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The Stones of Venice
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John Ruskin
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Discussing the difference between "Gothic" and "gothic architecture" Overall a cultural history and a commentary on human character --- spec. against slave trade!
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Main/general point of The Stones of Venice
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-History and origin of 'gothic' (word); how/why gothic is still a relevant phrase and demands respect -Gothic is too vast of a concept to fully understand. People focus too much on the small details of things, don't understand broad concepts. -Pans out and has reader imagine themselves flying over nature/natural things (volcano, Syria, Greece, mountains, flowers, animals etc). -Imagines hella nature/natural things -Poses 3 systems of architectural ornament -tells differences of of Greek, ninevite, and egyptian servile ornaments. Talks about how they use slaves -glorifies Christians -Compares modern Engl. mind to Greek -Talks about humanizing laborers ; major theme -Gives 3 solutions on how to regulate labor
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Key points in The Stones of Venice
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-execution/power of inferior workman is subject to intellect of the higher -GREEK NINEVITE AND EGYPTIAN --Greek more advanced in knowledge -cant endure appearance of imperfection -ornament composed of geometrical forms
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servile ornament
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constitutional ornament
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executive inferior power is emancipated and independent has obedience to a higher power
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revolutionary ornament
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no executive inferiority
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Gothic architecture has been sufficiently vindicated; and perhaps some among us, in our admiration of the magnificent science of its structure, and sacredness of its expression, might desire that the term of ancient reproach should be withdrawn, and some other, of more apparent honorableness, adopted in its place. There is no chance, as there is no need, of such a substitution.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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It is true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and wild; but it is not true that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or despise.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but in all dignity and honorableness: and we should err grievously in refusing to recognize as an essential character of the existing architecture of the north, or to admit as a desirable character in that which it yet may be, this wilderness of thought, and roughness of work [...]
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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If however, the savageness of Gothic Architecture, merely as expression of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in some sort, a noble character, it possesses higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not of a climate, but of religious principle.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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In the medieval,or especially Christian system of this ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only recognizes its value, it confesses its perfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgement of unworthiness.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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Therefore, to every spirit which Christianity summons to her service, her extortion is: Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame. And it ism perhaps, the principle admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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But the modern English mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable to man, because more perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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For the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer blight.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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And therefore, while in all things that we see or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellencies, because they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make and nature of every man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labour, there are some powers for better things; some tardy imagination, torpid capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst; and in most cases it is all our own fault that they are tardy or torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honour them in their imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is what we have to do with all our labourers; to look for the thoughtful part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line,and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last-a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned: saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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But to smother their souls with them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm's work on it, is to see God
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: Divided into mere segments of men-broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share. 2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. 3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.
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dont make what we dont need we are all engaged in slave trade ; when we buy we are supporting the trade
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I shall only give one example, which however will show the reader what I mean, from the manufacture already alluded to, that of glass. Our modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the English and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges; while the old Venetian cared not a with whether his edges were sharp or not, but he invented a new design for every glass that he made, and never moulded a handle or a lip without a new fancy in it.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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No great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure; that he is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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If we are tp have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work would be imperfect. however beautiful.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, ridgidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent.
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The Stones of Venice John Ruskin
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Culture and Anarchy
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Mathew Arnold
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Point of Culture and Anarchy
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demonstrate Ruskin's indictment of the middle class for their lack of sweetness and light. Arnold attempted to describe an objective center of authority that all, regardless of religious or social bias, could follow.
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This center of authority is culture, which he defined on the level of the individual as "a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world." Because this authority is internal, it is a study of perfection within the individual, a study that should elevate the "best self" through a fresh and free search for beauty and intelligence. By following "right reason," the disinterested intellectual pursuits of the best self, Arnold foresaw a way to overcome the social and political confusion of the 1860's and to prepare for a future in which all could be happy and free. With this basically romantic view of human beings as a means and human perfectibility as the end, Arnold turned to social criticism, carefully showing that no other center of authority was tenable. The ideal of nonconformity, the disestablishment of the church, led to confusion or anarchy because it represented the sacrifice of all other sides of human personality to the religious. The ideal of the liberal reformers, on the other hand, led to anarchy because it regarded the reforms as ends rather than means toward a harmonious totality of human existence.
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why the world is so effed up accd. to Arnold
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Culture and Anarchy Chapter 1 gen. about?
