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41 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave To each, but whoso did receive of them, And taste, to him the gushing of the wave Far far away did seem to mourn and rave On alien shores; and if his fellow spake, His voice was thin, as voices from the grave; And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake, And music in his ears his beating heart did make. They sat them down upon the yellow sand, Between the sun and moon upon the shore; And sweet it was to dream of Fatherland, Of child, and wife, and slave; but evermore Most weary seem'd the sea, weary the oar, Weary the wandering fields of barren foam. Then some one said, "We will return no more"; And all at once they sang, "Our island home Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam." |
The Lotos-Eaters
Lord Alfred Tennyson post-romantic Attractive addiction, homo-eroticism, self-absorbed community |
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Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. |
Tears, Idle Tears
from 'The Princess' Lord Alfred Tennyson post-romantic comforting, isolated sadness, repetitive and sleepy, experience of feeling, meaningless tears |
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That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around, 40 And strangled her. No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain. |
Porphyria's Lover
Robert Browning post-romantic ideal feminine preservation, really self-absorption, delusional |
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Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. |
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold post-romantic world lacks meaning, failed gesture to 'ideal' life, lover as only hope |
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"I suppose I must tell what that first paper was, though I had much rather not; for I am so heartily ashamed of the whole business as never to have looked at the article since the first flutter of it went off. It was on female writers on practical divinity. I wrote away in my abominable scrawl of those days on foolscap paper, feeling mightily like a fool all the time."
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Harriet Martineau
Autobiography Victorian Novel (context) can't sign own writing, fells shame, publishes in church journal, makes her authoress, intelligent women unmarriable in time |
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Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them, Cannon behind them Volley'd and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, While horse and hero fell, They that had fought so well Came thro' the jaws of Death Back from the mouth of Hell, All that was left of them, Left of six hundred. When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. Honor the charge they made, Honor the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred. |
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Lord Alfred Tennyson Empire man as machine, nobility=stupidity, empty verbs and nouns |
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. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one end of the year to the other. Native States were created by Providence in order to supply picturesque scenery, tigers and tall-writing. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made of a flapjack, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It was all in a day’s work.
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The Man Who Would Be King
Rudyard Kipling empire edge of empire, lack of control, oriental fantasy, unsatiable desire |
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It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye...
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"Coketown" from Hard Times
Charles Dickens fictional account of industrial city |
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I thought I should make my furtune in London - i'd heard it was such a grand place. I had read in novels and romances,- halfpenny and penny books, - about such things, but i've ment with nothing of the kind... The young women steal the most...Those go as parters are all prostitutes
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London Labour and the London Poor
Henry Mayhew industrial england interview with boy from shelter, cheap literature creates fantasy, educated poor |
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"The fast majority of Londoners have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused in order that a small, closely,-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop... The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful,, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all class and ranks of society pack the streets of london. Are they not all human beings...
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The Great Towns
Friedrich Engels overabundance erodes sympathy, desc of London |
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There is a very sharp drop of some 15 to 30 feet dowse leading down to the south bank of the Irk at this point...The worst courts are those leading down to the Irk, which contain unquestionably the most dreadful dwellings i have ever seen... This privy is so dirty that the inhabitants of the court can only enter or leave the court if they are prepared to wade through puddles of stale urine and excrement
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The Great Towns
Friedrich Engels Scientific description, finds asshole of england |
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And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die,—the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull! This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled.
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"Democracy" from "Past and Present"
Thomas Carlyle Laissez faire replaces family and community |
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Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail. Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods, or fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.
But glass cups and vessels may become the subjects of exquisite invention; and if in buying these we pay for the invention, that is to say for the beautiful form, or color, or engraving, and not for mere finish of execution, we are doing good to humanity. |
The Stones of Venice
John Ruskin christian secular (economic) morality, glass beads as slavery |
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For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs - as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices
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The Descent of Man
Charles Darwin preference to monkey over native, imperialist theme |
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The theory, coarsely enough, and to my father's great indignation, was defined by a hasty press as being this - that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geoplogists into infidelity. In truth, it was the logical and inevitable conclusion of accepting, literally, the doctrine of a sudden act of creation
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Father and Son
Sir Edmund Gosse father wrote "omphalos", huge failure, dismantling of creationism/christianity, no bridge b/w science and religion |
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And the fire that breaks from then then, a billion
times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier |
The Windhover
Gerard Manley Hopkins christ as bird/knight, ingatian spiritual excercise to write, inscape (holds together), instress (act of knowing inscape) |
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To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life
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Studies in the History of the Renaissance (conclusion)
Walter Pater decadence immoral ecstatic/orgasmic experience is goal |
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"to see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism...What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure?
