Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

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Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

Introduction and Main Theme

Diving into the Wreck is Adrienne Rich’s most celebrated poem. It is unanimously called epic of our modern times. The poet gives a description of the sea and her dive into the sea, the various things observed and particular experiences underwent are all beautifully narrated and described. The poem is also adventurous because it I based on the search for a wreck.

Here Diving into the Wreck is not a simple adventure story, but Rich has a very serious account to relate. On the onset, it is a story of a diver going into the water to observe a wreck, but as the seawater is deep and mysterious so are the meanings of the poem. Basically the poem is the struggle for women rights in the male-dominated society. The poem is representative of not only Rich’s ideals, but also the changing conditions of American at the time when the poem was written.
Rich becomes androgyny[1] and wants to observe the damage that was done to the female race and the treasures that prevail in their rights. Her struggle for the voice of rights is single-handed.

[1]. Androgyny: medical term that shows characteristics of both sexes – male and female. Rich becomes Androgynous: again a medical term relating to or exhibiting both female and male sex organs but with a predominantly female appearance.

A Critique of Diving into the Wreck

Introduction

Wrecked ship. Ruins of a wrecked ship at the bottom of the sea are explored in “Diving into the Wreck,” the title poem of the collection. Although it is not named, the Atlantic Ocean is probably the sea that houses the wreck that the speaker of the poem explores. The wreck and the sea are not named because they must be inclusive, not exclusive. The primary symbol of the poem, representing unrecovered female history, seeks to identify with all its readers, as the final stanza reinforces:
We are, I am, you are
a book of myths in which
our names do not appear

The image of the sea is a metaphor of life as sea is full of wreckages; the world too is full of ruins. One glance around will bring back countless pictures of destruction. Diving into the Wreck provides the angle of perception about the wreck from both the male and the female side. It is androgyny that investigates the wreck, not female or male alone. The poem is hailed as an epic of the modern times. It statement is fully justified by the technical merits of the poem and the subject matter.

Development of Thought

Quest for Fact or Myth

According to Margaret Atwood, the wreck she is diving into, in the very strong title poem, is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths about men and women. She is journeying to something that is already in the past, in order to discover for herself the reality behind the myth,
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth.”

What she finds is part treasure and part corpse, and she also finds that she herself is part of it, a “half-destroyed instrument.” As explorer she is detached; she carries a knife to cut her way in, cut structures apart; a camera to record; and the book of myths itself, a book which has hitherto had no place for explorers like herself.
This quest--the quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about the “I” and the “You,” the He and the She, or more generally (in the references to wars and persecutions of various kinds) about the powerless and the powerful--is presented throughout the book through a sharp, clear style and through metaphors which become their own myths. At their most successful the poems move like dreams, simultaneously revealing and alluding, disguising and concealing. The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

Depth of the Poem

According to Nancy Milford, In Diving into the Wreck she enters more deeply than ever before into female fantasy; and these are primal waters, life-giving and secretive in the special sense of not being wholly revealed. The female element. A diver may dive to plunder or to explore.
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
Alone and crippled by her equipment, she is descending, she is
having to do this,
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin
And even though the mask of the diver is powerful the point of the dive is not the exercise of power in self-defense.
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element
She came “to explore the wreck.” And what is the wreckage; is it of marriage, or of sex, or of the selfhood within each? Is it the female body, her own?
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
Moving in deeply private images, circling darkly and richly into the very sources of her poetry, she is, as she says, “coming-home to. . .sex, sexuality, sexual wounds, sexual identity, sexual politics”:
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Dreaming of the person within the poem: she walking toward me, naked, swaying, bending down, her dark long hair falling forward of its own weight like heavy cloth shielding my face and her own, her full breasts brushing my cheek, moving toward my mouth. The dream is the invention of the dreamer, and the content of the dream moves in symbols of sustenance and of comfort. The hands of that diving woman become our own hands, reaching out, touching, holding; not in sex but in deliverance. That is the potency of her poetry: it infuses dreams, it makes possible connections between people in the face of what seems to be irrevocable separateness, it forges an alliance between the poet and the reader. The power of her woman’s voice crying out, I am: surviving, sustaining, continuing, and making whole
we move together like underwater plants
The meaning of Wreck
Deborah Pope in finding the meaning of the wreck states, the wreck represents the battered hulk of the sexual definitions of the past, which Rich, as an underwater explorer, must search for evidence of what can be salvaged. Only those who have managed to survive the wreck--women isolated from any meaningful participation or voice in forces that led to the disaster--are in a position to write its epitaph and their own names in new books.
Rich’s Approach to the Wreck
"Diving into the Wreck" presents a less privatized, more mythologized version of the theme in "Waking in the Dark." Rich again creates a setting that merges the ruinous state of modern civilization with the damaged sexuality of the self. The poet begins the exploration alone, but she suggests that others have risked such journeys toward clarification. In a passage that Rich and most readers now find problematic, the solitary explorer modulates into an androgyne as she

approaches the wreck:
the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
... I am she: I am he....

Speaking, feeling, and seeing for both sexes, the poet wants to witness "the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth." Margaret Atwood notes that the wreck is "beyond salvation though not beyond understanding" (239), but the poem actually offers very little analysis of the wreck and quite a bit of explanation of how the wreck is approached, how the inquiry is carried out, and how the explorer understands the mission and her/himself. Other than describing the wreck of the self and of culture as the drowned face" and

the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log / the fouled compass,

The poem focuses on the process and attitude of the explorer. Even the motive is vague and not necessarily pure:
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Diving into the Wreck offers a metaphor for the crisis and necessity that could only be called a detached "it" in "Trying to Talk with a Man": "Coming out here we are up against it" (my emphasis). Yet as Cary Nelson has noted, "Diving into the Wreck" is hardly a concrete or thoroughly grounded poem since the androgyny it supplies oversimplifies sexuality and is itself a myth (156).
For Nelson, the poem "demonstrates that one can suppress difficult feelings by mythologizing them" in "stylized and abstract" ways (156); however, the poem's attention to the process of exploring the wreck and not to the analysis of the wreck is significant for both Rich's feminist theory and her poetic practice. The poem has cleared ground, and unlike "When We Dead Awaken," it stops before it reconstructs anything, satisfied with creating a new signifying space rather than overly desperate to fill it. In fact, the ending returns us to the beginning of the poem and prepares for another exploration by again mentioning the knife, the camera, and the book. As Werner says, the poem continually makes ready "for the descent which we are, then and now and perpetually, just beginning" (175). In its mythologized, abstract way, "Diving into the Wreck" conveys the dialectic between the epic feminist vision and the lyric feminist vision, as the diver and the wreck of culture coincide in the image of the "drowned face." While the modulation of the lyric "I" into the androgynous "we" presents problems, the strategy allows Rich to avoid the potential egotism of realistic self-dramatization and to expose the myth that the absence of "our names" signifies we are somehow unafflicted by the reductive sexual ideologies that prevail. Like many others in the volume, this poem raises the question of origin, of "where the split began" ("Waking in the Dark"): the poem privileges neither an external nor an internal site as the source of bifurcation, and it avoids hypostatizing a lost unity. Even the androgyny of the diver suggests not an original unity but the common bond of incompleteness, loss, and disrepair shared by all selves.