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Arnold takes aim at the Puritan element (of Dissenting, or Independent, Christians) in middle class English culture. Talks hella about perfection
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Genre of Culture and Anarchy
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Political text/criticism
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There is sweetness and light, an ideal of compete harmonious human perfection! One need not go to culture and poetry to find language to judge it. Religion, with its instinct for perfection supplies language to judge it, language too, which is in our mouths every day.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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And men have got such a habit of giving to the language of their religious organizations a special application of making it a mere jargon that for the condemnation which religion itself passes on the shortcomings of their religious organizations they have no ear, they are sure to cheat themselves and to explain this condemnation away
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers' voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakspeare or Virgil, — souls in whom SWEETNESS and LIGHT, and all that in human nature is most humane, were eminent, — accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakspeare and Virgil would have found them! In the same way let us judge the religious organisations which we see all around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which they have accomplished; but do not let us fail to see clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its true goal.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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When I began to speak of culture, I insisted on our bondage to machinery, on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself, without looking beyond it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is valuable. Freedom, I said, was one of those things which we thus worshipped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which freedom is to be desired. In our common notions and talk about freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of machinery.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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Our prevalent notion is, — and I quoted a [54/55] number of instances to prove it, — that it is a most happy and important thing for a man merely to be able to do as he likes. On what he is to do when he is thus free to do as he likes, we do not lay so much stress. Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system of checks, — a system which stops and paralyses any power in interfering with the free action of individuals.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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Our leading class is an aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes the notion of a State-authority greater than itself, with a stringent administrative machinery superseding the decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputy- lieutenancy, and the posse comitatis, which are all in its own hands.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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Then as to our working-class. This class, pressed constantly by the hard daily compulsion of material wants, is naturally the very centre and stronghold of our national idea, that it is man's ideal right and felicity to do as he likes. Our masses are quite as raw and uncultivated as the French [...]
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working-class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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More and more, because of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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But, oh! cry many people, sweetness and light are not enough; you must put strength or energy along with them, and make a kind of trinity of strength, sweetness and light, and then, perhaps, you may do some good. That is to say, we are to join Hebraism, strictness of the moral conscience, and manful walking by the best light we have, together with Hellenism, inculcate both, and rehearse the praises of both. Or, rather, we may praise both in conjunction, but we must be careful to praise Hebraism most. "Culture," says an acute, though somewhat rigid critic, Mr. Sidgwick, "diffuses sweetness and light. I do not undervalue these blessings, but religion gives fire and strength, and the world wants fire [170/172] and strength even more than sweetness and light." By religion, let me explain, Mr. Sidgwick here means particularly that Puritanism on the insufficiency of which I have been commenting and to which he says I am unfair.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the not in print version unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self. Some of the instincts of his ordinary self he has, by the help of his rule of life, conquered; but others which he has not conquered by this help he is so far from perceiving to need subjugation, and to be instincts of an inferior self, that he even fancies it to be his right and duty, in virtue of having conquered a limited part of himself, to give unchecked swing to the remainder.
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Culture and Anarchy Matthew Arnold
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
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George Eliot
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists was published
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anonmyously
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Main point of "Silly Novels"
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Eliot criticises the majority of novels written by and for women, objecting to their 'silliness' and disregard for reality
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Describing what she calls the 'mind and millinery' novel. The heroine in this is beautiful, virtuous and supremely intelligent. The novel ends happily, with the heroine making a splendid marriage to a man she adores. Eliot mentions several subgenres of this kind of novel: religious, philosophical, historical and 'frothy.'
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
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Why are silly novels dangerous?
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-undermine the cause of women's education -heroines in these novels are usually highly educated, but their education only makes them self-satisfied and tedious -writers of these novels have evidently read a great deal, but this has not enabled them to write well -suggests that those who read silly novels will come to the conclusion that women do not benefit from education
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-opens with many stereotypes and cliches about women in novels
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Silly Novels and Lady Novelists summary
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The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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She is understood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well. The men play a very subordinate part by her side.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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For all this she as often as not marries the wrong person to begin with, and she suffers terribly from the plots and intrigues of the vicious baronet; but even death has a soft place in his heart for such a paragon, and remedies all mistakes for her just at the right moment.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call the oracular species—novels intended to expound the writer's religious, philosophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely exhausted of common-sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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And the most mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form, because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the more solid education of women.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in the world; but we have not now to contest their opinion—we are only pointing out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have volunteered themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We do not believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by associating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her knowledge instead of being absorbed by it.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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In conversation she is the least formidable of women, because she understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you can't understand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw material of culture—she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest essence.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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In the ordinary type of these novels the hero is almost sure to be a young curate, frowned upon, perhaps by worldly mammas, but carrying captive the hearts of their daughters, who can "never forget that sermon;" tender glances are seized from the pulpit stairs instead of the opera-box; tĂŞte-Ă -tĂŞtes are seasoned with quotations from Scripture instead of quotations from the poets; and questions as to the state of the heroine's affections are mingled with anxieties as to the state of her soul.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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From most silly novels we can at least extract a laugh; but those of the modern-antique school have a ponderous, a leaden kind of fatuity, under which we groan. What can be more demonstrative of the inability of literary women to measure their own powers than their frequent assumption of a task which can only be justified by the rarest concurrence of acquirement with genius?