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Studies in the history of the Renaissance (preface)
Walter Pater decadence solipsism ignores common view, importance of impression |
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I
In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.... VIII And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. |
The Convergence of the Twain
Thomas Hardy archaic language, ice imitates ship |
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WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berrys And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. |
The Stolen Child
William Butler Yeats changeling, fantasy of escape from society |
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How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? |
Leda and the Swan
William Butler Yeats begins history of trojan war, complicit rape, violent union |
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If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. |
The Soldier from "sonnet series"
Rupert Burke mythologizes lost soldier, secular consolation, corpse as colony, England not defined |
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And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.º |
Adlestrop
Edward Thomas train takes someone from idyllic english scene (WWI) |
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The cherry trees bend over and are shedding,
On the old road where all that passed are dead, Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding This early May morn when there is none to wed. |
The Cherry Trees
Edward Thomas wedding, all men are dead, fecundity ends |
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‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.
‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind; ‘Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die; ‘And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find 10 ‘A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’ And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’ |
They
Siegfried Sassoon religious consolation fails, boys seen as group by bishop, individuals by themselves, |
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Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies, Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. |
Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg humanizes rat, international, men live like rats, mechanized |
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What passing-bells2 for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns. ... Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor10 of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. |
Anthem for a Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen bullets replace prayers, girls' pale faces become ceremony, incompletely mourned |
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"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said that other, "save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also, I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. |
Strange meeting
Wilfred Owen journeys to hell, encounters self?, vision poem in imitation of Yeats |
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Both paused to watch a black man in white linen drawers running through the pale fields for dear life, with a large brown-paper parcel in his hands. Josephine's black man was tiny; he scurried along glistening like an ant. But there was something blind and tireless about Constantia's tall, thin fellow, which made him, she decided, a very unpleasant person indeed. . . .
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Daughters of the Late Colonel
Katherine Mansfield Oriental fantasy, realism w/ imagination, close sisters yet minds not in concordance |
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"I . . . I'd rather hear what you were going to say first," said Constantia.
"Don't be absurd, Con." "Really, Jug." "Connie!" "Oh, Jug! " A pause. Then Constantia said faintly, "I can't say what I was going to say, Jug, because I've forgotten what it was .. . that I was going to say." Josephine was silent for a moment. She stared at a big cloud where the sun had been. Then she replied shortly, "I've forgotten too." |
Daughters of the Late Colonel
Katherine Mansfield modernism pretend father's alive, complete failure of language/thought |
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The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter.
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Odour of the Chrysanthemums
D.H. Lawrence modernism first line, locomotive overtakes natural world |
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HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said. Others can pick and choose if you can't. But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling. 155 You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) 16 |
The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot talking about abortion at closing time, moral collapse, from second section |
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The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. |
September 1, 1939
W.H. Auden date of german invasion of poland, blames human nature rather than individuals for dictatorships, WWII from our psyche |
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Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht. in a copybook gothic script. We see him almost with content, abased, and seeming to have paid and mocked at by his own equipment that's hard and good when he's decayed. ... For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart. And death who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt. |
Vergissmeinnicht
Keith Douglas WW2!!!!! imitates owen, lives WWI poetry, german similar to english, commonplace expression yet sincere, lover/soldier united |
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Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88:
it took his lega way, he died in the ambulance. I saw him crawling on the sand; he said It's most unfair, they've shot my foot off. |
Aristocrats
Kieth Douglas epitome of british understatement, stupid heroic masculinity |
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I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.
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Shooting an Elephant
George Orwell plays "sahid", puppet show of imperialism, borrowed race language, dismantles empire prematurely |
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For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. |
Church going
Philip Larkin ambivalent to anglicanism (had previously defined england), ends up granting spiritual value to church |
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One of the most absurd aspects of this quest for national authenticity is that - a s far as India is concerned anyway - it is completely fallacious to suppose that there is such a thing as a pure, unalloyed tradition from which to draw. The only people who seriously believe this are religious extremists.
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English is an Indian Literary Language
Salman Rushdie Eclecticism defines English, purification is a pointless dangerous fiction |
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Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world
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The language of african culture from "Decolonizing the Mind"
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o language changes those who speak it, opposes Rushdie's view |
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Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? |
A Far Cry from Africa
Derek Walcott mau mau rebellion, compares to spain, beast on beast=darwinian, conflict with and love for English language |
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I said, "Sahib, I couldn't stay on for less than a hundred and twenty-five."
... Now here was a victory. It was only after it happened that I realized how badly I had needed such a victory, how far, gaining my freedom, I had begun to accept death not as the end but as the goal. |
One Out of Many
V.S. Naipaul parodies USA slogan, learns equality liberty language, raise is granted but uses term "sahib" and measures success by money but loses old world comaradery |