Past and Present

The better poems of Adrienne Rich always exact a certain price from anyone willing to participate in their vision. This is also true in the case of Diving into the Wreck. The kind of political awareness she advocates may cost a loss of personal freedom. The voyage into new territory may require us to adopt a generalized, mythic identity. The reader who accepts her vision uncritically has probably repressed the real anxieties accompanying self- recognition and personal change. The enthusiasm for her efforts to create a myth of androgynous sexuality is a typical case. To applaud the androgynous psyche or to announce this as its historical moment is easier than actually living out its consequences: “I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams back, the merman in his armored body ... I am she: I am he.” We all have more varied sexual impulses than we can act on, but will Rich’s romanticized androgynous figure, “whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes,” help bring them any closer to realization? While that is not a criterion one would ordinarily apply to all poetry, it is relevant in Rich’s case. Unlike Roethke, she cannot take pleasure in the powerlessness of poetic solutions to social and historical conflicts. Her poetry continually testifies to her need to work out possible modes of human existence verbally, to achieve imaginatively what cannot yet be achieved in actual relationships. Moreover, she hopes that poetry can transform human interaction. Yet perhaps that is not, after all, the point, at least in poems like “Diving into the Wreck,” despite its call for “the thing itself and not the myth.” For what we have here is the myth, as Rich herself has now implicitly acknowledged: “There are words I cannot choose again: humanism androgyny”. “Such words,” she goes on to say, “have no shame in them.” They do not embody the history of anguish, repression, and self-control that precedes them. “Their glint is too shallow”; they do not describe either the past or the life of the present. As Rich has recently written of bisexuality, “Such a notion blurs and sentimentalizes the actualities within which women have experienced sexuality; it is the old liberal leap across the tasks and struggles of here and now.” Indeed “Diving into the Wreck” demonstrates that one can suppress difficult feelings by mythologizing them. It may be that both Rich and her readers are relieved to have their fear and their desire conjoined in symbols so stylized and abstract.

Conclusion

Words are purposes and maps. They are intentions we have toward each other, whether we are aware of those intentions or not; they are ways toward and away from each other. This is such a brilliant and beautiful poem, one of Rich's best. (The other great one for me is "Splitting.") There is deep sadness here, and a sense of being broken by a life that is much more powerful and vaster than our intentions had led us to believe when we thought we could set goals and reach them. So what can we do? Throw away the myths and seek what treasure remains in the devastation of our dreams. And the treasure is there, obscured, but there. The fact that the book of myths will remain, but our names will not appear in it is very hopeful.  Further, I believe that the poem is one of the great poems of our time. It is a poem of disaster, with a willingness to look into it deeply and steadily, to learn whatever dreadful information it contains, to accept it, to be part of it, not as victim, but as survivor. The wreck represents the battered hulk of the sexual definitions of the past, which Rich, as an underwater explorer, must search for evidence of what can be salvaged. Only those who have managed to survive the wreck--women isolated from any meaningful participation or voice in forces that led to the disaster--are in a position to write its epitaph and their own names in new books.

Final Notation by Adrienne Rich

Final Notation by Adrienne Rich

Introduction and Theme

Final Notations is thematically an ambiguous poem. The poem is not understood because of the flowing imagery or stylistically presented issues, but because of the reader’s individual perception of the poem. We can say that unlike Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, which has a few fixed themes and issues, Final Notations is infinite in its interpretations.

Final Notation is a cultural, political and personally emotional poem which has been written in a simple and neat style with careful economy of words. The poet is experiencing new lifestyles, sexual issues, motherhood tensions, friendship or even doctor patient relationship. Final notations shows the last message of the poet or the New World Order of a colonial power when it has controlled a territory or is coming to control it.

In short, we can say that Final Notation shows us things which are difficult at first become easy, things which are strange at one time, become familiar at another, things which may seem painful, but become joyful and pleasant which encountered and things which people apparently looking disgusting in the first impressions, later become our heart and soul with the passage of time.

A Critique of Final Notations

Introduction

This is a fine, simple and little piece of poetry. The speaker is taken to be a lover and the addressee is the beloved. The lover is telling the beloved how to make love. The relationship between man and woman is very complex and this is the point to which the poem alludes.

The poem also shows a pregnant woman who is going to be operated on by her doctor and the doctor is giving instructions to the patients on how to react in this operation or is trying to reassuring the patient so that the seemingly difficult operation for the patient should be completed without any complication.

The poem has layers of meanings and open to various interpretations and the reader should be feel at large to interpret the poem at whatever level he wants. However, the approach suggested for the reader is three-fold. The first is male-female relationship, doctor-patient relationship and the policy of the colonial powers with the poor nations. Though some people might not agree, the poem does have imperialistic allusions in it structure and the American dominating attitude towards the world at large.

The poem is structurally simple, but thematically complex. The language is neat and no difficult word used, but the use of structure is ambiguous.

Development of Thought

Doctor-Patient relationship
The only complete analogy and supposition found in the poem is that a pregnant woman is lying before the doctor, may be to be delivered or her first visit to the doctor regarding her pregnancy. When the doctor is giving her instructions about the new experience. Though it looks difficult, yet

It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not be long, it will occupy your thought

The procedure is not long. Normally, it takes a few minutes unless complications arise. The child seemingly so disturbing and troubling in the belly of the mother after a short time and struggle on part of the woman will be delivered. As she says,

It will be short, it will take all your breath

The procedure may be difficult for some women who are taking this first experience, but it is very simple if it taken to be so. The few months of pregnancy are touching and delicate, special care needs to be taken, the overall trouble becomes a reward for the mother. As the doctor is says,

It will be simple; it will become your will.

The disturbing child in the belly ironically becomes the passion, will and the centre of full attention for the mother. The wants to get rid of the child during the delivery, but after the child is born, it becomes the most important thing of the world for her.

Lover and beloved relationship

It will not be simple, it will not be long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath.
It will be short, it will not be simple.

A young girl, running towards teens, feels a number of strange romantic and ideal desires, looks for partners and once finding a partner becomes terrified at the idea of physical relationship. As the woman, however bold or open-hearted, is naturally shy and repressed, is unable to understand the nature of the first physical union.   Ultimately the responsibility is left to the lover who in a small and brief style tries to explain the importance and process of this newfound physical relationship. The nature of this relationship is not simple, but once experienced, it will bring abundance of joys in the life the partner. This physical relationship may be the first one in the life of unmarried woman or may be the first on the first marriage night in which the lover is trying to make physical contacts. Thus things seemingly looking dangerous or troubling are sometimes sweet in actual experience.

Sexual Harassment in the Final Notations

It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not be long, it will occupy your thought
It a city occupied, as a bed is occupied
It will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

The modern world is the age of harassment especially for women. The young girls let loose for various experiences in the name of freedom and modernity or broadmindedness fall a prey to such harassment where studs try to encourage these young modern girls into such physical activities. These studs gradually make women slave to their own appetites; they occupy their bed like a ruler occupies a city. They leave them no options but be ruled and controlled by their passions.  The studs use various tactics to convince their new prey of the physical contact. The newborn and uncontrolled desires in women ultimately lead them astray without proper management or responsibility of their parents.

Theme of Eagerness and Oneness in Love

It will be short, it will take all your breath
It will be simple, it will become your will

Final Notations can also be taken to be a pure love poem in which the poet wants to achieve pure love regardless of the metaphysical speculations of Donne or casualness of Surrey-Wyatt in a concise and simple language. The most important point in lovemaking is eagerness and wilfulness. It is not difficult to achieve this state if sure determination and seriousness is show. This seriousness leads to oneness of the lovers when love becomes a passion or will of the two.

Unfaithfulness of the lover

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
You are taking parts of us into places never planned
You are going far away with pieces of our lives

The lover has left her beloved and went on to establish relations with some other woman and as a result he leaves a note behind giving her instructions that she should forget him. The above lines are an ample proof of this interpretation. The beloved outbursts into the above lines. The repetition of ‘coming into’ reinforces the idea of establishing relation with the beloved first and the phrase ‘pieces of life’ symbolises faithlessness and quit love on part of the lover. The love once developed in the beloved by the lover is disintegrating and those pieces are being shared by the lover with some body else.

Style, Imagery, Symbolism and Technique

The style of the poem is simple. There is no stylistic ambiguity. The only ambiguity lies in the nature of theme or the message of the speaker and also the identity of the speaker and the addressee needs to be resolved by different speculations from the reader. The themes of the poem range from personal to social, medical, psychological, political and emotional.
The repetition of different lines and words show intensity and importance of the theme (though theme is not directly addressed by the poet, it is to be explicated by the reader on the strength of his speculation. The lines are erratic which symbolise the complexity of the theme, again whatever it may be.
The title has been made ambitious. Does it related to music, dictation or what? In short, the poem is not rich in great images or symbols. The only thing important about the poem is complexity and that is what it is rich in.

