's poetry was published after his death, by a woman who was probably his housekeeper. " Playful, casual, and witty in tone, always light on its metrical feet and exact in its diction, Marvell's verse displays depth and intellectual hardness in unexpected places; its texture is extraordinarily rich" (M.H. Abrams, "Andrew Marvell", p. 1415)
The 17th century was a fruitful period for the lyric, both secular and religious. During this time, the lyric developed into a highly polished, formalized, self-conscious, self -questioning form which subverted and played with the courtly conventions (remember, the court had, for a while, disappeared), while also providing fertile soil for innovative poetic exploration.
Note: Critics often make a distinction between the poet and the persona/ speaker in a poem, since we cannot usually assume that the persona's thoughts and experience are those of the poet. However, this distinction becomes a difficult one to make when dealing with some lyric poetry.
Sources:
Abrams, M.H., "Andrew Marvell", The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: Norton, 1993).
Eliot, T.S., "The Metaphysical Poets", Selected Essays, London: Faber, 1951.
Parfitt, George. English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. London: Longman, 1992.

Sanders, Wilbur. John Donne's Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

[مرشدة مغرورة]

How To Read A Metaphysical Poem:

What Do You Need To Know before you set for the Exam?

1/ What is a metaphysical poem?
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////

The term "metaphysical" when applied to poetry has a long and interesting history. You should know this, but the information in Helen Gardner's Introduction to The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin)is more than adequate. Luckily, you have no time in an exam for a lengthy discussion. The examiner wants to see you discuss the text.

Metaphysical poetry is concerned with the whole experience of man, but the intelligence, learning and seriousness of the poets means that the poetry is about the profound areas of experience especially - about love, romantic and sensual; about man's relationship with God - the eternal perspective, and, to a less extent, about pleasure, learning and art.

Metaphysical poems are lyric poems. They are brief but intense meditations, characterized by striking use of wit, irony and wordplay. Beneath the formal structure (of rhyme, metre and stanza) is the underlying (and often hardly less formal) structure of the poem's argument. Note that there may be two (or more) kinds of argument in a poem. In To His Coy Mistress the explicit argument (Marvell's request that the coy lady yield to his passion) is a stalking horse for the more serious argument about the transitoriness of pleasure. The outward levity conceals (barely) a deep seriousness of intent. You would be able to show how this theme of carpe diem (“seize the day”) is made clear in the third section of the poem.

Reflections on love or God should not be too hard for you. Writing about a poet's technique is more challenging but will please any examiner. Giving some time to each (where the task invites this), while ending on technique would be ideal.

Here are some suggestions as to how to look at the detail of individual poems under a very broad heading.

Love in the poems:

In Marvell we find the pretence of passion (in To His Coy Mistress) used as a peg on which to hang serious reflections on the brevity of happiness. The Definition of Love is an ironic game - more a love of definition let loose; the poem is cool, lucid and dispassionate, if gently self-mocking. So you can move on to Donne, in whom passionate sexual love is examined with vigour and intensity. There are far too many suitable poems to consider all in detail, but The Good-Morrow, The Sunne Rising and The Anniversarie belong together, while A Nocturnall, upon S. Lucie's Day gives the other side of the coin. There is positive celebration of life in The Good Morrow and the others, while in the Nocturnall we have the examination of complex negativity.

In A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning the argument is not logically persuasive, but the cleverness and subtlety of Donne's method are diverting - an intelligent woman might be comforted. She cannot change the fact of the lover's going, but the poem is evidence of the integrity of the love he has professed hitherto.

Both Herbert and Vaughan address man's love of God, while Herbert, and Marvell (Bermudas), consider God's love of man. Herbert considers man's duty to God in The Collar and The Pearl as does Marvell in The Coronet.

Eternity and man's life in the context of this, is the explicit subject of all of Vaughan's poems in the selection, but is considered by Herbert in The Flower and, in a wholly secular manner, by Marvell in To His Coy Mistress.

In terms of the whole poetry of these four, this small selection accurately reflects the arguably narrow preoccupation of Herbert and Vaughan with religious questions, and the great variety of Marvell.

The selection only of love poems is partly misleading in Donne's case. He wrote a great deal of devotional verse, much of it very good, but his most striking achievements are in the Songs and Sonets. Herbert, of course, is not narrow - he is concerned with man's whole life in relation to God. Vaughan is more problematic - his preoccupation with his own salvation and his conviction that most of mankind is damned are less attractive qualities. He is fanatical where Herbert is tolerant.

