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20. CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
COURSE-KIT
Instructor: dr Tóth Sára
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Required Reading: See syllabus
Recommended Reading: See syllabus of lecture course
20th CENTURY BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE (BAN 2383)
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Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN (1899)
Take up the White Man’s burden
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden--
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.
Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.
THOMAS HARDY
Hap
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
that thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--CrassCasualtyobstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
1. Establish the form of the poem (meter, rhyme-scheme, stanza form).
2. What are the causes of the speaker’s suffering? (lines 3, 4, 9-12)
3. What kind of „god” does the speaker desire for himself? (lines 1-8)
4. What is the nature of the universe described in the last 6 lines?
5. Can you think of poetic devices which intensify Hardy’s meaning in the poem (sound symbolism, choice of words and word order, rhyme-scheme etc.)?
Vocabulary
vengeful: wants to take revenge
to close, grasp or grip tightly (clench one’d fists / teeth)
wrath, anger (from latin ira)
(to mete out) to distribute
to slay = to murder, to butcher
to sow = to implat (scatter the seed for growth)
crass = coarse, insensitive, rude, rough, vulgar, gross
casualty = person hurt / killed in accident
to obstruct = to hinder, to block
to dice = to gamble
moan = long, slow sound of pain
to straw, strew strewn/strawn = to scatter
bliss = great (mystical) happiness
pilgrimage = journey (to a holy place)
The Convergence Of The Twain
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls-grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"...
VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her - so gaily great -
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
IX
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
X
Or sign that they were bent
by paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres
Questions
- Structurally, the poem can be divided into two parts. Can you identify them? (A grammatical change, among other things, indicates the shift.)
- What is described in the first section? What is described in the second section? What does “she” refer to? (There is a clue later.)
- Can you identify the historical event behind the poem?
- The poem contains a narrative but it does not follow the chronological order. Can you reconstruct the proper chronology/timing?
- A contrast is set up in the first stanza which then dominates the poem. Point out the contrasting images in stanzas 1 to 5.
- Can you find the synonym of the expression “human vanity”?
- What philosophical/theological idea is parodied in the second section? In other words: a historical event is described, but extremely ironically. In what does the irony lie?
- Find the phrase which has the same referent as “Immanent Will.”
- Explain the title.
- The irony is strenghtened by the use of a metaphor to describe the “august event.” Consider the expressions. “prepared a mate”; “consummation.” Which area of life do these images come from?
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Neutral Tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro--
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing....
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and unstressed syllables (do this at least for the first stanza).
2. How do we know that this text is a reversal of a love poem? How are the traditional devices of a love poem reversed?
3. Characterize the relationship of this couple. What are some of the poetic figures expressing that? What is the main source of the figures?
4. Characterize the structure of the poem. It helps to compare thoroughly the first and last stanzas. What makes the last stanza special and different from all the rest? Think about images and motifs that appear in both. What changes can you observe? (Look at the tenses of the verbs for example.)
W. B. Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now,And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade. / .
And I shall have some peace there,
For peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning
To where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer,
And noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings
I will arise and go now,
For always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway
Or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core
1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and unstressed syllables (do this at least for the first stanza).
2. To what an extent does this poem evoke Romantic tendencies?
3. Describe the situation of the speaker. (Place and time of his utterance!)
4. What poetic devices are used to evoke the poem’s special atmosphere? Pay attention especially to sound symbolism.
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1
W. B. YEATS
Easter 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse --
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born
1. Look up the historical background of the poem (the Irish Easter Rising of 1916). (See for instance
2. The first two units speak of a change or transformation in the people who actively participated in the revolution. How would you describe this change?
3. Explain the meaning of the contrast between „casual comedy” and „terrible beauty”.
4. What basic contrast governs section 3 (expressed by the metaphors of stone and living stream)?
4. Is the „great cause” of the revolution praised or criticized in this poem (units 3-4)? An important metaphor is carried over from section 3 to 4 which may help us deciding this.
5. In what way can we say that this poem is the debate of the poet with himself?
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come
Questions
1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and unstressed syllables (do this at least for the first stanza).
2. Contrasting stanzas 1-2 with 3-4. How would you describe the governing tension or contrast of this poem. Find references to the first part of the poem in the last two stanzas.
3. What kind of quest does the poet undertake in this poem? What does the voyage symbolize?
4. Contrast the last two lines of stanza 1 with the previous lines. What exactly is described in the first 6 lines? What are some of the poetic devices used?
5. What is the dominant metaphor of stanza 2?
6. What do you think fire can be a symbol for (stanza 3)?
7. What kind of utterance is stanza 3?
8. What exactly does he want to become (in stanza 4) in ordet to defeat mortality?
Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Study Questions
1. Try to imagine the situation. Why are the petals on a black bough? Why is the bough wet?
2. How would you characterize the style of this poem?
What are the petals metaphors for? What is the significance of this?
3. How can we interpret the contrast between the petals and the black bough?
4. What are the connotations of the word “apparition”?
Robert Frost: Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.
Study questions
1. The poem bitterly parodies one of the main traditional arguments for God’s existence. What is this argument?
2. What are the poet’s answers to his own questions?
3. How is the tension between the traditional idea of design and the “design of darkness” is expressed by the imagery?
4. Comment on the irony of
“Assorted characters of death and blight”
“Mixed ready to begin the morning right”
“kindred spider”:
4. Establish the form and rhyme-scheme of the poem. Almost half of the ending syllables are identical. Give a list of these words. What may this express?
Lecturing in 1834 on the theme of man’s relationship to the globe, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked
The snail is not more accurately adjusted to his shell than man to the globe he inhabits, that not only a perfect symmetry is discoverable in his limbs and senses between the head and the foot, between the hand and the eye, the head and the lungs,—but an equal symmetry and proportion is discoverable between him and the air, the mountains, the tides, the moon, and the sun. I am not impressed by solitary marks of designing wisdom; I am thrilled with delight by the choral harmony of the whole. Design! It is all design. It is all beauty. It is all astonishment.
Robert Frost: For once, then, something