ODE ON A GRECIAN URN

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats: Summary and Critical Analysis

Ode on a Grecian Urn is an ode in which the speaker addresses to an engraved urn and expresses his feelings and ideas about the experience of an imagined world of art, in contrast to the reality of life, change and suffering. As an ode, it also has the unique features that Keats himself established in his great odes.

The features of Keatsian Romanticism and Keats’ philosophy of art, beauty and truth are also important in this poem. Though it is a romantic poem, we find the unusual classical interests of Keats in the style and form of this poem. This is a romantic poem mainly because of its dominant imaginative quality.

Like Wordsworth’s nature, Keats' imagination is a means to understand life, a means of the quest for truth and beauty, and the most reliable mode of experience and insight. The speaker in the poem begins with reality- an ancient marble urn with engravings around it. He addresses to the urn as a virgin bride of quietness. Time is slow for it. It is unchanging, perfect and silent. The carving around the urn is expressing the story of the pilgrims, lovers and other mysterious people recorded in times of gods and men on its outside. In the poet's imagination, this world and people are made immortal and beautiful by art.

The Ode on a Grecian Urn expresses Keats's desire to belong to the realm of the eternal, the permanent, perfect and the pleasurable, by establishing the means to approach that world of his wish with the help of imagination. This ode is based on the tension between the 'ideal' and the 'real'. Keats here idealizes a work of art as symbolizing the world of art which represents the ideal world of his wish at an even deeper level. Then he experiences that world thus created through imagination. In this poem, the two domains of the transient real and the permanent ideal are the two facets of a deeper reality, the reality of imaginative experience. The perfect, permanent and pleasurable world of the Urn, or that of the ideal, stands against the destructive corrupting and painful effects of time. Keats’ fascination with the immortality of art is duly counterbalanced with his awareness that it is lifeless. He neither supports gross realism against truly imaginative art, nor does he wander in imagination alone. Life compensates for the incompleteness of art and art compensates for the transience of life.

This ode which represents Keats mature vision consists of one of his central philosophical doctrines of art itself: "Truth is Beauty and beauty truth". This famous maxim of Keats has an intellectual basis of truth and also an emotional basis in beauty. Art may appeal to the sensuousness or just the emotion of common people, but Keats' response extends from the sensuous to the spiritual and from the passionate to the intellectual. Keats establishes a balance between the real and the ideal, and art and life, and he finds the deepest of reality in its balance. This ode gives a much importance to passion as to the idea of permanence. It is not a lyric of the escape of a dying young man, unwilling to face bitter life into the realm of everlasting happiness, but is a poem that embodies his mature understanding.

Keats indicates a contrast between the unchanging 'Urn' and temporal life in the very beginning of the poem, but shifting to the other side from where he seems to prefer warm life against the 'Cold Pastoral' where he finally resolves the duality in his doctrine of beauty and truth. The Ode begins with an apostrophe to the urn: "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian". Keats addresses the urn as a bride of quietness that is still unravished by time. That reminds us of life that is ever ravished by time. The urn narrates its history in a silent but musical form. The silent music which Keats, the addressee, feels he can hear is sweeter than the music of the human voice for it is permanent. Unlike the temporal presentation of poetry which is prone to narrate the histories of human being, the urn narrates a 'leaf-fringed legend' as if it were in space rather than in time. The narration of the urn is itself liberated from time.

The worlds of reality and of imagination (or the real and the ideal) are explicitly contrasted in this ode. But the permanence of art created out of imagination is a complement to the temporary aspect of life. The creation of art and its realization in the contemplation of a higher reality is a complement to the tragic awareness of temporal and painful life. Even the realities are of two kinds: the reality of life or the objective reality and the reality of art or the world of imagination. On the one hand, the lover in the world of the urn can never kiss his beloved as one can in real life. But on the other hand, the lover on the urn has the privilege that the beauty of his beloved can never fade away – as it happens in real life. This is why the poet is seeking for the reality of life to be like that of the ideal art. The urn's immunity to the time could not be an absolute ideal without the consummation of love. But the temporary satisfaction in life only intensifies the awareness of transience by consummation itself. The act of imaginative experience can bring together the unheard into a lasting melody. The poet who is emotionally involved with the picture of passion also has the unifying vision that reconciles the real with the ideal by idealizing the real.