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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We are aware that our remarks are in a very different tone from that of the reviewers who, with perennial recurrence of precisely similar emotions, only paralleled, we imagine, in the experience of monthly nurses, tell one lady novelist after another that they "hail" her productions "with delight." We are aware that the ladies at whom our criticism is pointed are accustomed to be told, in the choicest phraseology of puffery, that their pictures of life are brilliant, their characters well drawn, their style fascinating, and their sentiments lofty.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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The foolish vanity of wishing to appear in print, instead of being counterbalanced by any consciousness of the intellectual or moral derogation implied in futile authorship, seems to be encouraged by the extremely false impression that to write at all is a proof of superiority in a woman.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest—novels, too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements.
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Silly Novels by Lady Novelists George Eliot
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Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
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George Eliot
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Editor's Study
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William Dean Howells
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We are not picturesque, and we are not splendid. Our towns, when they are tolerably named, are not varied in their characteristics, and our civilization, as a means of pleasure to polite people of limited means and of sympathies narrowed to their own class, with historic ideals of beauty and grandeur, is very much a failure
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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One of the truths which Americans have always held to be self-evident was that a man, if he was honest, was not only priviledged, but was in duty bound to look other men in the face, with eyes as nearly upon the same level as congenital differences would allow
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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Here, we may say, with just self gratulation in positive proof that we have builded better than we know, and that our conditions which we have always said were the best in the world, have envolved a type of greatness in the presence of which the simplest and humblest is not abashed.
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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Somehow the idea we call America has realized it so far that we already have identification rather than distinction as the fact which strikes the foreign critic in our greatness
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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But we may see the progress we have made in the right direction by the study of our own past, and especially of that formative period when the men who invented American principles had not yet freed themselves from the influence of Euro. traditions.
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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Mr. Arnold to whom, if he could have appeared, he would certainly have appeared distinguished
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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Comparisons are odious as we found ourselves when Mr. Arnold compared Emerson to his disadvantage with several second-rate British classics, and we will not match a painter with painter, architect with architect, .... to proove that our art and literature are at least as good as the present England
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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There is something sweet, something luminous, in the reflection that apparently there is in the ordinary American the making of the extraordinary American [...]
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Editor's Study William Dean Howells
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation
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William Dean Howells
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3 forms William Dean Howells discusses
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novel romance romanticistic novel
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation is about/does?
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talks about novel and why it's important and whatever
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By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other, it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the false which is universal.
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation William Dean Howells
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I do not expect the novel to be wholly true...but I expect it to be a constant endeavor for the truth
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation William Dean Howells
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The truth which I mean, the truth which is the only beauty is truth to human experience, and human experience is so manifold and so recondite, that no scheme can be too remote, to airy for the test.
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation William Dean Howells
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For the reader, whether he is an author too, or not, the only test of a novel's truth is his own knowledge of life.
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation William Dean Howells
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The novel is easily first among books that people read willingly and it is rightfully first. It has known how to keep the charm of the story, and to add to the attraction of almost every interest.
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation William Dean Howells
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It has broadened and deepened down and out till it compasses the whole of human nature; and no cause important to the race has been unfriended of it.
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Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation William Dean Howells
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The Art of Fiction
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Henry James
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...you will not write a good novel unless you progress the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being
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The Art of Fiction Henry James
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Experience is never limited, an it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative ... it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.
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The Art of Fiction Henry James
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The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling of life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it...
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The Art of Fiction Henry James
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A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, that in each of the parts there is something of the other parts.
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The Art of Fiction Henry James
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There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.
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The Art of Fiction Henry James
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Daisy Miller: A Study
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Henry James
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I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago, sat in the garden of the 'Trois Couronnes,' looking about him, rather idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned.
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake.
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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Daisy Miller
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A rich, pretty, American girl traveling through Europe with her mother and younger brother. Daisy wants to be exposed to European high society but refuses to conform to old-world notions of propriety laid down by the expatriate community there. In Rome, she becomes involved with an Italian man named Giovanelli, and she eventually dies from malaria as a result of being outside with him at night.