Conclusion

Cutting the long story short, we can say that the poem depends on the experience of the reader for various interpretations. The complexity of the poem is also caused by the extreme subjectivity in the poem. The poem is too personal to understand in its true perspective. This complexity is the typical characteristic of modern American poetry which is based on confessional and experimental nature of their artists.

RAPE OF THE LOCK text line 445 onwards

Casting n gathering by seamus heaney some points

Casting and gathering
This poem is all about the experience of life but in heaneyz own way
A river is depicted in yhe poem , two banks represnts rightist and leftist
The title is quite significant in this poem
Casting ,throwing or sowing while gathering most probably represent the harvesting???
[12/14, 8:06 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: This poem pertain  two belief of progress  positive and negative  ideologies about life.main theme is contraries loss on one is the gain of other theses process of loss and gain essential for every one . Left and right both side people are engaged in their activities profoundly .. these poem show the activities of people on land and sea..
[12/14, 8:07 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Here again an anecdotal beginning of the poem
When v start to read the poem it appears as if a story is going to be told by the poet but it only consists of a single vers
[12/14, 8:09 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Also depict the Irish history same In this poem..
[12/14, 8:10 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: But this one  poem is for all age I think
[12/14, 8:12 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Its acctually about the struggle of human beings from the very beginning of the life so thats why years and years ago is
Being said by the poet
And the voice was always there some in favour while others against
Its all about the two extremes
One side says a thing while other differs
People always had queries about the systems
[12/14, 8:12 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: In very last of the poem he told the process of loss and gain ..this process constantly continue uptill the day of judgment..
[12/14, 8:12 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Yup
It is its all about the social jugement
[12/14, 8:14 PM] Pu Naila Aun: The workers kept on working while the sounds the voices ,either revolutionary or Protestant always prevailed
[12/14, 8:18 PM] Pu Naila Aun: On left bank people r busy in sowing on the other hand machines r harvesting obviously the machines can not work on their own , the human hands would be the operators but and in the river nets r being droped and noise r being raised by whom? By the believers of two diffrent ideologies
[12/14, 8:24 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Yup
When i was reeading the poem and was trying to explain the symbols used by poet it reminded me an english movie
The movie is about a laureate "the beautiful mind"
In that movie the hero of the movie was used to decode the ciphers
So when i was reading i felt that me too decoding the words of poet to assess what he acctually wished to say
When v explain a work of a poet v try our level best to decode his words but v can never achiev the real meanings or the state of the mind of a poet about a poem compossed by him
[12/14, 8:25 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Richating activity show the human being new invention like modren man they are busy to building a huge building and invent new machinery by their hands..
[12/14, 8:30 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Yes when we have ability to decode the writer words we can make our explanation best.
[12/14, 8:32 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Comimg back to the topic
In 3rd quatrain poet stats about his plight that he is neither fully awake nor dreamy but now is come of age and has gaind sort of a maturity and have seen both the sides  closly, each side is busy in his work yet they r giving voice to their views one side says an individual can not play any role in the society( who probably followed to the philosophical views Rousseau who voiced to the individual freedom, the captilists)
While the other group saying that u r every thing  like Hegel'z philosophy absolute authority of society ,,, socialist z
[12/14, 8:37 PM] Pu Naila Aun: But here heaney presents his own point of view that both r right in their views and then he gives an example of farming
Where one sows ,other reaps but the sole object of both is to grow grains for whom? Of course humans so the main purpose of both is to grow for the betterment of humans so how any of them can be assessed of  doing wrong
[12/14, 8:38 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Yes right know about Rousseau philosophy man is social animal can't survive individualy in society can explain hegal philosophy ..
[12/14, 8:38 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Ots all about to walk between two extrems and at the diffrence of opinion should not judge any one as a wrong doer
While he is presenting his ideas, his point of views

Novel-I~Suggested Questions For Tale Of Two Cities

Novel-I~Suggested Questions For Tale Of Two Cities

1. How sympathetic is Dickens towards the French Revolution? Which details illustrate his revulsion or attraction to the movement?

2. Compare the adherence to traditional gender roles by Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge. Is Dickens constrained by literary or social conventions, for example by making a manly woman the villain and a feminine woman the sentimental heroine?

3. How does religion color the attitudes of the characters in this novel? Compare Sydney Carton to Lucie Manette, or Jerry Cruncher to the Defarges.

4. Does the plot's reliance on fate and coincidence--including the resemblance of Carton to Darnay, the discovery of Dr. Manette's document, and the double recognition of Solomon Pross a.k.a. John Barsad by Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher--make the story less believable or less powerful?

5. How does Dickens reconcile his distaste for the Revolution with his identity as a social crusader? Does he believe in the people's right to revolt under an oppressive government?

6. Examine the motifs of light and darkness in this novel, and trace how they relate to Carton, Lucie, Dr. Manette, and/or Madame Defarge's character development.

7. The most recurrent criticism of this novel is that the characters do not have the psychological depth or development of other Dickensian figures. Does Sydney Carton's transformation undermine this claim? Is this criticism really fair toward the other characters?

8. Examine the theme of resurrection in the novel. Which characters are brought back to life and how? Is there any situation from which resurrection is impossible?

9. Dickens focuses mostly on the lower class in France, but what sense does he give of the lower class in England? Why was there no comparable class struggle in the same era?

10. Analyze Dickens's descriptions of mobs in England and in France. How do they differ? What makes a mob what it is? How do mobs make decisions?

Electra complex

Many kinds of coplexes have been used in this play
1st the electra complex where a daughter loves  the father adorably and hates the mother do not care about the mother so this the complex of lavinia towards her father , she is the one who has been suffering this ,and the distance from her father due to the civil war , and coz he is busy in the war and she misses him so badly at home the deficiency which has been made by the absence of his father is not being filled by anyone else
Yet she finds vrant whome she finds parallel to his fathers personality and falls for him unintentionally
2nd the Oedipus complex
And the suferers are bothe orin laviniaz brothe r and adam brant
Its quite an opposite to electra complex , in this effector adores the mother and doesnot care about father, and it vived example when orin has got heart during the war and took a sever injury to his head he often desired to see his mother , and in dreams he called her  she was alwats there in his subconscious
And adam brant who had find his mother as sufferer of his fathers wrath and once he had hit his father , qho was a drunkard and died due to the excessive use of ales or drinks hia mother told him to take revenge from mannonz ciz she always cursed them and considerd them the cause of her difficult life  so due to adorable adherence he came to mannons to take revenge
3rd complex of position and honour in the society
Mannons has had a great respect and a good reputation , which was dinted quit badly when david mannon married the maid if the house and morover when he and his mrs thrown out of tje house , people whisperd about them but has had not the guts to utter a word before them due to their social possion to which Lavinia wushed to secure by hiding or keeping the infidelitu of her motjer secret and to restrict her motives she warnd her and threatend her to expose before Ezra mannon
Inner complex
And now the bearer is laviniaz mother , she find that she had not been enjoing the king nd of liberty which she ever longed for to her , her husband was the biggest hinderance in between her and her desired liberty
Her desire for somones love , which she finally found in adam and now she want to get rid of this complx of incompleteness
Complex of guilt or of concious
Ezra mannon on his arrival ,after a long time , he express his feelings to his wife that during all his life he never behavd correctly towards his wife  but promises her to keep her happy in up coming life
And last but not the least complex of insecurity which probably induced in the mind of christine by her own daughter that she is over aged to be loved by brant for ever , after few monthes he would be fed up from her coz having no charm and beauty she had left with
[12/11, 8:56 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Psychological complex is also important lavi, orin and ezra evryone of them was effected by this
[12/11, 9:03 PM] Pu Naila Aun: A word Freudian psychology
I met with word several time then i decide d to grab some knowledge about this term so i ve  explored and fi d the FAC that it is all about the theories constructed by Sigmund Freud
Its all about the things that dream expresses the secret unconcious desires ,
[12/11, 9:08 PM] pu ms ayesha: Yes i read abt Sigmund Freud he intrepeated human mind in psychological terms
Consciousness, unconsciousness n sub consciousness
He also defined the types of dreams n how natural instinct like hunger n sex affect human personality
[12/11, 9:10 PM] pu ms ayesha: Infact he was the 1 who introduced n interpreted 2 kinds of Complexes i.e. Oedipus n electra complex n he borrowed tgese terms frm Greek mythology but elaborated in his own way
[12/11, 9:11 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Exactly
[12/11, 9:15 PM] pu ms ayesha: Samin American literature is scarcely comprehed by me
Any suggestions to improve my learning??
[12/11, 9:19 PM] pu ms ayesha: But i consider U worthy that's y i am asking U
Tge way U explained typs of complexes is commendable
Otherwise i would've get only electra, Oedipus n psychological complexes
[12/11, 9:33 PM] pu ms ayesha: I am not done n satisfied wid tge queries yet 1 day or le len?
[12/11, 9:39 PM] pu ms ayesha: Asma pls do guide me regarding this drama Mourning becomes electra
Hw should i prepare it its been a week n i am not done
Just to prepare question answers aftr reading summary ?
[12/11, 10:47 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Crucibles and morning become electra I like both drama ..anything difficult to understand in both plays feel free to ask me ..
[12/11, 10:49 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Play based on electra complex and Oedipus complex ..read Freud Sigmund theory will understand all very clearly...

