Whitman--Song of Myself; Leaves of Grass

Particularly in "Song of Myself", Whitman emphasized an all-powerful "I" who serves as narrator. The "I" tries to relieve both social and private problems by using powerful affirmative cultural images.^[24] The emphasis on American culture helped reach Whitman's intention of creating a distinctly American epic poem comparable to the works of Homer.^[25] Originally written at a time of significant urbanization in America, Leaves of Grass responds to the impact urbanization has on the masses.<sup>[26]

i hear america...
Whitman’s catalogs, or lists, are used in many of his poems to indicate the breadth of types of people, situation, or objects in a particular poem. Whitman’s mastery of the catalog has caused critics to praise his endless generative powers,
his seeming ability to cycle through hundreds of images while avoiding repetition and producing astounding
variety and newness. Anaphora is a literary device used by Whitman which employs the repetition
of a first word in each phrase; for example, each line will begin with “and.” Whitman uses anaphora to mimic biblical syntax and give his work a weighty, epic feeling, but also to create the hypnotic rhythms that take the place of more formal verse.</sup>

Spenser's Faerie Queene

Holiness and Chasity
Redcross=Holiness
Britomart=Chastity
(and she is finally only conquered by her love, Artegal)

Britomart, a female knight, the personification and champion of Chastity. She is young and beautiful, and falls in love with Artegal upon first seeing his face in her father's magic mirror. Although there is no interaction between them, she falls in love with him, and travels, dressed as a knight and accompanied by her nurse, Glauce, in order to find Artegal again. Britomart carries an enchanted spear that allows her to defeat every knight she encounters, until she loses to a knight who turns out to be her beloved Artegal. Parallel figure in Ariosto: Bradamante. Britomart is one of the most important knights in the story. She searches the world, including a pilgrimage to the shrine of Isis, and a visit with Merlin the magician. She rescues Artegal, and several other knights, from the evil slave-mistress Radigund. Furthermore, Britomart accepts Amoret at a tournament, refusing the false Florimell.

Mary Wroth "Am I Thus Conquered?'

I thus conquer'd? have I lost the powers,
That to withstand which joyes to ruine me?
Must I bee still, while it my strength devoures,
And captive leads me prisoner bound, unfree?

Love first shall leane mens fant'sies to them free,
Desire shall quench loves flames, Spring, hate sweet showers,
Love shall loose all his Darts, have sight, and see
His shame and wishings, hinder happy houres.

Why should we not Loves purblinde charmes resist?
Must we be servile, doing what he list?
No, seeke some host to harbour thee: I flye

Thy Babish tricks, and freedome doe professe;
But O, my hurt makes my lost heart confesse:
I love, and must; so farewell liberty.

_______________
Line 7. loose all his Darts, have sight: Cupid's emblematic paraphernalia, darts or arrows and a blindfold.
Line 9. Loves purblinde charmes: the prevailing sense of "purblind" was shifting in the 16C. and 17C. from totally blind to partially blind, dim-sighted, or by analogy, dim-witted


Although the differences in these poems far outweigh the similarities, the logical development of the sonnets have quite a bit in common. First, both poems essentially begin with the same question: "What, have I thus betrayed my liberty?" (924), and "Am

I thus conquered?" (1428). Both of them wonder if their freedom has been taken from them by an inevitable love for another person. Following the first line, each narrator begins to wonder how this has happened to them or what could have caused this love. Astrophil wonders if he was born with the tendency to love her and if his "neck becomes such yoke of tyranny…" (924). Pamphilia also wonders, how did she happen to fall in love? Despite her best efforts to abstain from love, it has happened. "Have I lost the powers that to withstand, which joys to ruin me?" (1428).

Sidney goes on to explain that he wishes to end this spiral because he is not praised for loving her but only scorned because he "may get no alms but scorn of beggary" (924). Here the poems begin to differ when Mary Wroth lists what must happen in order for her to give in to love. Her list is quite impossible with examples like "Desire shall quench Love's flames" and "Love shall loose all his darts" (1428). In both of the sestets, the scenario turns and Astrophil reminds himself to consider the inside when falling in love and not just the outside. He then decides it may be to his benefit to ignore this love altogether. Pamphilia already understands that love is best when ignored. She contemplates why it is so hard to resist love. Astrophil realizes the charm that makes love irresistible is beauty. In the couplets, both have a mutual realization that no matter what they try to do, love will not take pity on them. Astrophil lies to Stella because his eye has caught her magnificent beauty and he simply cannot bear to tell her that he does not love her. He remains a slave to her beauty. Pamphilia, like Astrophil, remains a slave to love because her pain forces her heart to admit that it does love and it has to love.