In short, the permanently ideal world of the urn is presented in the urn that is lifeless thing when seen from the viewpoint of real life. But the idea that comes under the domain of imaginative reality is reconciled in the act of imaginative creation of the urn’s legend. Therefore, the real life is complemented and enriched by this ideal. Thus, the two domains of the real and the ideal coming into conflict as usual, ultimately reconcile to make a more permanent truth as asserted in the 'truth and beauty' maxim. To sum up, in this ode, Keats begins by idealizing, personifying, and immortalizing a real object. This ideal at first clashes with the real but is reconciled by imagination and insight at the end. The poem begins with an address to the Grecian urn and with almost envious amazement, but it ends with the realization that beauty or ideal is also a dimension of the truth of the real; the beauty of imaginative experience is a part of reality or truth and the knowledge of all truth is beautiful.

In the Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats tries to state that neither the beauty of nature nor the beauty of art can console us for the miseries of life. The life of the figures on the urn possesses the beauty; the significance, and the externality of art; and this, in the third stanza explicitly, and throughout the poem implicitly, is contrasted with the transitory-ness, the meaninglessness, and the unpoetic nature of actual life.

The Ode is constructed pictorially in spatial blocks, for the eyes to take in serially. Keats had a genius for drawing vivid and concrete pictures mostly with a sensuous appeal. The whole of this poem is remarkable for its pictorial effects. The passion of men and gods, and the reluctance of maidens to be caught or seized is beautifully depicted.

(M.A English Part 1 Paper 2 Drama) Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

(M.A English Part 1 Paper 2 Drama)        Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Important Quotes

The following important quotes convey information about themes, symbols and motifs or the characters of the play. Section (as divided by the chorus) and line numbers are indicated.

There are many translations of the play, these quotes and line numbers refer to the translation by Robert Fagles The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus, published by Penguin Classics (1st edition).

Section 1. Lines 6-9:

“I thought it wrong, my children, to hear the truth from others, messengers. Here I am myself—you all know me, the world knows my fame: I am Oedipus”
- Oedipus

Oedipus addresses the people of Thebes in this opening passage, which right away sets up the paradigm of dramatic irony Sophocles employs throughout the work. What makes these particular lines ironic is that Oedipus is known not only to the people of Thebes for defeating the Sphinx, but by the actual theater audience because of his terrible fate, which had long been known through the retelling of myths. Also, it is through messengers that Oedipus eventually pieces together the puzzle of his life, leading him to his ghastly revelations—the truth—of his life.

Section 2. Lines 284-285:

“I curse myself as well…if by any chance he proves to be an intimate of our house”
- Oedipus

Oedipus says these lines while pronouncing a curse on the murderer of Laius. He hasn't yet realized he is the murder and is thus cursing himself—a curse that will later be carried out. This decree of punishment is ironic because he is both judge and criminal.

Section 2. Line 499:

“This day will bring your birth and your destruction”
- Tiresias

Spoken by Tiresias to Oedipus, this line acts as a riddle to Oedipus, a master at solving riddles, except he has no patience for this one. Tiresias provokes Oedipus by challenging his ability to solve riddles. This line also foreshadows the origins of Oedipus, the death of his wife, the loss of his sight, and the decree he pronounced on Laius's murderer being carried out upon Oedipus himself. Tiresias is directly referring to Oedipus's peripeteia, or reversal of circumstances.

Section 4. Lines 963-967:

“Pride breeds the tyrant violent pride, gorging, crammed to bursting with all that is overripe and rich with ruin—clawing up to the heights, headlong pride crashes down the abyss—sheer doom!”
- Chorus

This commentary on the effects of pride occurs when Oedipus is quickly finding out more details about his two edged curse, and does not cease trying to find the truth, despite pleas from Jocasta. The sentiment of pride being Oedipus’s downfall is one that is repeated throughout the play, with Tiresias being the first to mention it. Oedipus is a proud man, he is praised as the King of Thebes and the defeater of the Sphinx, but it is his pride, his own belief that he is a good man who is favored by the gods, that leads him to unravel this very belief. In his attempt to find the historical evidence to prove he is favored by the gods, he only proves to himself and those around him that he suffers from a cruel fate.