Tollund man critical appreciation points

[12/9, 8:25 PM] Pu Naila Aun: The tolluns man
A poem with ritual and political back ground
The bog people used to sacrifice there men to goddess of fertility
These were ritual ,religioys sacrifices so here the poem opens with few sentimental desires to go and visite the place by poet where the dead body of the man was preserved after been aquired or digged up from bog land
Brief adescription about the deadbody  for istance his last meal would be some grains or seed which were in a hard form in his stomach
He was naked except a cap  a noose and a belt
Here the story of his death being reveald by the noose a rope tide around his neck to hang him it might be the way to sacrifice someone for goddess
And then in the next quatrain poet describes the situation which probably faced by the man who was sacrificed and the goddes the she would have held him so tight , or embraced him and took him down in the marsh slush , so his body  juices made the whole land fertile
[12/9, 8:30 PM] Pu Naila Aun: The area which was used in the past for such sacrifices has been so much digged by the diggers that it looks like a honeycomb
As honey comb looks with so many holes in it , same the land looks coz people go there for digging  and hope to find some thing precious and during their work they find the body of a sacrificed man which is now have been put in the museum at Aarhus  Denmark
[12/9, 8:38 PM] Pu Naila Aun: As the tollund man was sacrificed to make all the otjer people happy and to end the sufferings of otjers so the people of north Ireland were sacrificeing the lives for there motherland
Here the poet tried to delineate his contemporary age
The age where he is present and the situation is so beatufully described the plight of the people ,acctually it happend in 1968 when a conflict arised among catholic or the nationalist and the other were puritans loyalist
So it took almost 30 long years to end up
Here our poet is describing the conflict and the people died during this period r highly appriciated by seamus coz he himself belonged to the catholics but he never participated
Here he is giving the depictions about the age
[12/9, 8:47 PM] Pu Naila Aun: First he tells us the story of bog culture , theur perception s about the land but his acctual aim is to ensure the reader that blood is always necessary to restore the fertility of motherland
Bog people dod that in their way in the past ,but now a days term r changed , and the sacrifices remaind the same
Tje people were sacrificed for ritual fulfilments but today its for some other reasons or may be they too r killed for the sectarian battle?
[12/9, 8:47 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Yup he was a writer but most of his work included in our syllabus gives us vived explaination of his noationalism or patriotism
[12/9, 8:48 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Double loyalty he belong to Ireland and from his childhood observe the military exercise in the field.
From England he got all fame ...
Have sympathy for Ireland people but he can't protest as a Irish..in his poetry he depicts the effect  and  Violence on the Irish people..

American Literture-I~ Explanation Of the Poem 'Morning Song By Sylvia

American Literture-I~ Explanation Of the Poem 'Morning Song By Sylvia

MORNING SONG

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

This poem is part of the collection Ariel and it is considered part of the so called Confessional poetry, a kind of poetry drafted by a group of poets of the fifties of the twentieth century in which Sylvia Plath has been framed and which works are composed in a mode of verse that reveals the poet's personal problems in a very frankly way. Long time it has been considered as a characteristic of the collection the theme of suicide, as a hint of the intimate subjects dealt with in the poems, but as in the previous research of this paper has been stated, death poems were not part of this collection, being the poems that express ideas on death not part of the original selection made by Plath before dying.

.

The poem is composed in free verses; it does not seek a regular metre and rhyming scheme. It is composed by six stanzas of three verses each.

The first stanza begins with the word love, which is a good hint of the theme of the poem. It is, the birth of Sylvia's son and the feelings she experiments because of her maternity. This word, love, it is said to be the reason of the baby's coming to the world. This coming, the sense of movement of the action, is compared with that of a watch, as an object that starts working at a certain point, in the life of a person this certain point can be the moment of the birth. This mentioned watch is a gold watch, the adjective gold gives an idea of the importance of the concept compared to it, in this case the newborn. And the word fat, referring to this watch, alludes to the baby's shape, being babies often tubby and rounded in their shape when they are born. In the second verse Plath tells the moment the midwife slaps the footsoles of the baby, when babies are born, the midwifes or the doctors that help in the childbirths usually snap the baby's buttocks or, in this case, the footsoles to help them breath as they start crying. In the poem, this crying, described as bald, sets the moment the new person has come to the world. This idea is described as “[…] took its place among the elements”. Being these elements interpreted as the elements that compose the world, the natural elements, and, they may be as well, the elements human beings have created to conform the world as it is nowadays, or as it was in that moment of history when Sylvia Plath lived.

The second stanza describes how the arrival of the new born has been welcomed. The first verse talks about the echoes of the voices of the parents magnifying his arrival, these words give idea of the happiness brought to them by the birth. The child is described as “new statue in a drafty museum”, his nakedness is compared to a statue, this image can be easily evoked by the reader. The naked body of a baby, so delicate and soft, is comparable with the perfection of the statues chiselled by crafty sculptors. This image of the delicate baby is the cause of the parent's worries, of the end of the safety felt before the new born's arrival, because of the responsibility on the new person good development and growing. So Sylvia says they stand as blankly walls, just staring around the baby, expectant.

The third stanza begins comparing Sylvia's motherhood with the breaking of the clouds in rain. The rain, stated as a mirror which reflects the disappearing of the clouds themselves; extinction made by the action of raining and the blow of the wind. This expression may express the idea of motherhood not as a condition of possession by the mother. The baby belongs to the world, to itself, to the elements which surround his life in the world.

In the fourth stanza the worry of the mother as the baby sleeps is expressed. The breath of the baby is described as “moth-breath”, this comparison gives an idea of the speed and regularity of the baby's breath as it sleeps. As moths are characterized by the fast and constant movement of their wings and are nocturnal insects. Therefore, the movement of these insects is compared with the rhythm of the breath of the baby at night when it is sleeping. This breathing, expressed as a flying is described as flickering among “the flat pink roses”. These flat pink roses may be the decoration of the wall papers of the room where the baby sleeps as they are described as flat and walls are the limits of the rooms and the breathing, as the moths flying, collides with the limits of the room where it is taking place or as the verse says “Flickers among” them. The mother's worry and attention is expressed when she says that she wakes to listen to this breath and the sound that comes to her is said to be like the sound of the sea that moves in her ears. This description of the sound gives idea of the rhythm of the breathing, similar to the sound of the sea.