Pamphilia and Astrophil's experience and reactions to love are quite different and yet at the same time entail the same metaphor of love as a slave driver, mercilessly taking its victim's freedoms from them. Mary Wroth and Sir Philip Sidney have very different perceptions of love and this comes across strongly in their poetry causing a huge contrast from the feeling one gets when reading the sonnets. Some major themes in each of the sonnets are slavery vs. liberty, physical appearance vs. honest love, and inescapable passion. Although their differences are great, they still both employ the same raw feelings that love elicits in all persons throughout time

Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"

To his Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell: Poem analysis » To his Coy Mistress » Commentary on To his Coy Mistress

Part onePart twoPart three

The poem is divided into three clearly defined section parts:

• The way the lovers could behave if they had all the time in the world (ll.1-20)
• Reminder that life is short and that death will bring an end to lovemaking (ll.21-32).
• The need to make the most of the brief time available (ll.33-46).

Part one

The poem starts with a conditional: ‘Had we but...Time’. The implication is that the lovers do not, setting the poem at the opposite extreme from Donne's The Sunne Rising, which boldly asserts that the lovers control their own time, and the sun is their servant. Marvell’s verbs go into the conditional tense: ‘would sit’, ‘should'st ... find’, ‘should ... refuse ... grow ... whatever’. So although his suggestions seem positive enough, they are an illusion.

The suggestions are, of course, comic absurdities. This is the form of Metaphysical wit that Marvell uses for his conceits. He would be willing to go back almost to the beginning of time in the Bible and ‘Love you ten years before the Flood’, a reference to Noah's flood (Genesis 7:17-24). She, on the other hand, could delay her response ‘till the Conversion of the Jews’, an idea which Marvell uses to symbolise an unknown future timescale. His love could be ‘vegetable’: which will keep growing and reproducing itself - slowly. The fact that it is one of the lower forms of life is part of the irony. As is the fact that we are irresistably reminded through his image of the speaker's (actually almost immediate) erection.

Marvell parodies the Elizabethan love convention of listing the mistress's bodily parts, and praising each one separately – eyes, forehead, breasts – by giving absurd amounts of time to be spent in praising each part. Heslyly hints at ‘the rest’. Each shall have an ‘age’, referring to Greek mythology in which human history could be divided into ‘ages’: gold, silver, bronze.

Part two

This is a powerful section on time and death. The carpe diem (‘seize the day’) theme is strong, as it is in Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd, or more genteelly in Robert Herrick's Gather ye Rosebuds. The tempo and mood suddenly change. ‘Times winged Charriott’ sounds quite military, in pursuit of the lovers. With the prospect of ‘Desarts of vast Eternity’, the vegetable image is replaced by total barrenness. This leads on to talk of dust, to which her ‘quaint Honour’ will be reduced. ‘Quaint’ contains a play on words. In the seventeenth century it meant proud and also ‘whimsical’, as it does today; it may also be a pun on ‘queynt’, which in the medieval period, referred to a woman’s sexual organs. Her ‘Virginity’ in death will be as barren: it has produced nothing but a facade. The reality of the grave confronts us as bleakly as it does in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet or some of the Jacobean dramas that followed.

Part three

Having mocked the Elizabethans in Section 1, then agreed with them in Section 2, Marvell follows their advice in Section 3. The Latin carpe diem (‘seize the day’) motif is echoed in such violent phrases as ‘like ... birds of prey’, ‘our Time devour’ and ‘tear our Pleasures’. The sense of struggle is strong: either time controls us, or we it. So there comes the defiant ‘yet we will make him [the sun] run’, echoing Donne's poem, a defiance which, we feel, stems from the frustration at his inability to make love to his lady.

Investigating To his Coy Mistress

• Compare Marvell’s To his Coy Mistress with Donne's The Sunne Rising
  • What are the biggest similarities and differences?
• How does Marvell convey
  • the idea of time almost stopping?
  • the idea of time rushing along?
• Do you think this is a very masculine poem?
  • What suggests it is so?
• If you were the one being addressed by Marvell, would you be persuaded or put off?
• Is the poem meant to be persuasive?

Today's New International Version

¹⁷For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. ¹⁸The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. ¹⁹They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. ²⁰The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits. ²¹Every living thing that moved on the earth perished - birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and the entire human race. ²²Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. ²³Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; human beings and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. ²⁴The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

King James Version

¹⁷And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. ¹⁸And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. ¹⁹And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. ²⁰Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. ²¹And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: ²²All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. ²³And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. ²⁴And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

1. A play of mind that can link dissimilar ideas together for humorous or insightful effect; the ability to play with words. 2. A person who does this.

