Here is Frau Freud, in mad lexical delight, listing every word she can think of for Penis — and at last, in a bout of new theory-making that would have given us a very different psychoanalysis, she drops Penis Envy and opts instead for Penis Pity. Actually or symbolically, practically or poetically.
A Practical Introduction and Guide to Explication
Only a man would think anyone could. She has no objection to sleeping with him first, or bringing him breakfast in bed. The skeleton of language is female. Deeper, it seems, than our mother tongue. What you risk reveals what you value. This thoughtful, funny poem questions the masculine obsession with money — far from the stereotype of woman as a gold digger. What Mrs Midas misses most about her husband is the one thing she can never have: The ballad-form rhyming here is tidy and deadly. Duffy, throughout her work, has made good use of both the English ballad and its 19th-century development, the dramatic monologue.
The ballad form is made for narrative stretch. Ballads had a lucrative disruptive sideline as political agitprop, in broadside ballads, as they became known. In , Wordsworth and Coleridge , the Lennon and McCartney of the 18th-century poetry scene, published their Lyrical Ballads , a moody, up-close, melodic extension of the ballad form, making it both personal and political — about ordinary people, not legends or hate figures, and using natural speech and the sights and sounds of what was around them. They were modernising poetry.
The ballad is usually a third-person narrative, and it can run on forever — it was designed to have verses added — while its later development, the dramatic monologue, throws the reader into a highly charged first-person narrative, closer to the urgencies of the stage than the shaggy dog of a story. But both forms have a story to tell. Some of these poems are laments for women in captivity. The dramatic Mrs Beast pictures a world where smart women with their own money ditch the prince and choose the beast.
Keys to the wine cellar. The women run a weekly poker game. They have an affair. She moves easily from gorilla-scale to the interiority of the sonnet. Duffy loves the sonnet form — she says: That choice is an audacious signal. In The Ring and the Book Browning displays all his distinctive qualities. Each monologue deals with substantially the same occurrences, but each, of course, describes and interprets them differently. By permitting the true facts to emerge gradually by inference from these conflicting accounts, Browning reveals with increasing subtlety the true natures of his characters.
As each great monologue illuminates the moral being of the speaker, it becomes clear that nothing less than the whole ethical basis of human actions is in question. For over 20, lines Browning explores his theme, employing an unfaltering blank verse , rising often to passages of moving poetry, realizing in extraordinary detail the life of 17th-century Rome, and creating a series of characters as diverse and fully realized as those in any novel. In the 20th century his reputation, along with those of the other great Victorians, declined, and his work did not enjoy a wide reading public, perhaps in part because of increasing skepticism of the values implied in his poetry.
He has, however, influenced many modern poets, such as Robert Frost and Ezra Pound , partly through his development of the dramatic monologue, with its emphasis on the psychology of the individual and his stream of consciousness , but even more through his success in writing about the variety of modern life in language that owed nothing to convention.
As long as technical accomplishment, richness of texture, sustained imaginative power, and a warm interest in humanity are counted virtues, Browning will be numbered among the great English poets.
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The Close Reading of Poetry | A Practical Introduction and Guide to Explication
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Please try again later. Keep Exploring Britannica Lord Byron. Just as Tennyson's outlook was improving—he was adjusting to his new domestic duties, regaining contact with friends, and had published his book of poems—the news of Hallam's death arrived. Tennyson shared his grief with his sister, Emily , who had been engaged to Hallam. According to Victorian scholar Linda Hughes, the emotional gulf between the state of his domestic affairs and the loss of his special friendship informs the reading of "Ulysses"—particularly its treatment of domesticity.
At the next, Ulysses is determined to transcend his age and his environment by travelling again. It may be that Ulysses' determination to defy circumstance attracted Tennyson to the myth; [14] he said that the poem "gave my feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life". It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems in In Memoriam. Other critics find stylistic incongruities between the poem and its author that make "Ulysses" exceptional.