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Winterbourne
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A young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva. Winterbourne is the novel's central narrative consciousness and possibly the protagonist. He is initially intrigued by Daisy because of her frivolity and independence, but he eventually loses respect for her. After she dies, however, he regrets his harsh judgment and wonders if he made a mistake in dismissing her so quickly.
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Randolph Miller
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Daisy's lil bro
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Mrs. Miller
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Mom
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Mrs. Costello
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Winterbourne's aunt, a shallow, self-important woman who seems genuinely fond of Winterbourne. Mrs. Costello is the voice of snobbish high society. She also fulfills the role of "confidante," a frequent figure in Henry James's novels.
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Eugenio
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The Millers' supercilious interpreter/guide, often referred to as "the courier." Eugenio has better judgment and a greater sense of propriety than either Daisy or Mrs. Miller and often treats them with thinly veiled contempt.
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Mr. Giovanelli
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An Italian of unknown background and origins. Mr. Giovanelli's indiscreet friendship with Daisy is misinterpreted by the American expatriate community and leads, directly or indirectly, to Daisy's ostracism and death.
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In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady except under certain rarely occurring conditions; but here at Vevey, what conditions could be better than these?—a pretty American girl coming and standing in front of you in a garden
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long out of the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You are too innocent.
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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"We simply met in the garden, and we talked a bit." "Tout bonnement! And pray what did you say?" "I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admirable aunt." "I am much obliged to you." "It was to guarantee my respectability," said Winterbourne. "And pray who is to guarantee hers?" "Ah, you are cruel!" said the young man. "She's a very nice young girl.
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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What a clever little reprobate she was, and how smartly she played at injured innocence!
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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I haven't got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and one came out right afterward. She said she'd slap me if any more came out. I can't help it. It's this old Europe. It's the climate that makes them come out. In America they didn't come out. It's these hotels.
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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Would a nice girl, even allowing for her being a little American flirt, make a rendezvous with a presumably low-lived foreigner? The rendezvous in this case, indeed, had been in broad daylight and in the most crowded corner of Rome, but was it not impossible to regard the choice of these circumstances as a proof of extreme cynicism?
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Daisy Miller: A Study Henry James
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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
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Stephen Crane
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Maggie
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grows up amid abuse and poverty in the Bowery neighborhood of New York's Lower East Side. Her mother, Mary, is a vicious alcoholic; her brother, Jimmie, is mean-spirited and brutish. But Maggie grows up a beautiful young lady whose romantic hopes for a better life remain untarnished. Her seemingly inevitable path towards destruction begins when she becomes enamored of Pete, whose show of confidence and worldliness seems to promise wealth and culture. Seduced and abandoned by Pete, Maggie becomes a neighborhood scandal when she turns to prostitution. Crane leaves her demise vague--she either commits suicide or is murdered. She seems a natural and hereditary victim, succumbing finally to the forces of poverty and social injustice that built up against her even before her birth. Like all the people in this short novel, she seems chiefly a type rather than an individuated character, serving to illustrate principles about modern urban life.
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Jimmie
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Maggie's brother and Mary's son, Jimmie Johnson is the first character we meet in the novel, and from the start he is fighting a street battle. He grows up violent and combative, hardened against sympathy and introspection. Although he himself has seduced and abandoned women, he fails to see himself in Pete, whom he hates for seducing Maggie, and he cannot muster any sympathy for Maggie, whom he blames, hypocritically, for bringing disgrace on the household. Unlike his naĂŻve sister, Jimmie has the toughness necessary to survive in the rough world of urban poverty, but this toughness seems inseparable from the casual cruelty that seems endemic to the novel's world. He survives his sister, but one senses that he will only engender the same kind of cruelty and misery that his parents engendered in him.
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During the evening he had been standing against a bar drinking whiskies and declaring to all comers, confidentially: "My home reg'lar livin' hell! Damndes' place! Reg'lar hell! Why do I come an' drin' whisk' here thish way? 'Cause home reg'lar livin' hell!"
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Maggie: a girl of the streets Stephen Crane
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Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: 'Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?'
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Maggie: a girl of the streets Stephen Crane
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The loud gallery was overwhelmingly with the unfortunate and the oppressed. They encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers. When anybody died in the pale-green snow storms, the gallery mourned. They sought out the painted misery and hugged it as akin.
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Maggie: a girl of the streets Stephen Crane
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The last act was a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man, his pockets stuffed with bonds, his heart packed with tyrannical purposes, imperturbable and suffering.
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Maggie: a girl of the streets Stephen Crane
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Mrs. Warren's Profession
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Bernard Shaw
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Vivie Warren
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recent grad Cambridge mathematics 22 y.o.
