The Wild Duck

By: Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen’s contribution to the theatre was threefold, and in each respect the drama owes more to him than to any other dramatist since Shakespeare. Firstly, he broke down the social barriers which have previously bounded it. He was the first man to show that high tragedy could be written about ordinary people and in ordinary everyday prose and the importance of that seemingly simple achievement can hardly be exaggerated. Before Ibsen, tragedy had concerned itself with kings and queens, princes, or at the lowest, Montague’s and capulets. Ibsen’s showed that high tragedy did take place at ……… as frequently in back parlours as in …… and palaces. He was, of course, not the first dramatist to attempt this, but he was the first to write a tragedy about the ordinary people that proved a tremendous success. The theme of The Wild Duck is the importance in human life, of illusions as distinguished from reality. The play is a study, in depth of the contrast between illusions and reality and of the relative position which each should occupy in human life. It is the tension between illusions and reality which is responsible for the tragic outcome in the play. Actually The Wild Duck is a play about two kinds of illusions traditional and Trans………. .Illusion is self-deception and quite obviously, a very common made of human behavior. Its function is to provide the personality with fixed patterns of value, which are nothing but orientate patterns in the mixed that guarantee a certain amount of meaningful continually to it beyond the randomness and disturbance of external data and experience. These valuable orientations tend to sustain the personality in its content struggle with reality, so that it is not surprising to find that against such strongly fixed patterns of illusions he reality often is nothing. Reality after all, exists to suit and confirm the orientate patterns in the mind and except in strictly scientific method, not the reverse. In the Ekdal household, especially for old Ekdaland little Hedvig, value is provided by the ……………….which contains a wild duck along with many other treasures of illusion such as ………………….pigeons and rabbits which trive in game forest in rented by Old Ekdal with five withered charismas trees. Old Ekdal hunts there, carrying a gun that is very old. Fir Aedvig there is an old giant clock that no longer ………..… and cupboards full of interesting books like a History of London with its numerous illustration of………..… and churches and great sailing ships. Hedvig and her grandfather approach their world with devotion and ritual akin to religious reverence for the ali………….… with the duck and other

1

treasures may be considered a metaphor for the Christian paradise: it performs in their lives exactly the same function as does a traditional church for many people. Existing on the top floor of the Ekdal microcosm…….... The ………. Is the ……………. bonus in their lives, it provides them, just like heaven, with a world of pure value, a realm of nearly perfect orientation. The Ekdal keep returning to their private religion for sustenance just as people do with any traditional illusion that is sacred to them. Significantly enough, the whole realm of self-deception, in fact the every thing in the Ekdal existence, has come at on time or another from wise old Werle the merchant and manufacturer Actually Werle has given them not only the wild duck, but also like some god, he has fashioned into their lies all the major values of existence ever since the time about fifteen years before , when he bestowed his single handed by on Hjalmar Ekdal, the young head of the household not only his home and his training in photography but even his wife and child. The other objects in the attic come from an old sea captian who once lived there long ago. Hedvig implies that he may be the Flying Dutchman who brought all treasures from the bottom of the sea, The Sea which invariably serves as a symbol for the unconscious self. In other words, all values has come into their from outside. Nothing is there own. What the attic is for Ekdal and little Hedvig, Hjal mar Ekdal, great “invention” is for him. Hjalmar cannot indeed give any specific details of this invention; he says only that When I resolved to dedicate myself to photography, it was not just with the idea of talking portraits of all kinds of every people… I swore that were I to consecrate my powers to this craft, I should also exalt it to such a height that it would become both an art and science. That is why I decided to make the great invention. Not surprisingly, this valuable illusion has been purposely brought into the existence from outside, to; this time by Dr. Relling, who cultivated Hjal mar’s self-deception that he would make some remarkable discovery in photography someday. What ever originality Hjalmar had, Dr Relling points out, “was torn out of him completely already in boyhood.” The real Hjalmar, Dr. Relling continues, only “had talent for prettily disclaiming the verses and thought of others.” Hjalmar, Ibsen is saying is, like most people merely an imitator; no artist, but only photographer who is sustained by an illusion of some great invention that never comes off. Value has been introduced for him, as for the rest of the Ekdals, by old Werle and Dr. Relling. The Ekdal micro some subsists more or less happily on these traditional illusions for almost fifteen years, until one day Gregers Werle arrives. Rebelling against his father’s wisdom, and mutedly seeking to cure his sick conscience, Grogers comes knocking at the Ekdas door with his claims of the ideals. What Gregers means are the demands of his transcedutal illusion? A remark of Sign mend Freud in a letter reads like a commentary on Ibsen’s train of thought at this time. Freud writes that “The moment of a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick since objectively neither has any existence”. We do not have