In the penultimate stanza the characteristic mother's state of alert is expressed when she says that if she hears a cry of her baby she stumbles from bed, in a clumsy way, being his clumsiness reflected by the composed term cow-heavy, and described as floral surely referring this term, floral, to the print of her Victorian nightgown. The mouth of the baby as it cries is described as a cat's mouth, this comparison may be because of the similarity of the baby's lament, surely longing for food, with that of the baby cat drawing for its mother attention. The last verse of this stanza links with the first verse of the next one and starts describing the moment of the daybreak

This last stanza as I said before links with the previous one where the window is mentioned. In this stanza it is said that the window square whitens, the day light is coming and in a poetic way she describes how the night ends by saying that it “swallows its dull stars”. The she describes the beginning of the baby's day. It starts babbling. This is a description of the baby's attempts to produce sounds, something characteristic of humans before we learn how to speak. These sounds are described as “The clear vowels rise like balloons”. The first sounds babies produce are most of all vowels. And the description of their production and heard like the rising of balloons in the air give clear idea of the constancy and intensity of the rising of these sounds.

Helen_of_Troy

#Helen_of_Troy

In Greek mythology, Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world. A daughter of the god Zeus, she is best known for the part she played in causing the Trojan War, a story told by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Some scholars suggest that Helen was also a very ancient goddess associated with trees and birds.

Birth and Early Life: Some myths say that Helen's mother was Leda, the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta. Others name Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, as her mother. Helen had a sister Clytemnestra, who later became the wife of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, and twin brothers Castor and Pollux, known as the Dioscuri.
Stories claiming Leda as Helen's mother tell how Zeus disguised himself as a swan and raped the Spartan queen. Leda then produced two eggs. From one came Helen and her brother Pollux. Clytemnestra and Castor emerged from the other. Other versions of the myth say that Zeus seduced Nemesis, and she laid the two eggs. A shepherd discovered them and gave them to Queen Leda, who tended the eggs until they hatched and raised the children as her own. In some variations of this legend, Helen and Pollux were the children of Zeus, but Clytemnestra and Castor were actually the children of Tyndareus.
When Helen was only 12 years old, the Greek hero Theseus kidnapped her and planned to make her his wife. He took her to Attica in Greece and locked her away under the care of his mother. Helen's brothers Castor and Pollux rescued her while Theseus was away and brought her back to Sparta. According to some stories, before Helen left Attica, she had given birth to a daughter named Iphigenia.
Some time after Helen returned to Sparta, King Tyndareus decided that it was time for her to marry. Suitors came from all over Greece, hoping to win the famous beauty. Many were powerful leaders. Tyndareus worried that choosing one suitor might anger the others, who could cause trouble for his kingdom.
Among those seeking to marry Helen was Odysseus, the king of Ithaca. Odysseus advised Tyndareus to have all the suitors take an oath to accept Helen's choice and promise to support that person whenever the need should arise. The suitors agreed, and Helen chose Menelaus, a prince of Mycenae, to be her husband. Helen's sister Clytemnestra was already married to Menelaus's older brother, Agamemnon.

The Trojan War: For a while, Helen and Menelaus lived happily together. They had a daughter and son, and Menelaus eventually became the king of Sparta. But their life together came to a sudden end.
Paris, a prince of Troy, traveled to Sparta on the advice of the goddess Aphrodite*. She had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world after he proclaimed her the "fairest" goddess. When Paris saw Helen, he knew that Aphrodite had kept her promise. While Menelaus was away in Crete, Paris took Helen back to Troy. Some stories say Helen went willingly, seduced by Paris's charms. Others claim that Paris kidnapped her and took her by force.
When Menelaus returned home and discovered Helen gone, he called on the leaders of Greece, who had sworn to support him if necessary. The Greeks organized a great expedition and set sail for Troy. Their arrival at Troy marked the beginning of the Trojan War. During the war, Helen's sympathies were divided. At times, she helped the Trojans by pointing out Greek leaders. At other times, however, she sympathized with the Greeks and did not betray them when opportunities to do so arose.
Helen had a number of children by Paris, but none survived infancy. Paris died in the Trojan War, and Helen married his brother Deiphobus. After the Greeks won the war, she was reunited with Menelaus, and she helped him kill Deiphobus. Then Helen and Menelaus set sail for Sparta.

Later Life: The couple arrived in Sparta after a journey of several years. Some stories say that the gods, angry at the trouble Helen had caused, sent storms to drive their ships off course to Egypt and other lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea. When they finally arrived in Sparta, the couple lived happily, although by some accounts, Menelaus remained suspicious of Helen's feelings and loyalty.
Many stories say that Helen remained in Sparta until her death. But others say that she went to the island of Rhodes after Menelaus died, perhaps driven from Sparta by their son Nicostratus. At first she was given refuge on Rhodes by Polyxo, the widow of Tlepolemus, one of the Greek leaders who had died in the Trojan War. Later, however, Polyxo had Helen hanged to avenge the death of her husband. One very different version of Helen's story claims that the gods sent an effigy, or dummy, of Helen to Troy but that she actually spent the war years in Egypt.

An Analysis of Stream of consciousness Technique in ‘To the Lighthouse’