An image that seems far-fetched or bizarre, but which is cleverly worked out so that the reader can understand the link.

Relating to the period of time of Elizabeth I of England.

1. Imitation, copy, likeness, statue, picture in literature, art or imagination. 2. A figure of speech in which a person or object or happening is described in terms of some other person, object or action, either by saying X is Y (metaphor); or X is

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Marvell's "The Definition of Love"

THE DEFINITION OF LOVE.
by Andrew Marvell


I.
MY Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high ;
It was begotten by Despair,
Upon Impossibility.

II.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ne'er have flown,
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.

III.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed ;
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

IV.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close ;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

V.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,

VI.
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear.
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramp'd into a planisphere.

VII.
As lines, so love's oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet :
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.

VIII.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.

---

Source:
Marvell, Andrew. The Poems of Andrew Marvell.
G. A. Aitken, Ed. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892. 73-74.

ndrew Marvell: Poem analysis » The Definition of Love » Commentary on The Definition of Love

Love’s parentageMagnanimous despairA philosophical interpretationEnter fateParallel linesConjunction of the mind

Love’s parentage

The opening ‘My Love’ refers to the state, not the person. Logically, we start at its beginning, its parentage. Here is the first surprise: they are abstractions! We are clearly going to be reading a highly abstract poem. ‘Despair’ and ‘Impossibility’ are definite negatives. Why? The only suggestion offered is that it is ‘for object strange and high’. Does this suggest the aristocratic origins of the beloved, as well as the quality of his love for her? Is his love elevated and outrageous, when he should be really thinking of someone of his own class and in his own league? Or is it the aristocracy of the mind? ‘Strange’ perhaps means ‘unique’ here.

Magnanimous despair

Stanza two has a wonderful oxymorons, ‘Magnanimous Despair’, leading to a wonderful paradox: how can despair ‘show him so divine a thing’, when hope could not? Here is the metaphysical wit, teasing us to get our heads round this conundrum. It could mean that because of the lady's nobility, he could never win her; but being a noble love, it is also great-hearted (the literal meaning of ‘magnanimous’), which was the highest virtue for the Greek philosopher, Aristotle. If the poet had merely ‘hoped’ for a suitable partner, he would never have allowed himself to fall in love with this lady. Despair is the price he has had to pay, but he was willing to pay it.

A philosophical interpretation

This is to imagine a definite context for the poem. A more general, more philosophical interpretation might be to suggest that only in despair lies the strength and integrity of emotion to break the lower sort of second-rate loving. Idealism both elevates and makes us aware of its unattainability.

Enter fate

Stanza three introduces a third term, Fate. If it were up to Love alone, he would soon reach his consummation. But Fate will not allow this. The next stanza expands on this: Fate, like a jealous lover, wants to guard her own power. Fulfilled love not only has great power, it is also self-determining – a theme Donne had taken up in his The Extasie. Donne believed such a state was possible; Marvell does not.

Parallel lines

The poem then sets up a series of extended images to explore this: in stanzas five and six, the image of the two lovers as two poles, turning absolutely together ‘Love's whole world’, but never able to touch because to do so would be to collapse that very world, to cause it to lose its dimensions. In stanza seven the image becomes geometrical: lesser loves may touch as oblique lines will. Perfect loves run as parallel lines and so never actually join.

Conjunction of the mind

The final stanza does not draw out these images, but returns to the threesome of Love, Fate and the lovers. Their Fate is paradoxically always to be separated, yet to be in true ‘conjunction of the Mind’.

Marvell's "A Dialogue Between Soul and Body"

Andrew Marvell

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SOUL AND BODY
Soul.		O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise A soul enslaved so many ways ? With bolts of bones, that fettered stands In feet, and manacled in hands ; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear ; A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins ; Tortured, besides each other part, In a vain head, and double heart ?
Body.		O, who shall me deliver whole, From bonds of this tyrannic soul ? Which, stretched upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go ; And warms and moves this needless frame, (A fever could but do the same), And, wanting where its spite to try, Has made me live to let me die A body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possessed.
Soul.		What magic could me thus confine Within another's grief to pine ? Where, whatsoever it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain ; And all my care itself employs, That to preserve which me destroys ; Constrained not only to endure Diseases, but, what's worse, the cure ; And, ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwrecked into health again.
Body.		But Physic yet could never reach The maladies thou me dost teach ; Whom first the cramp of hope does tear, And then the palsy shakes of fear ; The pestilence of love does heat, Or hatred's hidden ulcer eat ; Joy's cheerful madness does perplex, Or sorrow's other madness vex ; Which knowledge forces me to know, And memory will not forego ; What but a soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit ? So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew.