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Mrs. Warren
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Vivie's mom Owns brothels Was a prostitute Man-inizer
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Praed
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architect
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Crofts
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owns brothels with Mrs. Warren
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Frank Gardiner
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Maybe V's 1/2 bro
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Rev. Samuel Gardner
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used to sleep w/Mrs. Warren Helped fund the brothels
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People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
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Mrs. Warren's Profession Bernard Shaw
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There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.
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Mrs. Warren's Profession Bernard Shaw
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The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.
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Mrs. Warren's Profession Bernard Shaw
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Everybody has choices, Mother. The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between rag-picking and flower-selling, according to her taste. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
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Mrs. Warren's Profession Bernard Shaw
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But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it's arranged the other way...
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Mrs. Warren's Profession Bernard Shaw
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Who does Vivie reject? ---he tells her that her mom still owns brothels ---he tells her that she and Praed are 1/2 sibs (doesn't know fasho, just messing with her)
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CROFTS
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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Tom Sawyer
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Heart of Darkness
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Joseph Conrad
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Allegory for imperealism
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Heart of Darkness
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The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.
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Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
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In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found what they deserved. I did not inquire.
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Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
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It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?
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Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
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The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time. . . . I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of 'unsound method
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Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
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I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. . . . He had summed up—he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a remarkable man
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Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
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In Memorium - A.H.H.
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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The poem begins as a tribute to and invocation of the "Strong Son of God." Since man, never having seen God's face, has no proof of His existence, he can only reach God through faith. The poet attributes the sun and moon ("these orbs or light and shade") to God, and acknowledges Him as the creator of life and death in both man and animals. Man cannot understand why he was created, but he must believe that he was not made simply to die.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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The Son of God seems both human and divine. Man has control of his own will, but this is only so that he might exert himself to do God's will. All of man's constructed systems of religion and philosophy seem solid but are merely temporal, in comparison to the eternal God; and yet while man can have knowledge of these systems, he cannot have knowledge of God. The speaker expresses the hope that "knowledge [will] grow from more to more," but this should also be accompanied by a reverence for that which we cannot know.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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The speaker asks that God help foolish people to see His light. He repeatedly asks for God to forgive his grief for "thy [God's] creature, whom I found so fair." The speaker has faith that this departed fair friend lives on in God, and asks God to make his friend wise.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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In dissecting his own experience of grief, Tennyson is always running up against questions about life and death, and about religion and nature. Now he starts turning the questions on himself. Does he even remember his friend accurately, or is this just part of the grief? Tennyson confronts emotion with logic: maybe mourning is so terrible that, by contrast, it makes the old days seem more perfect than they really were.
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logic vs nostalgia in In Memorium
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Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy'd, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete; That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another's gain. Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last—far off—at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson Men trust that good will win out over ill, that "nothing walks with aimless feet" and everything has a purpose Men think that the vagaries of nature mean something Trust is hard to maintain, for men know nothing The poet is like an infant who can only believe in what he sees His faith is shaken by the realities of the rational evidence against immortality.
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The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul? Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life; That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear, I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope thro' darkness up to God, I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson Wonders if God and Nature are at strife, meaning if the evidence found in Nature denies the immortality of the soul Nature seems utterly careless of "the single life" and is capable of waste and chaos Poet stretches his feeble hands out and tries to muster his faith.
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'So careful of the type?' but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, `A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go. 'Thou makest thine appeal to me: I bring to life, I bring to death: The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more.' And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation's final law— Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek'd against his creed— Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills? No more? A monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match'd with him. O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson The poet does not think Nature is careful at all. He notes that species have gone extinct. She cares for nothing Man, who is "her last work, who seem'd so fair" and who trusted God, is at odds against Nature, "red in tooth and claw." She cares nothing for his creed and his battling for the good and the just He begins to think life is futile and frail, and he hopes for Hallam's voice to answer him or offer redress.
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There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars, hath been The stillness of the central sea. The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true; For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson The poet contrasts geological changes in the land with the permanence of his spirit in which he dwells and "[dreams] my dream, and [holds] it true."
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That which we dare invoke to bless; Our dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt; He, They, One, All; within, without; The Power in darkness whom we guess; I found Him not in world or sun, Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; Nor thro' the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun: If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice `believe no more' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep; A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd `I have felt.' No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamour made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near; And what I am beheld again What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the hands That reach thro' nature, moulding men.
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In Memorium - A.H.H. Alfred, Lord Tennyson The poet finds God not in the natural world or in the process of rational thought but in feeling, in emotion.
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Dover Beach
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Matthew Arnold
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Poems with rhyme schemes:
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dover beach in memorium a.h.h.
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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.