Section 5. Lines 1188-1190:

“I count myself the son of Chance, the great goddess, giver of all good things—I'll never see myself disgraced”
- Oedipus

These lines are spoken by Oedipus before he is aware that the prophecy he tried avoid has come true. However, this quote is just as true at the end of the play, where Oedipus knows and accepts his horrible fate. In Greek mythology, Fortune (Chance) is the goddess of fate and she is depicted as veiled, as to be unbiased of those to whom she was distributing good or bad luck. In the situation in which he says this line, Oedipus is dealing with the newfound fact that the people who raised him were not his parents. He thinks that because his patronage is unknown, that Fortune must be his mother, since he has been gifted with greatness. At the end of the play, the irony is that Oedipus is still greatly under the guidance of Fortune, but rather than favoring him, it destroys him.

Section 7. Lines 1471-1472:

“What good were eyes to me? Nothing I could see could bring me joy”
- Oedipus

Oedipus speaks these lines in response to a senator’s questioning as to why he gouged out his own eyes. He believes it is better to no longer see the things and people around him. This is a testament to Oedipus’s character that he is willing to accept a harsh, self-administered punishment, and accept it with all the grace he can muster. At this point in the play, Oedipus sees no alternative to blind exile and speaks calmly in lyric form.

Oedipus Rex: The Three Types of irony

Oedipus Rex: The Three Types of irony

Oedipus Rex is one of the best Greek tragedies of all times. The Oedipus Rex irony is the king’s tragedy of fate. This article will help you identify the different dramatic ironies of Oedipus Rex as categorized according to verbal, tragic and situational ironies.

Brief Overview About the Playwright.

Oedipus Rex is the king in a story by Sophocles, one of the best Greek dramatic playwrights of all times. The Oedipus Rex irony is focused on the king’s tragedy of fate. Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides were acclaimed as the three greatest ancient Greek tragedians during the Golden Age of the Greek Drama.

Sophocles (495-405 B.C.) came from an affluent family of merchants and received the best education offered during that time. Because of his beauty and grace, he was invited to participate in many dramas. He was a great innovator and made significant improvement in the presentation of Greek tragedies:

He eliminated the trilogic form of always having three related tragedies in a drama; instead he presented only one complete story; and
He reduced the importance of the chorus by adding a third actor in the play.
Out of the 123 plays he wrote, only 7 survived: Ajax, Antigone, Trachinian Women, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus of Colonus.

The following are the ironies presented in Oedipus the King:

The Dramatic Irony

Dramatic irony is extensively used in the play to emphasize the twist of fate that hound the protagonist. These tragic events happening to the characters are unknown to them but well-known to the audience.
1. Verbal Irony is illustrated in the hero’s speeches.

Oedipus demands that the evil man who murdered Laius be punished, but he is unaware that he is the murderer.

Oedipus accuses Creon of framing him for the murder of Laius so that Creon would become king. Creon states that he is not interested in being king as he is contented with his present position of wealth and power.
Oedipus explains that he ran away from his parents to avoid the prophecy that he would kill his own father and marry his mother. He does not know that he is adopted and his true parents were Laius and Jocasta.
Oedipus ridicules Teiresias for his blindness but Oedipus is also a sightless, witless and senseless man to the truth of his own actions.

2. Tragic irony is shown by the character’s actions and even verbal actuations resulting in a pathetic outcome which the spectators are aware about beforehand.
Due to the prophecy, Oedipus leaves his parents and escapes to another city. He does not know that he was an adopted son. His escape leads him to the city where his true parents reside.
Unknowingly, he kills his own father and refuses to admit the crime.
Oedipus does not know that he marries his own mother and has four children with her. Incest is one of the greatest crimes, so he causes the plague to happen in his city.

3. Situational irony is the disparity between the anticipated outcome and the factual end when invigorated by dissolute fitness.
The situations are: Oedipus is an adopted son; he hears the prophecy; so he escapes to the city of his real parents.
It happens that he unknowingly kills a man who happens to be his father and is persuaded to marry the queen who happens to be his own mother.
The plague strikes the city as punishment for committing incest.