Topic: - “An Analysis of Stream of
consciousness Technique in ‘To the
Lighthouse’
Introduction
Biography:-
Virginia Woolf was a popular British
author born on January 25, 1882 and died
on March 28, 1941. She is considered to
be one of the primary figures of both
Modernism and Feminism in the twentieth
century. Woolf is considered one of the
most psychological of all the Modernists;
Many of her later novels take place
entirely within her characters' heads,
focusing solely on the literary technique,
stream of consciousness.
Virginia Woolf, one of the prominent
representatives of modernist novelist in
England, has contributed significantly to
the development of modern novel in both
theory and practice. She abandoned
traditional fictional devices and
formulated her own distinctive techniques.
The novels of Woolf tend to be less
concerned with outward reality than with
the inner life. She also takes the readers
to the high glory of perception thinking.
The sense of liveliness her is depicted in
this novel that how the thinking and our
root of observation is defers. Her
masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, serves as
an excellent sample in analyzing Woolf’s
literary theory and her experimental
techniques. There is a mythical pattern in
this novel and how it is shown here and it
is symbolize that makes a kind of reading
of this novel. This paper is to attempt
every aspect and depict to her novel “To
the Lighthouse” and to deal with her idea
about stream of consciousness literary
techniques: indirect interior monologue
and free association. And also it is good
to see how Language, Subject, Self:
Reading the Style of the novel.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, To the
Lighthouse, Stream of Consciousness
technique,Mythical pattern, ( An Analysis
of Stream of consciousness Technique in
To the Lighthouse)
It does not present objective narration, but
attempts to replicate the thoughts.Which
shape the character's mind. She wrote a
novel called “To the Lighthouse” that
explored the minds of the characters
using the stream of consciousness
technique. This made the characters
thoughts and feelings mix into one
another while the outer actions and
dialogue come second to the inner
emotions and cogitations.To the
Lighthouse,have generated the most
critical attention and are the most widely
studied of Woolf's novels.
Ø What is Stream of Consciousness ?
In literature, stream of consciousness
writing is a literary device which seeks to
portray an individual's point of view by
giving the written equivalent of the
character's thought processes, either in a
loose interior monologue, or in Connection
to his or her sensory reactions to external
occurrences. Stream of consciousness
writing is strongly associated with the
modernist movement. Its introduction in
the literary context, transferred from
psychology.
• Stream of Consciousness is a literary
technique which was pioneered by
Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and
James Joyce.
• ‘Stream of consciousness’ is
characterized by a flow of thoughts and
images, which may not always appear to
have a coherent structure or cohesion.
The plot line may weave in and out of
time and place, carrying the reader
through the life span of a character or
further along a timeline to incorporate the
lives (and thoughts) of characters from
other time periods.
Ø ‘ Interior Monologue’
• The related phrase ‘Interior Monologue’
is used to describe in inner movement of
Consciousness in a character’s mind. A
stylized way of thinking out loud.Unlike
stream-of-consciousness, an interior
monologue can be integrated into a third-
person narrative. The points of view of
character’s thoughts are woven into
authorial description, using their own
language. This is the essential difference
between interior monologue and straight
narrative :
Two types of interior monologues
a. Indirect Interior Monologue
b. Direct Interior Monologue
Stream of Consciousness Narrative
technique in ‘To the Lighthouse’
ü Characters, Presented Through their
Own and through other’s Consciousness
ü Rejection of Traditional Technique
ü The Role of The Central Intelligence
ü Suspense and Curiosity
ü The Pattern : Conversation and Reaction
ü Sources of Unity
ü Third Person Narration
ü The Completion of The Circle
( Dhara Bhatt)
Virginia Woolf saws us a particular person
in this novel not only through the
Consciousness of the other persons. The
Conventional novel did not express life
adequately. She was of the opinion that
life was a shower of ever failing atoms of
experience, and not a narrative line. Life,
she said, was a luminous halo, a
semitransparent envelope surrounding us
from the beginning of Consciousness to
end.
She tried to experiment with the same
technique in her novel, ’To the
Lighthouse’. In which the character reveal
them very much in the same way.
However, her method differs from that of
Joyce in certain important respects.
Virginia Woolf does not put us directly
into the minds of her people all the time.
She does depict character through the
inner Consciousness of the Person’swhom
we meet in this novel. But she herself
remains the controlling intelligence,
speaking in the third person. While she
very seldom slips in Comments ofher
own, she remains the narrator, telling us
what is going on in the various minds.
Virginia Woolf Shows us a particular
person in this novel not only through the
Consciousness of that person himself or
herself, but also through the
Consciousness of the other persons. We
are given the interior monologues of the
various characters in this novel, and it is
largely through the twin devices of
Stream of Consciousness and the interior
monologue that we come to know the
various characters.
Thus, we see Mrs. Ramsay not only
through her own Consciousness but
through the Consciousness of Mr.
Ramsey, the child James, Lily Briscoe,
Mr. Tinsley,and Mr. Bankes. Similarly we
come to know Mr.Ramsay not only
through his own Consciousness but also
through the Consciousness of
Mrs.Ramsay, the young James, Lily
Briscoe, and Mr. Bankes. In fact, every
character in the novel is presented to us
through his own Consciousness and also
through the Consciousness of the other
characters. At the same time, the
characters are occasionally presented to
us directly by the all-knowing author of
the novel, and also sometimes bits of
conversation or dialogue between the
characters.
Ø Rejection of Traditional Technique
Modernist writer start the new style of
writing and reject the old style of writing
and also we can say that the writer of the
novel ‘TotheLighthouse’ by Virginia
Woolf’s start the new way of writing. Mrs.
Woolf’s Concern in writing novels was not
merely to narrate a story as the older
novelists did, but to discover and record
life as the people feel who live it. Hence
it is she rejected the conventional
technique of narration and adopted a new
technique more suited to her purposes. It
is for this reason that in ‘To The
Lighthouse’ she not told a story, in the
sense of a Series of events, and has
Concentrated on a small number of
Characters, whose nature and feelings are
represented to us largely through their
interior monologues. In order to capture
the inner reality, the truth about life, she
has tried to represent the moving current
of life and the individual’s Consciousness
of the fleeting movement, and secondly,
also to select from this current and
organize it so that the novel may
penetrate beneath the surface reality and
may give to the reader a sense of
understanding and completeness. The
interior monologues of the different
characters are, no doubt, given, but the
novelist, the central intelligence, is also
constantly busy, organizing the material
and illuminating it by frequent Comments.
Mrs. Woolf’s technique of narration is
quite different from that of the “Stream of
Consciousness” novelists. Writers, James
Hefley. “Far from being a stream of
Consciousness novel, ’To the Lighthouse’
is theobjective account of a central
intelligence thatapproaches and assumes
the characters. Consciousness, but does
not become completely identified with
any one Consciousness. This central
intelligence is thus free to Comment upon
the whole in what seems a completely
impersonal manner, as this short passage
shows:‘It is a triumph’ said Mr. Bankes,
laying his knife down for a moment. He
had eaten attentively. It was rich; It was
tender. It was perfectly cooked. How did
she manage these things in the depths of
the country? He asked her. She was a
wonderful woman. All his love, all his
reverence, had returned; And she knew
it.” “It is a French recipe of my
grandmother’s said Mrs. Ramsay,
Speaking with a ring of great pleasure in
her voice. Of course it was French. What
passes for cookery in England is an
abominations; It is pulling cabbages in
water. It is roasting meat until it is like
leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins
ofvegetables. ’In which’, said Mr. Bankes,
“All the virtue of vegetables is contained.”
Here the central intelligence is reporting a
part of the dinner Conversation.
‘To the Lighthouse’ may not have a logical
unity, a logical sequence of Cause and
effect, it is have a unity of a higher and
stronger kind i.e. emotional unity. Jean
Guiget has considered the point in detail,
and we may be excused for quoting from
him at length;
“Lily Briscoe, painting on the lawn,
fromtime to time costs a glance towards
the bay to watchthe boat on which Mr.
Ramsay, James and Cam aresailing. But
this link is purely eternal; The real unity
ofthe sections lies in the Coincidence of
Project andthought me the Completion of
Lily’s Canvas, thefulfillment of James’
plan. It is not so very importantthat Lily
sees the sails fall and Flap; What
common istheir common immobility: “Life
stands still here, and“The boat made no
motion at all.”
Ø Third Person Narration
The Third person narration is a very
Common novel device Virginia Woolf is,
however, very careful to mock her
direction of the narrative as little noticed
as possible. Her use of direct speech for
the interior monologues of her characters
makes it easy for her to work into these
mental soliloquies a number of
statements and ideas which are outside
the range of knowledge of character she
is dealing with. When, for example, at the
beginning, she describes the feelings of
James about his father, she moves from
what the child is thinking to what
Mrs.Ramsay habitually did and said,
through impersonal sentences:
“Had there been an ate handy, apoker, or
any weapon that would have gashed a
holein his father’s breast and killed him,
there and thenJames would have seized
it. Such were the extremesof emotion that
Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’sbreas
ts by his mere presence: Standing:
disillusioning his son and casting ridicule
upon his wife, who was tenthousand times
better in every way than he was(James
thought), but also with some secret
conceit athis own accuracy of judgment.
What he said was true.It was always true.
He was incapable of untruth;
Nevertampered with a fact; Never altered
a disagreeableword to suit the pleasure or
convenience of any mortalbeing, least of
all of his own children, who sprung
fromhis loins, should be aware from
childhood that life isdifficult…….”
The statements in the midge here clearly
develop from James is thinking, but we
seem to move away from the child
himself into a general comment, which, in
turn, merges into the description of Mr.
Ramsay’s attitude towards life. Yet we
hardly notice the shift because of the
uniformity of style; The two currents of
thoughts seem to flow together. Just as
this third person narration makes it
possible for Virginia Woolf to move
smoothly from one character to another,
so in the novel as a whole it is a unifying
Principle.
Conclusion:-
Thus, The lighthouse Stream of
consciousness is used as unifying factor
in the novel. The action moves on normal
Constructional lines from scene to scene
andfrom the mind of one person to that of
another. There is very little Complication.
These shifts from one consciousness to
another and these movements aremade
further easy by allowing every incident to
take place in a close knit homogenous
world. ’To The Lighthouse’ is a
masterpiece of Construction. It is
anorganic whole. It is a great work of art
which fully deserves the Praises that
have been lavished on it.
Woolf has cleverly avoided the drawbacks
of the stream of Consciousness novel,
and given form and coherence to her
material. She is not haphazard and
incoherent like the other “Stream of
Consciousness” novelists. Indeed through
her flexible style she fuses narrative and
description of thought, imparts farm and
unity, and conveys a sense of the
amazing richness and Complexity of life.