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DOVER BEACH MATTHEW ARNOLD
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Song of Myself
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Walt Whitman
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Radical ideas about America, democracy, spirituality, sexuality, nature and identity. He used 'Song of Myself' to explore those ideas while preaching self-knowledge, liberty and acceptance for all.
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Song of Myself Walt Whitman
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Form of Song of Myself
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Freeform loose structure
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He thinks that society has surpassed organized religion with its hierarchies and rules, but his language is full of Biblical references and talk of the soul and the spirit. In a nutshell, he thinks that the body and the soul are two sides of the same coin
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Song of Myself Walt Whitman
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DEMOCRACY
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VISION OF AMERICA IN SONG OF MYSELF
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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
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Walt Whitman
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anaphora/repitition
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characteristic of whitman's poetry
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The tide is the first thing that the speaker addresses "face to face" in the poem. The ebb and flow of the tides - and their currents - represent continuity. Thinks that human generations show a similar continuity. The movement of the tides also parallels the speaker's movement back and forth in time, when he projects himself in the future and returns again. Finally, you could read a tide-like pattern into the structure of the poem, where the same images and phrases come and go and come again.
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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Walt Whitman
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The poem's imagery actually seems go grow darker as it progresses, as if to mirror the setting of the sun. Although darkness corresponds to evil and doubt, the author accepts it as a necessary part of nature, and not as a power to be fought and defeated.
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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Walt Whitman
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He clearly does not have much taste for traditional, organized Christianity, as he makes clear with the many subtle digs he takes at religion. But he also borrows the language and themes of religious spirituality, particularly with regard to the individual communion with the divine known as mysticism. The principle message of the poem, repeated again and again, is that all material things large and small contribute to some larger spiritual reality.
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WALT WHITMAN
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I taste a liquor never brewed
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Emily Dickinson
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Uses alcohol and drunkenness as the vehicle of a metaphor about the beauty and awe-inspiring quality of nature
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I taste a liquor never brewed Dickinson
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I taste a liquor never brewed - From Tankards scooped in Pearl - Not all the Frankfort Berries Yield such an Alcohol!
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I taste a liquor never brewed Dickinson
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Inebriate of air - am I - And Debauchee of Dew - Reeling - thro' endless summer days - From inns of molten Blue -
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I taste a liquor never brewed Dickinson
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When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee Out of the Foxglove's door - When Butterflies - renounce their "drams" - I shall but drink the more!
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I taste a liquor never brewed Dickinson
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Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats - And Saints - to windows run - To see the little Tippler leaning against the sun!
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I taste a liquor never brewed Dickinson
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The religious imagery in the poem provides an odd juxtaposition with all the drunkenness going on. Still, it fits in perfectly when the poem is taken figuratively. Angels and saints would have no interest at all in the drunken exhibitions of the narrator. However, if the drunkenness is just an intense admiration and exaltation of God's handiwork, then they would rejoice in seeing it.
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I taste a liquor never brewed Dickinson
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Symbolism of alcohol in I taste a liquor never brewed
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drunkenness of a naturally-induced euphoric state
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There's a certain slant of light
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Emily Dickinson
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There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons - That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes -
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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Heavenly Hurt, it gives us - We can find no scar, But internal difference - Where the Meanings, are -
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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None may teach it - Any - 'Tis the seal Despair - An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air -
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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When it comes, the Landscape listens - Shadows - hold their breath - When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death -
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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The poem opens with the idea of there being a certain slant of light in winter afternoons that "oppresses. The speaker then compares the light to a kind of "Heavenly Hurt" that leaves no scar. It's impossible to define exactly what the light is or what it's like. But the speaker says it's everywhere, an "affliction" of sorts, that is sent from the air. When the light arrives, the landscape seems to listen and everything kind of stands still. When the light goes, there's something "distant" about it, kind of like death.
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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The speaker has her feelings put on the spot because of that light, making everything around her seem oppressive like that "imperial affliction."
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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Rather than seeing the light as uplifting and happy, we see it as something oppressive that also has the potential to be somewhat enlightening.
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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These tunes "oppress" rather than uplift. And with them comes a heaviness that the speaker can't help but feel burdened by. They also inflict a kind of "Heavenly Hurt" that reveals the speaker's "internal difference" or conflict even more.
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Cathedral Tunes There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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The speaker appears to be deliberately ambiguous about this "internal difference." We're not meant to see any specifics because it's "internal," and therefore only really understood by the speaker. And yet even she struggles to define this difference and the "imperial affliction" that comes with that slant of light.
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There's a certain Slant of light Emily Dickinson
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I 'M ceded, I 've stopped being theirs;
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Emily Dickinson
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I 'M ceded, I 've stopped being theirs; The name they dropped upon my face With water, in the country church, Is finished using now, And they can put it with my dolls My childhood, and the string of spools I 've finished threading too.