---

Source:
Marvell, Andrew.The Poems of Andrew Marvell.
G. A. Aitken, Ed. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892.43-44.

Andrew Marvell: Poem analysis » A Dialogue between Soul and Body

The dialogue formSoul saysBody repliesSoul’s responseBody concludesThe key question

The dialogue form

The dialogue is a form of poetry which is not often used. However, Marvell did write several: A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure; Clorinda and Damon; Ametas and Thestylis are other examples, the first like this one, a moral debate; the other two, pastoral poems with some religious significance. It is best to see this dialogue as being like a first class cricket match. Both sides get two innings, alternately. At the end, we have to declare the match drawn. Marvell, though clearly favouring the Soul, does not give either side the match-winning argument.

Soul says

The soul opens the batting with a powerful complaint: it is not only being imprisoned in the body, but tortured by it. The image of the soul being imprisoned is typically Platonic. Its move is to escape through the death of the body. Marvell plays with several parts of this extended conceit: ‘blinded with an Eye’ makes a nice paradox. The organs of sense blind (and bind) the soul to heaven, keeping it bound to sense impressions. Blinding was a common form of torture, as was constant sound. The worst part is ‘a vain head’, meaning stuffed with idle, fruitless thoughts, and a ‘double Heart’, because divided.

Body replies

The body is not too well pleased with this onslaught, and accuses the soul of driving it around, when all it wants is a quiet life. It even has to get up and walk upright! (‘mine own Precipice I go’). The soul makes it restless with its own restlessness. It feels possessed by ‘this ill spirit’.

Soul’s response

The soul's response is to enlarge on the ‘double Heart’. It has its own grief through being trapped in the body and has to bear the body's grief as well. We might say in modern terms, the soul here is both the psychology and the spirituality of human existence: the psychology derives from the body; the spirituality, from its heavenly origins. Left to itself, it would escape the body by letting it die; but the body's concern is to keep itself alive, and the soul is forced to help it do that. Again, Marvell makes the most of this paradox in his imagery: ‘Shipwrackt into health again’; ‘whats worse, the cure’.

Body concludes

The body is allowed its second innings. It lists the psychological suffering the soul forces on it through hope, fear, love, hatred and so on. The list goes on through the whole stanza. It climaxes with the paradox:

What but a Soul could have the wit
To build me up for Sin so fit?

Only the soul has given it the consciousness of sin. Left to itself, it would live like the animals in instinctive, undifferentiated being. The final image is one that Marvell was to take up several times in his ‘Mower’ poems: the body is like an undifferentiated tree growing naturally; the soul like an architect (or topiary gardener, as we might say), which trims and prunes it into all kinds of outlandish and unnatural shapes.

The key question

The final question is a real dilemma, then: Marvell has been working slowly towards it. Do human beings live ‘as Nature intended’, however shapeless that life might be morally or intellectually? Or do we raise ourselves through, allowing our ‘souls’ or spirits to restrain and shape our lives according to some overall design? Marvell does not push through to the soul's early conclusion: its wish for death as escape. He recognises life is something that has to be accepted, however problematic it is.

Investigating A Dialogue between Soul and Body

• Read through A Dialogue between the Soul and Body
  • Pick out some of the images and work them out
• Compare Marvell's Platonism here with that of Vaughan in his Ascension - Hymn
  • What are the differences in the way they express their desire to escape earthly existence?
• What is metaphysical about this poem?
• Compare Marvell's attitude to the body to Donne's.

(see Themes and significant ideas: Being Human.)

Raleigh's "Nymph's Reply to the Shephard"

[The nymph's reply to the shepherd]

F all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd's tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love. Time drives the flocks from field to fold, When rivers rage and rocks grow cold; And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to come. The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields: A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall. The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,— In folly ripe, in reason rotten. Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love. But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love.

---

Source:
Hannah, J., Ed. The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh.
London: George Bell and Sons, 1891. 11-12.

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Nymph's Reply To The Shepherd" was written by Sir Walter Raleigh in response to Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love". It could be considered a criticism, or at least a negative reaction to the original poem, as the nymph is in fact rejecting the shepherd in question quite harshly, and includes many lines that are directly connected to propositions made in Marlowe's poem. However her main reason for rejecting him is more related to her own feelings of mortality and the transience of life; from the last stanza, "But could youth last, and love still breed,/ Has joys no date, nor age no need,/ Then these delights my mind might move/ To live with thee and be thy love,".