2

conjecture whether Gregers is sick; he tells us this himself when he reveals the neurotic motivation behind his life mission by telling his father that “It’s thanks to you I go round hunted and graved by a guilt-Laden conscience”. Gregers now decides to “save” Hjalmar from what he judges to be the falsehood and deception that re ruining him. Ibsen, however, now unmasks the real purpose behind the Gregers missionary zeal with a single stunning stroke when he has him state: “Besides, if I am to go any empathy involved. In this way Ibsen analyze in this play, the whole reason for being of the transcendental hero. Hjalmar world of second –hand illusion places him rather vulnerable spot when Gregers comes along, he actually moves in with the Ekdals so he can perform at close range in order to concentrate him and his wife, Gina, to our entirely of “claims of the ideal,” when he defines as “certain demands that a person cannot set aside without injuring his soul”. Ironically, of course, the claims of the transcendental hero violate the very “soul” which they intend to protect and elevate, for the transcendentalist which his sick conscience questions the meaning and value of existence, in fact the very conditions of experience. In itself this is harmless, but Ibsen shows repeatedly from now on that such questioning inevitably gees rise to the religion impulse, which is the impulse to save people from their traditional low bred orientations, in short , from themselves , by imposing on them a loftier illusion. In this attempt at a noble synthesis of reality with a transcendental ideal, on Ibsen saw it, the missionary not only fails to destroy himself, but also inevitably ends up by wondering and finally destroying the personalities of those who are subjected to his vision.Again and again in Ibsen, beginning with play, the noble synthesis turns out to be a heroic self-deception, and one that always proves to a fatal error, whether one is speaking of Gorgers Werle or Romer, of solness or allmers. Gregers seeks to redeem the very condition of experience of the Ekdals by the imposition of his transcendental authority. Fortunately, his aims are thwarted by Dr. Relling, who comes into the sick world as the author’s raisonneur; a diagnostician and potential healer in a microcosm that seems to him like one big hospital. Infect he diagnoses the sickness of the transcendental hero of the perfection when he tells the Gregers that he suffers from a bed case of ‘self-righteous fever’, and he add that he always goes around wallowing in a delirium of religious impulse; “always must have something to look up to our own limits” Transcendental illusion, that doctor knows, just like traditional illusion, provides a need sereau against the rigor and disturbance of reality; but Relling is keenly aware also that traditional illusion is more perfectible by far, since it will not justify the violation of other personalities . The whole world is sick, unfortunately, Dr, Relling ayes, the remedy is purposeful cultivation of stimulating and life- sustaining illusion by anyone who is strong enough to stand alone, and above illusions. Such a man is them in a position to help other people to live their lives by manipulating and sustaining their self-deceptions, both large and small. Gregory’s