Irony is very effective in emphasizing the hero’s downfall as illustrated in Oedipus Rex Irony. The audience looks at Oedipus suffering his cruel destiny without considering him less than a hero

The Arrival of the Bee Box Analysis

The Arrival of the Bee Box Analysis

‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ (hereafter I shall refer to the poem as ‘The Bee Box,’) is a brilliant example of the poetry by Sylvia Plath, with the use of similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, internal rhyme and allusion quite prevalent within. ‘The Bee Box’ like any good poem, is open to all manner of different interpretations. Unfortunately most readers of Plath’s work sadly always seem to reflect on the poet’s decaying mental state and her ultimate ill-fated demise. This is surely a tragic axiom, as it cruelly detracts from the finer intricacies of her work. One such overlooked interpretation of this poem is its political connotations. In particular ‘The Bee Box’ makes reference to the “Winds of Change” speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in Cape Town, on the 3rd February 1960, to the South African Parliament ‘With the swarmy feeling of African hands’. ‘It is like a Roman mob,’ refers to the (fourth?) paragraph of Macmillan’s speech which starts with “Ever since the break up of the Roman empire…”

‘Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!’ alludes to the infamous Sharpeville Massacre, which occurred less than seven weeks after the speech where a man was shot by police in Vanderbijlpark in a mass protest ‘Black on black, angry clambering’. The shooting that sparked the massacre happened due to nervousness of the police as a few weeks’ earlier nine policemen had been killed by a mob ‘…like a Roman mob’ at Cato Manor, a small township outside Durban. Marcus Porcius Catō Uticēnsis coincidentally was a famous Roman politician, also known as Cato the younger or Cato Minor. To further emphasise this point Plath makes continual references to the massacre with fragments throughout the poem ‘wood box’, ‘coffin of a midget,’ ‘They can die,’ and ‘funeral veil.’ Plath notes the risk involved with changing policies in Africa ‘it is dangerous’, and her feeling of defencelessness towards the events ‘I have to live with it overnight’ despite the distance she is from it ‘There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.’ ‘I am not a Caesar,’ makes reference again to Cato, as he opposed Julius Caesar’s laws (59 BC). It is also of interest that Gaius Cassius Longinus, a blood relative of Cato, murdered Julius Caeser.

‘Minute and shrunk for export,’ suggests the inexplicable (considering the sanctions against the Union of South Africa by the United Nations) increase of South African exports, six weeks after the “Winds of Change” speech; South African exports having increased by 50% to Europe, 65% to America and by 300% to Asia. Alternatively the exports can always be returned ‘They can be sent back.’ Plath also discusses the fact that despite Britain’s stand against apartheid and support for black nationalist groups in the Union of South Africa to achieve independence an issue ‘almost to heavy to lift’ no real aid was extended ‘I need feed them nothing,’ ‘The Bee Box’ comments on this watershed event with the beginning of democratically elected governments in the Union of South Africa. With Plath identifying that it is we the public who give power to elected officials with the iambic tetrameter ‘I ordered this, this clean wood box’. Any lay person who has ever listened to Question Time can relate to ‘It is the noise that appals me most of all, The unintelligible syllables.’ Plath persists with this feeling of bewilderment through the use of brilliant metaphors ‘I lay my ear to furious Latin.’ and ‘I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.’ Conversely she notes that she could remove them from office ‘They can be sent back’ and ‘The box is only temporary.’ However, just like a car accident or an itch too sensitive to scratch, she is intrigued ‘And I can’t keep away from it.’