2/ The poems' arguments
//////////////////////////////////////////
Looking at the poets' technique should, perhaps, begin with a consideration of argument. In a way all of the poems have an argument, but it is interesting or striking in some more than others.

To His Coy Mistress - the light and the serious arguments in one; the structure "Had we ..." "But ..." "Now therefore ...";

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning - the structure "As ... so" "But ... But" "Therefore" "Such wilt thou be to me ..." and the similarity to this of The Definition of Love (but there are big differences, too);

The World - various follies depicted, with the solution to the supposed puzzle in the final stanza;

Bermudas and The Collar - both use a dramatic form: the puritan sailors' song or the outburst of the rebellious Christian;

The Flower is dramatic, too, but embodies a kind of parable: Herbert sustains both the metaphor and the idea of the speaker as the Christian “Everyman”, examining his relationship with God;

Discipline - the severity of God's wrath is mirrored in the taut, cramped lines - compare this with the “disordered” lines of The Collar.

3/ Imagery
/////////////////

You can also consider the imagery used by the poets. Do NOT become bogged down in discussion of single images, such as the notorious “twin compasses” in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.

Consider, rather, the whole range of sources of imagery each uses. Broadly speaking, Donne is eclectic (wide-ranging) and apparently obscure. He did not write for publication, but showed poems to friends whom he supposed to be well-read enough to understand these references. Donne's imagery draws on the new (in the late 16th century) learning of the English renaissance and on topical discoveries and exploration. We find references to alchemy, sea-voyages, mythology and religion (among many other things). Certain images or ideas recur so often as to seem typical: kingship and rule; subjectivism ("one little room an everywhere" "nothing else is"); alchemy - especially the mystical beliefs associated with elixir and quintessence - and cosmology, both ancient and modern (references both to spheres and to the world of "sea-discoverers").

Herbert's imagery, by way of contrast, draws on the everyday and familiar; reason is like "a good huswife", spirit is measured in "drammes" and God's grace is a "silk twist", suffering is a harvest of thorns or blood-letting, Paradise is a garden where winter never comes, severity is a rod and love is God's bow or the host at a banquet. It will be seen, however, that many of these images are found in Christ's teaching, while others (or the same ones) may have acquired religious connotations. The reference to "thorn" and "bloud" in The Collar ironically seem to ignore the conventional religious symbolism of these terms.

Vaughan uses imagery almost exclusively from the natural world which is apprehended with a delight notably absent from his perception of most other people. The clue to this lies in The Retreate where Vaughan notes that "shadows of eternity" were seen by him in natural phenomena such as clouds or flowers. These images are readily understood and beautiful as with the flown bird and the star liberated from the Tomb. With Marvell, imagery is more problematic. Unlike Donne who scatters metaphors freely, Marvell is more selective and sparing. Very often the image is more memorable and striking than the idea it expresses, as with the "deserts of vast eternity", while frequently one finds an idea which cannot be understood except as the image in which Marvell expresses it, as with the "green thought in a green shade". In any case, with all of these poets, the use of metaphor serves, and is subordinate to, the total argument.

You should not leave the subject of technique without considering two poems (Jordan I and The Coronet) in which poetry is itself discussed. Herbert argues for plain-speaking, truth (man's real relationship with God, not a pastoral fiction) and simplicity in a poem in which only the final two lines are simple. Herbert cannot help the cleverness of his verse but time and again concludes poems with praise of simplicity and deprecation of the wit he has just displayed. In The Coronet, Marvell considers whether the poetic skill which has formerly (and culpably) served to praise his "shepherdess" can "redress that Wrong", by weaving a "Chaplet" for Christ.

But, the poet concludes, this is self-deception and vanity, and he ends with a prayer that God will act to remove the "Serpent" (the pursuit, in writing, of the poet's own "Fame" or (self) "Interest" - even if this requires the destruction of Marvell's own ingenious verse - "my curious frame"). In the skilful development of the central metaphor of the garland or "coronet" (appropriate both to the pastoral context and with biblical connotations, especially in associating the temptation to evil with the Serpent lurking in the greenery, Marvell exhibits the complexity, the riddling quality which this poem calls into question, perhaps best shown in the tortuous syntax of the first sentence with its succession of subordinate clauses separating the introductory "When" from the subject and main verb "I seek".