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I 'M ceded, I 've stopped being theirs; Emily Dickinson
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Baptized before without the choice, But this time consciously, of grace Unto supremest name, Called to my full, the crescent dropped, Existence's whole arc filled up With one small diadem.
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I 'M ceded, I 've stopped being theirs; Emily Dickinson
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My second rank, too small the first, Crowned, crowing on my father's breast, A half unconscious queen; But this time, adequate, erect, With will to choose or to reject, And I choose—just a throne.
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I 'M ceded, I 've stopped being theirs; Emily Dickinson
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When she says "I'm ceded—I've stopped being Theirs," the poet is saying?
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that church and family have relinquished their authoritarian claims on her, and also, in a second meaning of "ceded," that she is liberated.
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She speaks dismissively of attempts to mold or own her. As a helpless baby, "Crowing" or crying in her father's arms, the adults "dropped" a name "upon [her] face" along with the baptismal water. Well, "they" can take that name and put it away with her dolls, her childhood, and the little practice spools by which young girls began learning the wifely and homely arts. The poet is having none of it. Not any more. She now asserts her ability to make up her own mind. This time around she takes a higher rank ("too small the first") and chooses "just a Crown." What she means by this isn't completely clear.
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I 'M ceded, I 've stopped being theirs; Emily Dickinson
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A bird came down the walk
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Emily Dickinson
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The speaker describes once seeing a bird come down the walk, unaware that it was being watched. The bird ate an angleworm, then "drank a Dew / From a convenient Grass—," then hopped sideways to let a beetle pass by. The bird's frightened, bead-like eyes glanced all around. Cautiously, the speaker offered him "a Crumb," but the bird "unrolled his feathers" and flew away—as though rowing in the water, but with a grace gentler than that with which "Oars divide the ocean" or butterflies leap "off Banks of Noon"; the bird appeared to swim without splashing.
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A bird came down the walk Emily Dickinson
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the author keenly depicts the bird as it eats a worm, pecks at the grass, hops by a beetle, and glances around fearfully. As a natural creature frightened by the speaker into flying away, the bird becomes an emblem for the quick, lively, ungraspable wild essence that distances nature from the human beings who desire to appropriate or tame it. But the most remarkable feature of this poem is the imagery of its final stanza, in which the author provides one of the most breath-taking descriptions of flying in all of poetry. Simply by offering two quick comparisons of flight and by using aquatic motion (rowing and swimming), she evokes the delicacy and fluidity of moving through air. The image of butterflies leaping "off Banks of Noon," splashlessly swimming though the sky, is one of the most memorable in all their writing.
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A bird came down the walk Emily Dickinson
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This is my letter to the world
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Emily Dickinson
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This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me— The simple News that Nature told— With tender Majesty
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This is my letter to the world Emily Dickinson
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Her Message is committed To Hands I cannot see— For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen— Judge tenderly—of Me
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This is my letter to the world Emily Dickinson
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I wrote a letter to the world even though the world never wrote anything to me. I wrote about what Nature told me, and I am entrusting it to an invisible audience. Please, don't judge me harshly because of what I have written.
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This is my letter to the world Emily Dickinson
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My life had stood - a loaded gun
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Emily Dickinson
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My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - In Corners - till a Day The Owner passed - identified - And carried Me away -
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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And now We roam in Sovereign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - And every time I speak for Him - The Mountains straight reply -
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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And do I smile, such cordial light Upon the Valley glow - It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its pleasure through -
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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And when at Night - Our good Day done - I guard My Master's Head - 'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's Deep Pillow - to have shared -
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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To foe of His - I'm deadly foe - None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb -
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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Though I than He - may longer live He longer must - than I - For I have but the power to kill, Without - the power to die -
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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This poem is about many things. You may have your own interpretation, but we're going to focus on the theme of anger that pours out of these 24 lines like lava out of a volcano's mouth. Indeed, there is some anger up in this poem. And we're not talking about simple frustration, but fiery, explosive rage that can take over even the most levelheaded person. Wrath can makes us feel powerful, invincible even.
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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However, as the speaker explores in the poem, it can be an uneasy arrangement. Anger can carry us away whether we'd like it to or not. While it can be strangely rewarding to get angry, giving you a sort of high, this process can also be highly destructive. Feelings of invincibility may be a cover for something deeper and darker than anger - something that is harder to express. Intense.
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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The gun is a symbol of power and violence. Guns are dangerous, because they have the power to take life away instantly. By introducing us to a gun in the first line, our speaker makes sure that we are on edge and attentive throughout the remainder of the poem.