TWICKNAM GARDEN

CRITICAL APPRECIATION

“Twicknam Garden” is a sonorous (resonant; high-sounding) and thoughtful lyric. It was

most probably addressed to the Countess Lucy of Bedford for whom Donne had a

profound admiration. The lyric is distinguished by highly condensed feelings of sadness.

The poet is obviously in a mood of dejection. He gives vent to the anguish of his heart

which neither nature can soothe nor poetry. Only Donne’s emotion is the subject of this

lyric. There is a sort of sting in the tail or in the last two lines. Donne calls the fair sex as

the perverted sex but excepting this no scornful or bitter comments are made on

women.

DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT

It is remarkable that the lady to whom the poem is addressed was never in love with

Donne. The poet probably mistook her friendly regard for him for love. The poet feels

irresistibly drawn toward this “one of the most accomplished and cultured ladies” of the

seventeenth century. Her truth kills him, because he is deeply involved in her charm and

personality.

The most distinguishing feature of the poem is the atmosphere of sombre desolation that

pervades it. This cold, bleak and cheerless atmosphere is in perfect harmony with the

anguish of the poet. The poem reminds us of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci and

Shelley’s song, A Widow Bird Sat Mourning. We find the same bleakness, loneliness, and

dry unrelenting aspect of a leaden skied winter. The poem is steeped in grim and

overwhelming despair. The poet strikes a piercing note of sadness with the very first

line.

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears, the well defined and concrete images

drive home the utter despair and incurable pain of a love-lorn heart. For example the

cold hardness of a “stone fountain weeping out my tears” and “crystal phials” leave on

the mind an unforgettable impression of poignant sorrow. The frigid expression of tears

gives a unifying effect to the poem. The poet refers to tears in all the three stanzas.

Tears, in fact, control the diversity of imagery that we find in the poem.

The poem contains some of most marvellous of Donne’s “conceits”. In the first stanza we

have the startling conceit of “spider love”:

The spider Love, which transubstantiates all,

And can convert manna to gall.

Again, we have an equally brilliant conceit when Donne compares sad and poignant

memories of love to the serpent in the garden of Eden:

And that this place may thoroughly be thought,

True paradise, I have the serpent brought.

In the second stanza, the love-lorn poet yearns to be converted into the stone fountain

which would be shedding tears throughout the year. In the last stanza, ‘tears’ are called

“Love’s wine”. All these ‘conceits’ lend a peculiar charm to the lyric.

“Twicknam Garden” is a short poem, but it is one of the greatest expressions in literature

of poignant sorrow and piercing sadness.

Inspired by Lucy: - This poem was perhaps inspired by Donne’s passion for the

Countess Lucy of Bedford, a highly cultured and accomplished lady who did not feel

anything stronger than friendship for the poet. The poet has given a most powerful

expression to his frustrated (baffled) passion. His art which we can analyse to some

extent, deserves admiration.

An expression of disappointed love: - He comes to Twicknam garden in order that

the beautiful sights and sounds around him, might ease his anguish. But no, he finds

that his bleak and desolate mood does not yield to the soothing influence of the

atmosphere. On the contrary, the trees seemed to be laughing and mocking him to his

face. If the garden were as beautiful as the garden of Eden, the thought of love within

him was like the serpent to spoil the beauty of the place.

Contrast between the natural atmosphere and the poet’s mood: - Donne

expresses his mental state in a series of attractive conceits. He is a self-traitor, as he

cherishes in his bosom the spider love, which transforms everything, even the heavenly

manna can be turned into poison by it. If the garden is paradise, then his passion is the

serpent. He wishes to be a mandrake and grow there in the garden (for the mandrake is

a plant that feels pain) or a stone fountain, for he is always weeping,

Donne’s intellectual contempt for women: - In the third stanza, his intellectual

contempt for women is expressed in an intricate series of images. He is the stone

fountain and his tears are the true tears of love. Lovers should come and take away in

crystal phials these tears and compare them with those shed by their mistresses at

home. If those do not taste as Donne’s do, then they are not true tears of love. Thus he

implores lovers not to be misled by the tears their mistresses shed, for you can no more

judge woman’s thoughts by their tears than you can judge their dresses by their

shadow.

Paradoxical thought in the closing lines: - Donne ends his poem with a paradox

(anything that goes against the accepted opinion). The woman, he loves, is true and

chaste; she is quite honest, that is why Donne cannot enjoy her love. And it is the

perversity of the female sex that the only woman who is honest and true should be the

one whose honesty and truth kill the poet, otherwise, perhaps she would not be so

chaste and true. In Donne’s view, woman is a kind of plague devised by God for man.

CRITICAL COMMENTS

This poem was addressed to the Countess Lucy of Bedford—a cultured and accomplished

lady of the seventeenth century. She entertained a friendly affection for Donne the poet,

which could hardly be given the name of “love”‘. The poet, a sad and forlorn lover, finds

himself in a mood of dejection. Even nature fails to soothe his tormented soul. It is a

song of sorrow pervaded by nothing except the bleakness of despair. It expresses the

anguish of a lover’s heart who has fallen a prey to sorrow and who cannot drown it even

in nature. For its sombre atmosphere and intensity of grief, the poem has not been

surpassed by any lyric in English poetry. It is a passionate outburst of sorrow expressing

yearnings of unfulfilled love. The lady to whom it is addressed was never in love with

Donne. It is possible that Donne misconstrued her friendly regard for him. In its

poignancy of sorrow, the poem reminds us of Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci and

Shelley’s lyric, A Widow Bird Sat Mourning.

Imagery and symbolism in Twicknam Garden

Religious conceitsFirst stanzaSecond stanzaThird stanza

Religious conceits

As with most Metaphysical poetry, the real matter of Twicknam Garden lies in its imagery, here a series of brilliant conceits. Many of these conceits have religious origins, and we soon become aware of Donne's use of the ‘religion of love' language.

First stanza

If we look at the first stanza, what we find is a complex conceit woven from a number of quite different religious sources.

• The Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation (the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ believed to occur at the Mass)
• ‘Manna' is sometimes referred to as ‘the bread from heaven', a reference to the Israelites being supplied with a mysterious food whilst they were travelling through the wilderness (Exodus 16:14-15and Exodus 16:35)
• Here the ‘spider love' is the transforming substance, but, spiders, being poisonous, make it a sort of anti-transformation: from good to bad, from bread to ‘gall'
• ‘Gall', a bitter substance, often contrasted with food that is good to eat. The Gospel of Matthew describes gall mixed with vinegar being offered to Jesus Christ to drink while he was dying on the cross (Matthew 27:34)
• The final strand of the conceit is the reference to ‘True Paradise', or Eden (Genesis 2:8), the original perfect garden.
• The thing that transformed that from good was the serpent (Genesis 3:1-5). So now Donne is the serpent, turning a perfect place into a place of expulsion, grief and absence.

Andrew Marvell's poem The Garden uses similar imagery.

Second stanza

The conceits in the second stanza are more straightforward:

• the natural image of winter being obviously consonant with his own mood of desolation 
• Mandrakes had a symbolic meaning for the time: they were little plants with a forked root, often seen as symbolising males, sometimes females, especially anatomically. They were reputed to groan as they were pulled up. Some manuscripts have ‘groane', some have ‘grow' here. Since the groaning of mandrakes was an Elizabethan commonplace, this would appear the better reading.

Third stanza

• The third stanza's conceit of tears as something to be tasted is not unusual
• Donne manages to tie in the ‘bread' image of stanza one in his reference to ‘loves wine'
• Thus we have both the bread and the wine of the Mass.

But there is a reverse in the conceit:

• Whereas before he was the false presence, now his tears are the sign of the true
• The tradition of hearts being reflected in eyes is decisively rejected in Donne's cynical ending
• The comparison is made with shadows, which in fact tell us little about the actual clothes a woman may be wearing

The poem,  Twicknam Garden, by John Donne begins with his personal predicament. The poet is writing with agony and his lacerated self finds a succinct summing-up in the first two lines of the poem:

---

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,

Hither I come to seek the spring.