4/ Comparing the poets:
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All the poets, though they occasionally display erudition (learning) write with fairly colloquial voices. The best-known (and, so, frequently-quoted) examples are Donne's pretended outbursts: “I wonder by my troth ...”; “Busy old foole” and “For God's sake hold your tongue ...” However the simple intimate address to the reader - “'Tis the year's midnight” is no less characteristic of speech.

In Herbert we find equally pregnant openings. There are simple introductory statements which turn out not to be so simple: “Love bade me welcome ”(but what is this love, or who?), “I know the wayes of learning ...”; there are questions: “Who sayes that fictions onely ... become a verse?” and tranquil recollections of far from tranquil outbursts: “I struck the board, and cry'd, No more”. And, finally, as Donne addresses his mistress directly, so Herbert speaks, in the second person, to God: “Throw away thy rod” and “How fresh, O Lord ... Are thy returns ... These are thy wonders, Lord of love”.

As in other respects, Marvell exhibits more variety here. We find the second person in To His Coy Mistress. When Donne does this, we can believe, even though his own thoughts are what we learn, that an intimate address to a real woman is intended (in, say, The Good-Morrow, The Anniversarie and, even, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning). But the “Coy Mistress” is conspicuously absent - a mere pretext for Marvell to examine his real subjects - time and the brevity of human happiness.

5/ Themes and subjects:
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As Donne and Herbert do, Marvell writes much about his own ideas, but with less consistency. There is variety and superficial contradiction in the Songs and Sonets but Donne's preoccupation with love is not in doubt. Herbert's devout manner appears consistently in the poems in The Temple, but To His Coy Mistress is not easily reconciled with Bermudas or The Coronet. Marvell in all of these poems writes with lucidity and wit yet there is often an element of detachment - perhaps best shown in the dispassionate clarity and wordplay of The Definition of Love. It is interesting to note that the simplicity of much of Bermudas (essentially a list of God's gifts to the settlers of the islands, though individual lines contain the usual wit - as in the description of the [pine]apples) is explained by the device of making most of the poem a hymn of gratitude, sung by the English sailors.

Though Vaughan's exclusive religious views may repel us, we cannot ignore the clarity and directness of his style. The syntax is easy to the modern ear and unusual vocabulary is rare. He may open with an exclamation: “Happy those early dayes!” or “They are all gone into the world of light!” The simple understatement employed by Herbert is more than matched in The World which has one of the most striking openings of any English poem:

I saw Eternity the other night.

It could be fairly argued that the poem does not wholly succeed in the account, in detail (no poem could!) of the vision of Eternity which follows, but we can see how Vaughan works in the tradition established for poetry by Donne and for devotional verse by Herbert.

6/ Stanzas and poetic form:
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Donne also establishes a pattern which the others emulate in his use of the stanza. He appears to love variety as a natural embellishment and (to borrow Milton's phrase)“true ornament of verse”. We can see this by comparing poems. The three stanza structure which carries the argument in The Good Morrow is used again in other poems. But the fluency of the stanza in The Good-Morrow leading to the brief penultimate line and final Alexandrine with its stately, measured quality, gives way in The Sunne Rising to a far more lively and varied stanza. The almost breathless colloquial lines are, however, qualified in each stanza by a wholly regular and fluent rhyming couplet which enables Donne to conclude with a rhetorical flourish (note, however, that the final pentameter line is divided - rather on the model of the Alexandrine - after the second iambic foot). In The Anniversarie the whole stanza is more measured and stately and the Alexandrine is restored as the final line. In A Nocturnall Upon S.Lucies Day Donne uses, again, predominantly the pentameter line, yet the whole effect is more laboured than the fluent Good-Morrow. This is achieved by repeated interruptions marked by the punctuation.

Herbert matches Donne for variety in the stanza, but is more aware of the appearance of the poem on the page, as well as the effect on the ear. Poems such as The Altar and Easter Wings are written almost wholly for the sake of appearance. In this selection we should note, especially, The Collar and Discipline. In Discipline the cramped, lean lines reflect the severity which the poet begs God to refrain from using. In The Collar, there is an apparent randomness, a lack of order on the page, which mirrors the disordered outburst the poet here records. the jerky quality which derives from rhetorical questions - frequent use of full-stop, colon and question-mark even in mid-line - gives way only in the final four lines to a fluent conclusion which comes with the poet's account of his submission to the divine pull on the collar.

In many of Marvell's poems we find the same eight-syllable iambic line, yet its effect can vary remarkably. In To His Coy Mistress the vigorousness of the argument appears in the breathless lines - few are end-stopped, and the lines have the rough power of speech.