‘The Bee Box’ does not contain any repetitive rhyme or metre. It has seven stanzas all five lines in length, and a final single sentence ‘punch line.’ As with all of Plath’s poetry it is carefully structured using multiple techniques giving it a layered textured feel. ‘The Bee Box’ has internal rhyme thread throughout, examples include: ‘Square as a chair’, ‘box is locked,’ ‘my eye’, ‘appals me most of all,’ ‘mob…god,’ and ‘blonde colonnades’. She also uses onomatopoeia to great effect with ‘din in it’, ‘unintelligible syllables,’ and in the final three stanzas the use of vowel sounds (a technique also used to great effect in her poem “Mushrooms”) to imitate the sound of bees ‘me’, ‘tree’, ‘cherry’, ‘immediately’, ‘honey’, ‘me’, ‘sweet’, ‘free’ and finally ‘temporary’. In closing I again wish to plead with all readers of Plath’s works to overlook her life history and appreciate her poetry for what it is. I can guarantee it will reveal to you a breathtakingly beautiful world through the eyes of a supremely talented poet.

Historical_Linguistics

#Historical_Linguistics:

Definition:
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. Language change is both obvious and rather mysterious. The English of the late fourteenth century, for example, is so different from Modern English that without special training it is difficult to understand the opening lines to The Romance of the Rose cited below.

Many men sayn that in sweveninges
Ther nys but fables and lesynges;
CHAUCER, THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE (c. 1370)

The existence of such differences between early and later variants of the same language raises questions as to how and why languages change over time. The origin, growth and development of language is an important event in the life of the human race. Linguistics deals with this event. 

History of historical linguistics:
People have thought about the origin of languages for a long, long time. Like other early looks into nature and the universe, the early ideas about language where at best obvious (realizing that two very similar languages were related) or lucky guesses, at worst dead wrong, and almost always ethno-centric (only paying attention to nearby languages. This, of course, wasn't always their fault, since communication was so slow. However, for example, the Greeks simply considered most languages in Europe to be "Barbarian", even though there were certainly several distinct "Barbarian" languages).
One of the earliest observations about language was by the Romans. They noticed that Latin and Greek were similar. However, they incorectly assumed that Latin came from Greek. The reality is that both came from Indo-European. More on that later.
There were lots of people looking at languages in the middle ages. However, most of them were trying to show Hebrew giving rise to all of the world's languages, specifically European languages. This never really worked, since Hebrew is not directly related to Indo-European languages.
When Europeans started travelling to India about 300 years ago, they noticed that Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India, was similar to Greek, Latin, and other languages of Europe. In the late 18th century, it was first correctly theorized that Sanskrit and the languages of Europe had all come from the same language, but that that language was no longer living. This was the beginning of Indo-European. Since then, many languages from all over the world have been studied, and we are starting to get a good idea of how all the world's languages may be related.
Historical linguistics is concerned with both the description and explanation of language change.

Kinds of historical linguistics:
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. There are basically two types of study about the change in language.

Synchronic linguistics studies a language's form at a fixed time in history, past or present. Saussure proposed that language as a system of signs be studied as a complete system at any given point in time. Like chess, the important part of language is how pieces move and the positions of all pieces relative to one another. The shape of each piece is only important in that its potential can be recognized.
A synchronic relationship is one where two similar things exist at the same time. Modern American English and British English have a synchronic relationship.

Diachronic, or historical, linguistics, on the other hand, investigates the way a language changes over time. Diachronic is the change in the meaning of words over time. For example in the way that 'magic' meant 'good' in youth culture for a period during the 1980s (and, to a lesser extent, beyond). It is thus the study of language in terms of how it visibly changes in usage. It is based in the dictionary meaning of words.
A diachronic relationship is where related things exist separated by time. 12th century English and 21st century English have a diachronic relationship.

The diachronic or historical linguistics is chiefly concerned with the growth of various languages or language as a whole through different periods of history. It divides this growth into different periods of progress, and describes them in its own manner. The various linguistic changes— phonological, grammatical and semantic—that have occurred in the past, are recorded in it. Just as history studies past events and happenings to throw light on the present social and political conditions, so linguistics studies changes and occurrences in language in the past so as to throw a light on, or account for, its present state. History is concerned with human beings; and so is language and linguistics. Thus, Linguistics and History are similar and thus become Historical Linguistics. It also forms a Typology – the classification of languages into different types; to find out how languages have developed; The purpose of Historical linguistics has been summed by Saussure:

“Describe and trace the history of all observable languages and finding their families. To determine the forces at work in languages and deduce and the general laws to which all specific historical phenomenon can be reduced (language universals)”
Language is not static or stagnant:
Change is the law of Nature. Everything that exists on this earth, including human life and society, changes. Language changes because the society in which it is used, changes. Language is never static or stagnant. It is always in a state of flux which involves change. Change is inevitable in language but language changes are frequent, gradual, and often abrupt.