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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Though many elements of this poem are ambiguous, we know that there is some sort of collaboration taking place between the speaker's life and the anger she feels. At times, these two concepts (life and anger) are separate entities. Other times, they are united. In any case, the concept of life weaves its way in and out of the poem.
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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violence can come in many different forms. There's spiritual violence, psychological violence, emotional violence - anything that can count as "abuse." Violence is not always physical, so it doesn't necessarily leave a scar you can see. More often than not, it's more complicated than it appears.
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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Power is influence. A guy with a gun has a lot of power, or at least thinks he does. A leader with public speaking skills has power. Power is always a two-sided equation. Something or someone has power over someone or something else. That is, a king without a kingdom isn't very kingly. Our speaker's life is like a gun, and so we know that she has power. Our speaker is the one in control of language in this poem, and so she has a certain power over us. However, the scary thing about being in power is that it can be taken away at a moment's notice. We watch our speaker struggle to gain control throughout this poem, and we watch her serve a far more powerful "Owner" and "Master" by guarding him as he sleeps.
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My life had stood - a loaded gun Emily Dickinson
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God's Grandeur
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
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God's Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins
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And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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God's Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Rhyme scheme of Hopkins poems
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ABBA
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The first four lines of the octave (the first eight-line stanza of an Italian sonnet) describe a natural world through which God's presence runs like an electrical current, becoming momentarily visible in flashes like the refracted glintings of light produced by metal foil when rumpled or quickly moved. Alternatively, God's presence is a rich oil, a kind of sap that wells up "to a greatness" when tapped with a certain kind of patient pressure. Given these clear, strong proofs of God's presence in the world, the poet asks how it is that humans fail to heed ("reck") His divine authority ("his rod").
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God's Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The second quatrain within the octave describes the state of contemporary human life—the blind repetitiveness of human labor, and the sordidness and stain of "toil" and "trade." The landscape in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and the prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed the landscape, and robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those few beauties of nature still left. The shoes people wear sever the physical connection between our feet and the earth they walk on, symbolizing an ever-increasing spiritual alienation from nature.
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God's Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet, enacting a turn or shift in argument) asserts that, in spite of the fallenness of Hopkins's contemporary Victorian world, nature does not cease offering up its spiritual indices. Permeating the world is a deep "freshness" that testifies to the continual renewing power of God's creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant regeneration is the grace of a God who "broods" over a seemingly lifeless world with the patient nurture of a mother hen. This final image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing within Himself the power and promise of rebirth. With the final exclamation ("ah! bright wings") Hopkins suggests both an awed intuition of the beauty of God's grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling bird emerging out of God's loving incubation.
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God's Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Carefully chooses this complex of images to link the secular and scientific to mystery, divinity, and religious tradition. Electricity was an area of much scientific interest during Hopkins's day, and is an example of a phenomenon that had long been taken as an indication of divine power but which was now explained in naturalistic, rational terms. Hopkins is defiantly affirmative in his assertion that God's work is still to be seen in nature, if men will only concern themselves to look
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God's Grandeur Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Pied Beauty
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins
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All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.
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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The speaker says we should glorify God because he has given us dappled, spotted, freckled, checkered, speckled, things. (This poem says "dappled" in a lot of different ways.)
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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The speaker goes on to give examples. We should praise God because of the skies with two colors, like a two-colored cow. And the little reddish dots on the side of trout. And the way fallen chestnuts look like red coals in a fire. And the blended colors of the wings of a finch (a kind of bird). And landscapes divided up by humans into plots for farming. And for all the different jobs that humans do.
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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins
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In short, the speaker thinks we should praise God for everything that looks a bit odd or unique, everything that looks like it doesn't quite fit in with the rest.
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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins
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All these beautiful, mixed-up, ever-changing things were created or "fathered" by a God who never changes. The speaker sums up what he believes should be our attitude in a brief, final line: "Praise Him."
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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins
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"Hymn to creation." It argues that the wonders and mysteries of nature provide ample reasons to praise and glorify God. The poem reads like a prayer. It ends with the speaker urging us to get on the bandwagon and join him in praise.
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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Carrion Comfort
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
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Carrion Comfort Gerard Manley Hopkins
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But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
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Carrion Comfort Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
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Carrion Comfort Gerard Manley Hopkins Expresses doubt
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No worst, there is none
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Gerard Manley Hopkins
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No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
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No worst, there is none Gerard Manley Hopkins
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My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."' O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
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No worst, there is none Gerard Manley Hopkins doubt and fustration with God
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Themes of Hopkins poems
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DOUBT AND FRUSTRATION WITH GOD