In The Definition of Love the same line is used, but arranged in four line stanzas. These carry the argument in the same way in which Donne uses this stanza in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. Unlike Donne, who is prepared to allow some use of enjambement (between first and second stanzas and frequently within all the stanzas) Marvell's stanza here has a near metronomic quality - a punctuation mark at the end of the second line exaggerates the rhyming syllable, which is emphatically matched at the end of the stanza. There is a similar regularity in Bermudas but here, by arranging the lines as rhyming pairs, Marvell conveys something of the sense of the motion of the English boat through the water (as the poem's last line makes clear). This same line is used again, but arranged into eight line stanzas to develop the argument in The Garden, which is less slick but more profound and thoughtful than that in The Definition of Love.

Vaughan feels free to use variety in his stanza. Less spectacularly, perhaps, than Donne, he nonetheless suits form to content. So The Retreate is a fast-moving sustained meditation not divided into stanzas. The more contrived and ordered argument of The World or Man require much longer stanzas, but regular in form, while "They Are All Gone into the World of Light", with its shorter stanza, becomes, in effect, a long series of distinct observations on the poem's single subject.

Most of these comments are very general. Connections have been made which you should now exploit in relation to particular poems. Memorizing the text is not required but you must know your way around the poems. Trying, for the first time, to understand them in an exam is not wise.

It is therefore worth taking a poem, and deciding what you can usefully write about it, in terms of content, technique and points of reference to other poems.



And Now Preparing for exams:
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Make your own idiot-guides or spider-charts to learn this stuff. Clearly, the greater the number of poems for which you can do this, the stronger will be your position in an exam. Make sure, in doing this, that your chosen poems are varied, in terms of author, subject and technique.

A good essay will contain some detailed analysis of some of the poems, but will show general understanding of all of the set poems unless the question explicitly limits you to a smaller selection.

You may find that a question obliges you to consider the work of each poet, or of all poets in relation to some theme or subject. Do NOT keep commentary on each poem separate; DO make comparisons and move freely between or among the poems.

The time allowed for exams enables you to plan properly; for these poems, planning is indispensable - any essay will require you to write widely; without planning, you will miss important material or points of commentary. Do not waste time labouring (or repeating) a few basic comments.

It Is Important To Follow These Steps:
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Essays which invite you to examine the poets' treatment of a given subject or theme. These may be limited to two or three of the poets.
Possible subjects would include love, religious faith, or (as it includes both of these) the poets' attitude to experience.
The examiners may give a subject which imposes a particular plan, but this is NOT likely. You should have an outline (NOT a prepared essay) of your own, for each possible subject.
Essays which ask what are the special characteristics of "metaphysical poetry". These will appear either as an "open" question ("what makes a metaphysical poem?", in effect) or a quotation, to which you should respond ('" The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together". How far is this an accurate assessment etc?')
If you have a "quotation" question it is most unlikely that the statement will be one which merits complete agreement or disagreement. You are allowed to qualify your agreement or refutation. N.B. You will never be given a quotation that is stupid or utterly wrong. Generally, they are more or less sensible.
Such essays can work for you, if you know what to do. You should first state what the characteristics of metaphysical poetry are, then illustrate them by consideration of appropriate evidence from the poems. The important tricks here are:

Have a clear list of characteristics, ensuring both content and method are covered.
Introduce evidence by some formula such as "we find this quality in The Garden, where Marvell ..." or "Both Herbert and Vaughan, in their different ways, address this subject in ..."
Ensure that you use a wide range of poets and poems. Where possible, compare, even if briefly, in passing.
Keep your eye on the ball. When you have shown one characteristic to be present (and how), then move on to the next.
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It is just possible that you may be given a question which requires you explicitly to examine (and compare) technique (the poets' method). You should be doing this, anyway, in a poetry essay, so don't be frightened. But you must before the exam have a clear mental checklist of the characteristics to be considered here.

For all of these poets, the method is closely bound up with the subject and mood, so some comment on these, if you make this point, will be allowed.

If you write about Donne (among others) why not put him last? The examiners will see any number of scripts which will begin with the (admittedly interesting) opening of The Good-Morrow. Don't let yours be among them

[noiselessness]

مرشدة مغرورة الله يعرب يجزاك خير ويوفقك ويسهل أمورك زي ماسهلتي أمورنا

[خيآل انثى]

مرشده الله يجزاك خير يارب
ويوفقك وينجحك ويسهل امورك كلها يارب