3

sickness proves to be so insidious that in the end it like Hedvig as a victim for Hjalmar, under the Gregers coaching, has ruthlessly exposed his daughter’s illusion of wild duck. “Life could be quite pleasant after all” the doctor concludes, “if we might only left in place by these blasted who pester us poor folk with ideal demands”. But even through Edvig is dead, Greger has learned nothing. He states that he shall go on with his mission of being the thirteenth men at table. His illusion to the New Testament Christ here is oblivious. Dr. Relling’s whole point is that the attic permits people to live, where as the transcendental ideal of Gregers is an illusion that that is neither stimulating nor life- sustaining; t is infect, destructive, for it claims the life of Hedvig and almost destroyed the Ekdal’s marriage. At this stage in Ibsen’s development, the only redemption seems to lie in able to engage with reality by an escape into some traditional kind of illusion, as old Ekdal, Hedvig, and Hjalmar willingly do the only persons who preserve real and complete identity an old Werle and Dr. Rellling. They are the only ones who can bear the reality more than most people; and Ibsen knows that most can stand very little reality, indeed. Only old Werle and Dr. Relling were able to cape with reality by looking at all ell of the world and the personality without casting up strong defenses. Although Ibsen had used the device of symbolism in some of his earlier plays, it was in The Wild Duck that he use of this device on an elaborate scale. The chief symbol in the play is wild duck which the Ekdal family had received from Mr. Werle who had shot at and wounded the bird. The first reference to the wild duck comes in an indirect manner in the wild duck comes an indirect manner in a speech by Mr. Werle in Act I, though this reference is made by him unconsciously, and we too become aware of this reference only afterwards when old Ekdal describes the behavior of a wounded duck to the Greger on Act II.As we read through the play, we discover that it symbolizes the kind of life which Hjalmar and his father are leading, that is symbolizes the life of the girl Hedvig and that further more, the wild duck symbolizes the Ibsen’s own life at the he wrote this play. We also discover, as early on Act II, That Greger too becomes involved in this symbolism by reason of his wishing to play the role of the amazingly clever dog which had divided into the water after the wounded duck and brought it back t the surface. As all this symbolism is the hub and heart of the play, the little The Wild Duck is appropriate for it. The Wild Duck is play dependant on, and held together by, a symbol; as though the wild duck were a magnet and the characters in the play so many in iron filings held together by this centripetal force. In this play the symbol is, for the first time in Ibsenian drama, a physical reality on the stage or near enough to into suggest actual presence. It is therefore both fact and symbol in the play. The dark garret adjacent to Hjalmar’s studio also serves as a symbol.

4

Gregers tells Hjalmar that the latter has also strain of the wild duck in him. Gregers elaborates his remark by saying that Hjalmar has divided down and taken firm hold of the weeds on the seabed. Gregers further says that Hjalmar has landed in a “poisonous swap” that Hjalmar has got an “insidious disease” in him, and That Hjalmar should not worry about his miserable condition because Gregers would see to it that Hjalmar rises to the surface again. Says Gregers;”I have a purpose in life new; I found it yesterday”. What Gregers means by these remarks is that Hjalmar is hiding himself from the reality of the life just as the wild duck, by diving to the bottom and holding fast to the weeds, had tried to hide itself from the reality of the life which it was living above on the surface? Gregers knows that Hjalmar’s wife Gina had been reduced by Mr. Werle before she was married o Hjalmar. But Hjalmar does not know this fact The wild duck symbolized Hedvig too. The wild duck is an alien in the garret; nobody knows where it has come from. All that is known about it is that it was wounded by Mr. Werle when he is enjoying the sport of shooting birds. Now, in a sense, Hedvig too is an alien in this household. Hedvig is the product of the Mr. Werle’s sport of making love to any woman, who attracted him the wild duck, is lame, has a damage wing, and is leading an incomplete and unsatisfactory kind of life, shut within the four walls of a dark garret. Hedvig too is leading a narrow, limited kind of life, partly because she has weak eyesight and would soon become blind and partly because she has no ambition to travel and see the world Just as the wild duck has got used to its new abode, so Hedvig is perfectly contended with her inadequate life in this house. To Hedvig, her house, her father, her mother, and the wild duck constitute the whole world. And yet she is leading a frustrated life like that of the wild duck. The wild duck symbolizes Old Ekdal’s life also at one time Old Ekdal used to live at Hoidal, in the open air, and used to go into the forest nearby in order to hunt wild animals. He was in those days as free as the wild duck was before it was shot by Mr. Werle. But now Old Ekdal is living in a small house situated in a congested crowded city, for away from open spaces and open air. The wild duck may also be regarded as symbol of Werle’s seduction of Gina before she got married to Hjalmar. After learning from Gregers secret of Gina past life, Hjalmar feels like wringing the neck of wild duck. The very sight of the wild duck now reminds him of the man from whom the bird had been received and who had played a trick upon Hjalmar by getting the reduced Gina married to him. At the same, while the wild duck has these specific significances within the play, it is possible that, consciously or unconsciously, it reflect also Ibsen’s impression of himself when he wrote the play. Ibsen wants us to understand that he has now forgotten what it meant to live a wild life; he now liked the wild duck, grown plump and tame and contented with his limited life. Raymond William says: In the pillars of society, the leaky ship becomes in a sense, the play. The fortunes of all characters the characters are involved with it; it