Robson writes, "Tennyson, the responsible social being, the admirably serious and 'committed' individual, is uttering strenuous sentiments in the accent of Tennyson the most un-strenuous, lonely and poignant of poets. Tennyson adopts aspects of the Ulysses character and narrative from many sources; his treatment of Ulysses is the first modern account.
Homer's Odyssey provides the poem's narrative background: At the conclusion of Tennyson's poem, his Ulysses is contemplating undertaking this new voyage. Tennyson's character, however, is not the lover of public affairs seen in Homer's poems.
Rather, "Ulisse" from Dante 's Inferno is Tennyson's main source for the character, [22] which has an important effect on the poem's interpretation. Ulisse recalls his voyage in the Inferno' s 26th canto , in which he is condemned to the Eighth Circle of false counsellors for misusing his gift of reason. The poet's intention to recall the Homeric character remains evident in certain passages. Critics have also noted the influence of Shakespeare in two passages. In the early movement, the savage race "That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me" 5 echoes Hamlet's soliloquy: A beast, no more.
The last movement of "Ulysses", which is among the most familiar passages in nineteenth-century English-language poetry, presents decisive evidence of the influence of Dante. The strains of discontent and weakness in old age remain throughout the poem, but Tennyson finally leaves Ulysses "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" 70 , recalling the Dantesque damnable desire for knowledge beyond all bounds.
The words of Dante's character as he exhorts his men to the journey find parallel in those of Tennyson's Ulysses, who calls his men to join him on one last voyage. Regard your origin,—from whom and whence! However, critics note that in the Homeric narrative, Ulysses' original mariners are dead. Since Dante's Ulisse has already undertaken this voyage and recounts it in the Inferno , Ulysses' entire monologue can be envisioned as his recollection while situated in Hell. The degree to which Tennyson identifies with Ulysses has provided one of the great debates among scholars of the poem.
Many other interpretations of the poem have developed from the argument that Tennyson does not identify with Ulysses, and further criticism has suggested that the purported inconsistencies in Ulysses' character are the fault of the poet himself.
Ulysses (poem)
Key to the affirmative reading of "Ulysses" is the biographical context of the poem. Such a reading takes into account Tennyson's statements about writing the poem—"the need of going forward"—and considers that he would not undermine Ulysses' determination with irony when he needed a similar stalwartness to face life after Hallam's death. Ulysses is thus seen as an heroic character whose determination to seek "some work of noble note" 52 is courageous in the face of a "still hearth" 2 and old age.
Read straightforwardly, "Ulysses" promotes the questing spirit of youth, even in old age, and a refusal to resign and face life passively. Until the early twentieth century, readers reacted to "Ulysses" sympathetically. The meaning of the poem was increasingly debated as Tennyson's stature rose. Baum criticized Ulysses' inconsistencies and Tennyson's conception of the poem in , [33] the ironic interpretation became dominant. Even Ulysses' resolute final utterance—"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"—is undercut by irony, when Baum and later critics compare this line to Satan 's "courage never to submit or yield" in John Milton 's Paradise Lost Ulysses' apparent disdain for those around him is another facet of the ironic perspective.
He declares that he is "matched with an aged wife" 3 , indicates his weariness in governing a "savage race" 4 , and suggests his philosophical distance from his son Telemachus. A skeptical reading of the second paragraph finds it a condescending tribute to Telemachus and a rejection of his "slow prudence" However, the adjectives used to describe Telemachus—"blameless", "discerning", and "decent"—are words with positive connotations in other of Tennyson's poetry and within the classical tradition, [32] where "blameless" is an attribute of gods and heroes.
Chiasson argued in that Ulysses is without faith in an afterlife, and that Tennyson uses a "method of indirection" to affirm the need for religious faith by showing how Ulysses' lack of faith leads to his neglect of kingdom and family. Chiasson regards the poem as "intractable" in Tennyson's canon, but finds that the poem's meaning resolves itself when this indirection is understood: Other ironic readings have found Ulysses longing for withdrawal, even death, in the form of his proposed quest. In noting the sense of passivity in the poem, critics highlight Tennyson's tendency toward the melancholic.
Eliot opines that "Tennyson could not tell a story at all".