The poet feels so shrivelled and disconcerted that he decides in his mind to find something soothing for his afflicted nerves, and he comes into a garden, perhaps the garden of his patroness, Duchess of Bedford. The specific garden of his patroness to whom he has paid handsome tributes in many a poem, in no way sheds any significant light on the poet’s anguish that has unhinged him. The garden is not the garden of Marvell with multiple layers of meaning. In this poem, Donne’s garden is simply a place, luxurious and delighting to the tortured self of the poet. The poet expression, ‘True Paradise’ for the garden, he believes that the garden has magical property because he will receive such balms ‘as else cure everything’.

The panacea the poet presumes to discover is of no avail because in the last line of the stanza he says, “I have the serpent brought”. The image of the serpent has to be viewed in images: the image of the serpent and that of the spider love, have something   diabolical about them. The serpent in relation to paradise is the cause of the primal sin in the Garden of Eden, making Adam an exile into the world, condemned to live by the sweat of brow. The serpent is symbolic of the original sin bringing a life of travail for people. Spider love signifies something that is base and vile because the spider feeds on filth and dirt. In Donne’s poem, “Love’s Exchange” we find a similar low image for love: “Love, any devil else but you, Would for a given Soule give something too.”

In short, the deceitful nature of love impels the poet to bring in the two images: serpent and spider. The poet has at the back of his mind the disdain and indignity heaped on him by his lady-love and this unceremonious treatment at the hands of his lady-love is the cause of his disturbed state of mind. The poet lays blame at the door of love (love embodied in the mistress), and he adds another dimension to the treatment of the idea of love which has become the cause of his undoing. The lines: “The spider love, which transubstantiates all, and can convert manna to gall,” have three keywords, ‘transubstantiates’, ‘Manna’, and ‘gall’. The first two words impart scriptural reverberations to the poem.

Transubstantiation is the doctrine in Eucharist church which means that bread is the flesh of Christ and wine is His blood. It is an important ritual in church. The partaking of bread and wine recalls minding the crucifixion of Christ and Judas, one of Christ’s disciples instrumental in putting Christ on the cross. This is nothing but betrayal of love. Manna is food provided by God for Israelites during their long stay in the desert, when love and trust are not there sustaining the bond subsisting between man and man.

John Donne’s poem begins with his private emotion of grief, but the sensibility of the poet is such that instead of luxuriating himself in sorrow, he contemplates the idea of suffering with a genesis in loving a wider perspective.

In Donne, there is an affirmation of cool detachment and self-possession in the face of something that upsets him. He shows a response and congeals at worst into cold self-righteousness. Donne’s wit exhibits a cool sanity and a wary openness which goes much beyond the refusal of facile commitment or sardonic amusement at the way the world goes. He probes and sifts experiences and analyses with remarkable candour the various possibilities in a given situation without aligning himself summarily with a soft option of acceptance or rejection.

Twicknam Garden Analysis

Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,

Hither I come to seek the spring,

And at mine eyes, and at mine ears,

Receive such balms as else cure everything;

But oh, self-traitor, I do bring

The spider love, which transubstantiates all,

And can convert manna to gall,

And that this place may thoroughly be thought

True paradise, I have the serpent brought.

In the first stanza of Twichknam Garden, the poet who is lovesick and is sunk in the slough of despondency keeps his wits about himself and contemplates the reality of love in multiple facets: the love that is naïve, the love that that is pure and immaculate, and the love that has a seamy side. The telescoping of images in the brief compass of the first stanza – the images of spring, balm, paradise, serpent, spider and transubstiation roll into unity under the intensity of artistic process, giving the impression of the ruin wrought by love that works in an unbridled way and knows no moderation.

‘Twere wholesomer for me, that winter did

Benight the glory of this place,

And that a grave frost did forbid

These trees to laugh, and mock me to my face;

But that I may not this disgrace

Endure, nor yet leave loving, Love let me

Some senseless piece of this place be;

Make me a mandrake, so I may grow here,

Or a stone fountain weeping out my year.

The second stanza presents an awful prospect starting the poet in the face. The poet who came to the garden in search of balm finds that his expectations are shattered and the garden becomes a menace with a sinister design, and he, therefore, wants that the garden be folded in darkness: ‘Twere wholesome for me, that winter did, Benight the glory of this place.”

The poet wants to be some senseless piece of the garden. He wants to be a mandrake or stone fountain, and this impulse of regression to the world of rocks and plants is prompted by something in the poet that he fails to come to grips with. He finds that the trees glistening with bright foliage mock him and the poet makes a very despairing disclosure:

But that I may not this disgrace

Indure, nor leave this garden…

This is a galling experience in the sense that the poet finds himself in impasse and does not know how to overcome it. He does not feel anger towards the lady-love who is not responsive to his amorous advances. He wants self-effacement by merging himself into nature without giving vent to pent-up anger to his mistress. Here this state of mind of the poet has kinship with the Astrophel of Sidney’s sonnet sequence, like many other Petrarchan and Petrarch himself, reflecting the grim plight they are in, and thus powerless to amend it. In this universe of lovers, anger is not consonant with the attitude of the poet-lover. The response is nearer to simple human respect than to reverence or hatred.

However, it is certainly not genuflection before a semi-deity in the form of a lady-love. The point worth noting in respect of Donne’s treatment of the disdainful attitude of the mistress to him is that Donne deals in all the battery of sighs and tears supposed to be flimsy stock-in-trade of the Petrarchan mode of idealizing the ‘Impossible She’. Donne’s distinctive merit lies in a finely discriminated fidelity to natural experience, and he refrains himself from the Petrarchan adulation of lady-love.

Hither with crystal phials, lovers come,

And take my tears, which are love’s wine,

And try your mistress’ tears at home,

For all are false, that taste not just like mine;

Alas! Hearts do not in eyes shine,

Nor can you more judge women’s thoughts by tears,

Than by her shadow what she wears.

Oh perverse sex, where none is true but she,

Who’s therefore true, because her truth kills me.

The third stanza is an intensification of the probing and analytic mind of Donne making an inquisition on the experience of frustration in love. This stanza abounds in hyperbole when he says that lovers with crystal vials would come to him for collecting his tears with the injunction from the poet to compare his tears with tears of their mistresses at home. The poet cannot forbear himself going into high-faulting utterances that tears of all are false that taste not just like his. He indulges himself in making extravagant claims of being pure and steadfast in love and makes a brutal exposure of sham and pretence underneath the veneer of naïveté:

Alas! Hearts do not in eyes shine,

Nor can you more judge women’s thoughts by tears,

Than by her shadow what she wears.

Though the poet appears to have spared his Lady-love the ignominy he has heaped on the rest of woman folk, he, in fact, with a remarkable sleight of hand brings his mistress in the net of wide-ranging censure of women when he says, “O perverse sexe”. The expression, ‘perverse sexe’ is also severe indictment of capricious and scorn, and this contemptuous mien of his lady-love offers an affront to him. She is a pervert because she has outraged the first primal state of nature in which love for love is an innate condition of life.

In short, the poet wants the naturalness of impulses seeking their fruition without, in the least, being impaired and warped by the massive indifference and nonchalance of the lady-love.

On the surface Twicknam Garden appears to share the strain of idealization in the Petrarchan mode in the light of the over-ceremonious gravity of manner. But there is no denying the fact that there are continual deflating touches of hard realism perceptible in the images of self-traitor, spider love, transubstantiation, Manna and gall, and it makes the poem a huge, high, comic hyperbole.

Like Donne’s poem ‘Love’s Deitie’, flouting the accepted pieties and denying the basis of courtly servitude of the Petrarchan mode, ‘Twicknam Garden’, too, asserts that an unreciprocated love is no love, and therefore, he breaks into the damaging exclamation, “O perverse sexe”