5

is possible to take this ship as an over-all judgment on the dramatic situation. In A Doll’s House the Tarantella danced by Nora sums up the total situation of the play in a form which does not depend on words. In Ghosts, the orphanage built in memory of captain Alvig, which is uninsured and which is burned down, is a similar statement of the total situation of the drama. In The Wild duck, the title phrase, and the strange Garret summarize the total situation. The Dark Garret in the play symbolizes thick forest where Old Ekdal used to hunt wild animals. Now Old Ekdal occasionally shoots a pet rabbit and imagines that he and shoots a wild bear. This is illusion which old Ekdal has built up for himself. This is the “Saving lie” (in Relling’s phrase) which keeps old Ekdals going. Deform this illusion also Gregers wanted to rescue Old Ekdal by talking him back to Hoidal, through Gregers soon afterward changes his mind and gives up his idea of going back to Hoidal. The garret is a symbol of protectative phamtasy for Old Ekdal. To Hedvig, however, the garret symbolizes the ocean’s depth asserts itself. The first description of the garret gives us the image of the imaginative world of Old Ekdal with its luminosities or mysterious as its shadows, all unordered. In The Wild Duck, Ibsen truly reached the height of his power as a structural artist. In this play he handled several themes and the destinies of different characters with an almost Shakespearean balance. The main theme of the play is that of illusion versus reality. Here the characters mainly concerned are Gregers, Hjalmar, and Relling. Another theme is that of idealism versus realism, and the main characters in this context being Gregers on one hand and the group of realists on the other. Yet another theme is frankness versus concealment, the characters concerned here being Gina and Mrs. Sorby. The paternal love of Hjalmar for Hedvig and the filial love of Hedvig for him constitute another important theme in the play. This relationship is contrasted with the strained relations between Mr.Werle and Gregers, or the alienation of the son from his father. It is in the interweaving of these various themes that Ibsen shows his skill as a dramatist. The Wild Duck is certainly a masterpiece of realism, and it is strikingly and emphatically so. It is a realistic play as regards its character portrayal; and it is a realistic play as regards its language and dialogue.

6

ARMS AND THE MAN

George Bernard Shaw G.B Shaw was the most representative British dramatist of the period from 1890-1920. He was the father of the new drama of ideas, and his plays made a great impact on the theatre-going as well as the reading public. Whether people argued with him or not they could not ignore him. This bright nimble, fierce and comprehending being, as Churchill called him, gave new life and vigor drama which had almost gone to sleep for ever a hundred years. An outstanding characteristic of Shaw as a play Wright is the exceptional variety and vividness of his characters. Shaw had the insight to enter into the minds of people, to grasp their points of view, and to objectify them in expression of their personalities, which accounts for the wide range of his characters. He did not take actual people as models, any more than he took the situations of actual life, but conceived original characters who created their own situations. Shaw drew his characters from the observation but they were the fruit of meditation. He was not concerned to put upon the stage men and women in their lives of weakness, confusion and commonsense, or aural life in its monotony, but living people in their hidden selves. Shaw entails a particular idea both of reality and of people. The fact that the truth is so apparent to Shaw and so obscure to others presses even his capacious ego to look for some explanation beside the superiority of his intellect. The explanation he seizes on is only a slightly less egotistical one: the superiority of his courage in facing facts. In many of his social and critical writings, Shaw strikes the pose of the one uncomfortable sentimentalist, and, more bluntly, the one same man in a nation of fools. The conviction that the he alone can and will tell the truth presupposes, thus, a world full of illusions and a populace that resists taking an honest look that world. Shaw’s plays are open-ended but it does not mean that they lack discernable patterns of meaning, or that they fail to function as inspirements of social criticism. The play conveys clear criticisms and affirmations in spite of their rapid shifts of focus and sympathy, and complexity of their portrayal of character. The value of Shaw’s drama as a thorn in the flesh of society is that it remains critical whilst not being easy to discard as presenting a partisan or limited view. Further, in Shaw’s dramas art imaginative use in made of all the resources of the theatre. The plays demonstrate a mastery of both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. Prose creates an impressive range of dramatic effects.