Causes of language change:
1.The individual as well as society play a part in language change. The speech habits of one generation are based on those of the earlier one, and a change is likely to occur during the course of the acquisition of these habits by others.
2.The rise of new concepts and discovery of new objects cause changes in the vocabulary, structure and sounds of a language.
3.Geographical conditions also affect changes in the sound of a language.
4.Language changes because new concepts and discoveries are born, a huge migration takes place, a prestige is required so language is molded to suit new trends and also language changes because man is accustomed to least effort in speaking.
There are usually five types of changes in language:

phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic and lexical.

Phonological Change: One of the major sound changes in the history of the English language is the so-called Great Vowel Shift. In Middle English, spoken from 1100 to 1500, the word house was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English word boot, while boot was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English boat. The change that affected the pronunciation of house also affected the vowels of mouse, louse, and mouth. This illustrates an important principle of sound change. The Old English word hām [haːm] ‘home’ in the second sentence became [hɔːm] in Middle English, and then [howm] in Modern English.

Morphological Change: In its morphology, Old English differed significantly from Modern English. The suffix -an on the Old English word for ‘sent’ indicates both past tense and plurality of the subject ( hı̄ ‘they’). An ongoing morphological change in English is the loss of the distinction between the nominative, or subject, form who and the accusative, or object, form whom. English speakers use both the who and whom forms for the object of a sentence, saying both “Who did you see?” and “Whom did you see?” The modern English word ‘stone’ has only three additional forms: the genitive singular ‘stone's’, the plural ‘stones’, and the genitive plural stones'. All three have the same pronunciation. In Old English they were different: stan, stanes, stanas, and stana, respectively. In addition, after certain prepositions, as in under stanum (under stones).

Syntactic Change: Differences in word order are also readily apparent, with the verb following both the subject and the direct object in the first sentence and preceding both the subject and the direct object in the second. Neither of these word orders would be acceptable in the Modern English forms of these sentences.
V S O
þa sende sē cyning þone disc
then sent the king the dish
‘Then the king sent the dish.’
In modern English, the basic word order is subject-verb-object, as in the sentence “I know John.” The only other possible word order is object-subject-verb, as in “John I know (but Mary I don't).” Old English, by contrast, allowed all possible word order permutations, including subject-object-verb, as in Gif hie ænigne feld secan wolden, literally meaning “If they any field to seek wished.”

Semantic and Lexical Change: In Middle English, the word nice usually had the meaning “foolish,” and sometimes “shy,” but never the modern meaning “pleasant.” Change in the meanings of words is semantic and can be viewed as part of the more general phenomenon of lexical change, or change in a language's vocabulary.

Semantic broadening is the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or more inclusive than its historically earlier form
bird ‘small fowl’ ‘any winged creature’
barn ‘place to store barley’ ‘farm building for storage and shelter’
aunt ‘father’s sister’ ‘father or mother’s sister’

Historical Linguistics is the study of how languages change over time and the relationship among different languages. Historical Linguistics studies the process of language change, the ‘genetic’ relationship between languages and how best to classify languages into groups. Using biological analogy, the linguist studies that languages are genetically related and are called a Language Family.

Other source
Historical linguistics is the study of not only the history of languages, as the name implies, but also the study of how languages change, and how languages are related to one another. It might seem at first that this would be a rather dull, uneventful field of study, but that is far from the truth. Historical linguistics is full of lively debate and controversy and occasionally some nasty words are thrown around.
The main job of historical linguists is to learn how languages are related. Generally, languages can be shown to be related by having a large number of words in common that were not borrowed (cognates).

Word borrowing:
Languages often borrow words from each other, but these are usually not too difficult to tell apart from other words. When a related group of languages has been studied in enough detail, it is possible to know almost exactly how most words, sounds, and grammar rules have changed in the languages.