7

Shaw’s treatment of the theme of suffering in the plays reflects an outlook which remained remarkably and tenaciously affirmative. Shaw was not sympathetic in his attitude to the suffering of his fellow beings and he spent the grater part of his life in combat with forces in human society which he saw as contributing to the sum of suffering. Few……… of the 20 century cold be claimed to have waged such a wide-ranging, courageous and subtle attack on the enemies of the society as does Shaw in his plays and other writings. The sharvian forms of the comedy tragic comedy celebrate life, and recurring the miracle of its self renewal. In the vision of life which is expressed in his plays, things that are funny belong to the essence of truth, and extended commiseration with sorrow is out of place. Shaw’s theme were the relations between men and women husbands and wives, and parents and children, the problems of conscience , character and disposition ; the problems of individual and society ; and the conception of life as creative energy. Hence he presents the classic theme of drama, the clash within the individual mind, the clash between the individual and customs, manners, religion policies of the time. Since the themes are of eternal interest, his plays go beyond the merely comic. They do not end in a joke but in the vision of life, so that we do more than smile when we see them. As he said of himself, “Though my trade is that of playwright, my vocation is ….. of a prophet,” because he is a prophet he is the dramatist of the future. What is seen in his plays is a mind at work, a mind that grasped what is set out to do, and had the lucidity and discipline, the generative power and technical skill, to accomplish it. Arms and the Man is Dryden’s translation of the opening words of Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, telling the adventures of Aeneas, The Trojan Prince, after the fall of Troy. Then opening lines in Dryden’s translation sum as follow: Arms and the Man sing, who force b y the fate, And haughty Juno’ unslenting hate. This suggested to G.B. Shaw the title for his play, which ultimately proved to be the happy choice. Shaw has given a different treatment to the phrase of Virgil. Instead of glorifying war and heroism like Virgil, He exposes the romantic glamour attached with the war and profession of a solider. The opening of the play, no doubt, creates a n atmosphere of war and heroism. We hear of a cavalry charge led by the Surgious. This has raised the status of Surgious to the level of real war-hero. Catherine imparts this information to her daughter Raina, and the young lady in raptures. Serguis becomes the hero of the hour. Raina embraces his photograph and worships him like a Priestess. Then there is a fugitive from the war who climbs a water pipe and seeks shelter in the bedroom of a young lady. He, too, has his own arms, a pistol, and later on uses Raina‘s cloak. Raina‘s room is searched by the soldiers of the Bulgarian army. The whole atmosphere vibrates with war cries and clang of war. But very soon the hollowware of war is exposed. We come to know that Serguis ‘s mush talk about cavalry charge was an act of good and idiot, and for

8

this he should has been court-martial led. Shaw makes it clear that soldiering is a coward‘s art of attacking your enemy when he is advantage. That most soldiers are born fools improved when the Bulgarian officer who comes to search Raina‘s bedroom failed to notice Bluntschli pistol lying on the ottoman. Bluntschli declares that all the soldiers are afraid to die. The old experienced soldiers prefer to grub in the battlefield rather than ammunition. Bluntschli tells Raina that the fights for a living, and not because of any patriotic motives: Don’t hate me, dear young lady. I am Swiss, fighting merely as a professional soldier. I joined the Serbs because they come first on the road from Switzerland. Shaw has declares in the Arms and the Man that romantic notion about war are mere illusions. War is such a dangerous affair that it destroys millions of innocent people in discriminaliy. People, who have witnessed the horrors of the two world wars, can well appreciate the anti war cries of Shaw. That ‘s why Shaw ridicules Serguis to be fool, instead of raisin him to the image of a war hero as did Virgil inn The Aeneid. So, Shaw asserts the supremacy not of a war hero, but of a real human being. Every man is a human being and wants to live as long as possible. This is what Bluntschli says; Raina; some soldiers, I know, are afraid to die. Bluntschli; All of them dear lady, all of them, believe me. It is our duty to live as long as we can. This is what every common man feels. This answer, perfectly acceptable to people today, who know to horrors of two world wars was revolutionary at the time play was written. It sets the mood for further anti-romantic revelations from intruder. Bluntschli tells Raina that he fights for a living not because of patriotic motives. The First Act is seemed therefore, as a contrast between realism and idealism. Raina romantically conceals Bluntschli behind the curtains, even through he is an enemy, and she tells him that he would have been safe if , instead of threatening her with a pistol he had simply thrown himself as a fugitive on the Pickoff’s scene of hospitality. It is an idea that she had gained from the opera of Ernami. To contrast with Riana’s girlish notion of how notions make war , however Shaw insists on Bluntschli ‘s exhaustion as he has not closed his eyes for forty eight hours, and the First Act ends with his falling asleep in Raina ;s bed. Arms and the Man is basically a light hearted play, but we retain after reading it is not only a pleasurable feeling from having experienced a witty piece of writing. At every point possible Shaw pricks the bubble of false romanticism. He shows us the Riana’s idea of battlefield is in accurately telling Bluntschli tells of the realities. He shows that Serguis needs to make love to the maid, as he finds the higher love too fatiguing. To reinforce further the idea of romantic attitudes about love being deluded, he shows Major Pickoff’s servant Nicola ready to give up his fiancé, for profit:

9

Nicola; I’ve often thought that if Raina were out of the way and you just little less of a food and Serguis just a little more of one, you might come to be one of my grandest customers, instead of only being my wife and costing me money,Louka: I would believe you rather are my servant than my husband. You would make more out of me. Thus we find that both Raina and Serguis are disillusioned in their notions of romantic ideas. Serguis find it hard to reconcile with the type of love he is getting from Raina, and in order to make up the deficiency of love in subsequent enjoyment he flirts with Louka, whose love he finds to be real. Again Raina makes love to Bluntschli because she finds to her great dismay that her so called hero is making love to her maid on her back. She is emotionally attached with Bluntschli not because he is an expert and practical soldier but because he talks of plain facts without mincing matters and has the capacity to face those acts. He exposes the hero of Slivnitza by extricating his real personality from the web of glory that surrounds him and makes Raina see the reality as it appears. In Arms and the Man there is a elusion between romantic illusion and the prosaic reality of sex. Raina and Serguis are disillusioned by coming in contact with Bluntschli and Louka/ Arms and the Man is the comedy of youthful romance and disillusion. Both Serguis and Raina are engaged and protest in hyperbolic terms that they have found higher love. But left alone, Serguis flirts with maid servant Louka and tells her that the higher love is a very fatiguing thing to keep up for the any length of time, Louka. One feels the need of some relief after it. This need which is met in the embraces of Louka shows that the higher love is sheer emptiness and a creature of flesh and blood cannot live on it. Shaw’s attacks romantic love from another angle. It is always associated with the jealousy and espionage. When Louka tells Serguis that Raina makes love to another man behind his back, he shivers as if she had stabbed him. Jealously grips him so much that he goes the ridiculous extreme of challenging Bluntschli in a duel. Raina, too, is suspicious of Serguis through she worships him like as her soul hero when in the embrace of Serguis Louka tells him: I may have been seen from the window: Miss Raina is sure to be spying about after you. Her suggestion is confirmed later on when Raina says: Do you know that I looked out of the window as I went upstairs, to have another right of my hero; I saw something and did not understand them. I know now that that you were making loves to her. So this jealously and espionage indicate that the higher love has no social foundation. It is because the higher love is based on a total misunderstanding of the nature of Sex. A woman cannot surrender her husband to another woman. Ruth Adam says: In Arms and Man, Shaw exposes what he calls the amateurism of the glory hunting solider, through the attitude of a Swiss mercenary a professional, who is in the business, not or the sake of patriotism, but as a job. He is contemptuous of the cavalry officer who led his men, not only

10

to certain death but to certain defeat. Is it professional to throw a regiment of cavalry in a battery of machine guns with the dead certainly that the guns go off not a horse or a man will ever get within fifth yards of the fire? Where he discovers that he is talking to the finance of the officer in question he is apologetic. Shaw’s exposes the weaknesses and follies of the military officialdom, social facts such as Byronism marriage of conventional and social attitude of servants towards their masters. Shaw was professed social reformer and satire was the weapon which he used to convert the nation with his own point of view. In play after play he lashes at the social wills prevalent in society. In Arms and the Man he satirized the romantic ideas of love and war, soldiering and social snobbery. The social snobbery of the people belonging to the upper strata of society has been satirized by Shaw in Arms and the Man .Raina had foolish pride in her family, her house. She likes to brag of a flight of stairs and the library. She wishes to impress Bluntschli by talking to him about the Opera and the story of the Ernami where by she imposes herself to the great noble who saved his enemy’s life. In the last quarter of the 19th century, western civilization has just started making and impact on the Balkan’s religion and the tendency to show off was very strong among the rich and particularly neo rich classes in Bulgaria. The situation has parreled in presented day Pakistan, snobbery showmanship have become the order of the day. The Prestige symbols have, of course changed. In Bulgaria of 1885, a library, a cell –bell and a flight of stairs were a prestige symbols. Raina represents the shallow upper class Bulgarian society. In the scene full of the good humor scathing satire, Shaw brings out the hypocritical character of the Petkoff family. Major Petkoff would take a great care to tell his colleagues in the army that they have a library. But he is barbarian out and out. Most amusingly he details in the folly and futiiculty of daily wash. Shaw has a very gay fling in him when he says that one can understand a wash once a week to keep up position, but once a day carrying things to a ridiculous extreme. And he has the case of his father to prove his point beyond a shadow of doubt. Catherine is perhaps a bigger snob. She regrets that her husband did not tell the people about the electric bell. The poor Major, however, does not understand what an electric bell is an would much prefer to Nicola. However Catherine is no more civilized than he. She dries her washing right in the garden where the visitors come and sit. Thus ignorance and snobbery hold supreme sway on the Petkoff. Shaw is a master satirist and apart from satirizing view of life, he misses no chance of attacking the upper class Bulgarians who were beginning to back in the sunshine of western civilization. Indirectly the play is fling of this civilization. Arms and the Man is a new kind of play different from the traditional theatre. There is enough of action is internal rather external. There are no incidents which may bring about the change in external circumstances of the characters. It is the maid of the characters that undergoes a change in the

11

situation. Certainly, there is no meaningless necessary action in the play. The characters move only in when the have a reason for doing so. The whole action moves towards one particular direction and that is the theme of the play. Shaw’s characters are not generally given to searching. They are too busy with the external problems of the plot to wonder very much about their inner situation. Serguis is an exception. He has inward. Looking eye and perhaps of all Shaw’s characters introspective. He is like Shaw a rebel against the tyranny of the soldier order even more heroically, against the tyranny of his compulsions. In short Arms and the Man do not only expose or ridicule some human or social folly or weakness; it has some serious purposes behind it also. Though Shaw has endowed this play with ample land together, yet the laughter has a serious purpose, and this differentiates the play from a farce. The intentions of the dramatist in Arms and the Man are comic and the use of bathos or anticlimax is the instrument through which he achieves his comic intention. So, the main purpose of the dramatist is writing this play is to demonstrate the folly of romantic ideals of love and war. There is no doubt that he has provided enough of form to his readers and audience, but he has also achieved his serious purpose; exposing the hollowness of romantic ideas of love and war. So can safely say that Arms and the Man is a comedy with serious purpose not a mere meaningless force.

12

HAMLETWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity learning to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well might more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make his story tragic. Nor yet would it become so, in the Shakespearean sense, if the fine and the great wind from the wilderness, and the torments of his flesh were conceived as sent by a supernatural power, whether just or malignant. The calamities of tragedy do not simply happen, nor are they sent, they proceed mainly from actions, and those the actions of men.We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances, and we see, arising from the co-operation of their character in these circumstances, certain actions. These actions beget others, and these others beget others again, until this series of interconnected deeds leads by a apparently inevitable sequences to a catastrophe. The effect of such a series on imagination is to make us regard the sufferings which accompany it, and the catastrophe in which it ends, not only or chiefly as something which happens to the persons concerned, but equally as something which is caused by them. This at least may be said of the principal persons, and, among them, of the hero, who always contributes in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes.

This second aspect of tragedy evidently differs greatly from the first. Men, from this point of view, appear to us primarily as agents, themselves the authors of their proper woe, and our fear and pity, though they will not cease or diminish, will be modified accordingly. The story or action of a Shakespearean tragedy does not consist, of course, solely of human actions or deeds, but the deeds are the predominant factor. And these deeds are far the most part, actions in the full sense of the word, not things done tween asleep and awake. But acts or omissions thoroughly expressive of the doer, characteristic deeds. The centre of the tragedy, therefore, may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in character issuing in action.

13

Shakespeare occasionally represents abnormal conditions of mind, insanity, for example, somnambulism, hallucinations. And deeds issuing from these are certainly not what we call deeds in the fullest sense, deeds expressive of character. But these abnormal conditions are never introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking has no influence whatever on the events that follow it. Macbeth did not murder Duncan because he saw a dagger in the air: he saw the dagger because he was about to murder Duncan. Lear’s insanity is not the cause of a tragic conflict any more than Ophelia’s; it is, like Ophelia’s, the result of a conflict and in both cases the effect is mainly pathetic. If Lear were really mad when he divided his Kingdom, if Hamlet were mad at any time in the story, they would cease to be tragic characters.

Shakespeare also introduces the supernatural into some of his tragedies; he introduces ghosts, and witches who have supernatural knowledge. This supernatural element certainly cannot in most cases, if in any, be explained away as an illusion in the mind of one of the character. And further, it does not contribute to the action, and is in more than one instance in indispensable part of it: so that to describe human character, when circumstances, as always the sole motive force in this action would be a serious error. But the supernatural is always placed in the closest relation with character. It gives a confirmative and a distinct from a inward movements already present and exerting an influence; to the sense of failure in Brutus, to the half-formed thought or the horrified memory of guilt in Macbeth, to suspicion in Hamlet, moreover, its influence is never of a compulsive kind. It forms no more than a clement, however, important, in the problem which the hero has to face; and we are never allowed to feel that it has removed his capacity or responsibility for dealing with the problem. So far indeed are we from feeling this that many readers run to the opposite extreme, and openly or privately regard the supernatural as having nothing to do with the real interest of the play.

Shakespeare in most of his tragedies allows to ‘chance’ or ‘accident’ an appreciable influence at some point in the action. Chance or accident will be found to mean any accordance which enters the dramatic sequence neither from the agency of character, nor from the obvious surrounding circumstances. It may be called an accident that Edgar arrived at the prison just too late to save Cornelia’s life; an accident that Desdemona dropped her handkerchief at the most fatal of moments; an accident that the pirate ship attacked Hamlet’s ship, so that was able to return forth with to Denmark.

14

Like Aristotle’s tragic hero, Hamlet is also endowed with exceptional qualities. Before the murder of his farther, he was genial, kindly, courteous, “the glass of fashion and the mould of form” “the courtier’s, soldiers, scholars, eye, tongue, sword” “the expectancy and rose of the fair state”. In a gay court, full of warriors and statesmen, he was the observed of all observers, popular with the people and found of aesthetic pursuits. These outstanding qualities gleam forth even in the darkest a most bitter moment of the tragedy. Much is expected from this remarkable personality, but only little is achieved by him, that too at the cost of many a death including his own.

Hamlet is a man of philosophy and intellectual depth. This is best seen in all his soliloquies. His soliloquies show him to be a man of deeply reflective and meditative nature. In his first soliloquy, we find him meditating upon the indecent haste with which his widowed mother has re-married. This gross behavior of his mother marked Hamlet generalize “frailty they name is woman”. In the next soliloquy Hamlet meditates upon the revelation that the ghost has made and regards his uncle as a “villain, smiling damned villain” and mother as a “most pernicious woman”. In the succeeding soliloquy he broods upon his delay in caring out the entrusted task and devices a plan to “catch the conscience of the king”. In his famous soliloquy which begins with “to be or not to be, that is the question”, he expresses thoughts which have a universal appeal. It is in these soliloquies that we see Hamlet taking us into his confidence, laying his soul bare, trying to analyze his thoughts and feelings.

He is too noble and large-hearted to live peacefully in this narrow world. The good in him exerts to shape the world in its own image. He is the type of man who would like to see the light and shut his eyes to darkness but he is also aware that this is not possible. Whenever darkness of this world envelops him, he seeks shelter in the thought of quiet serene death. Hamlet is a man of different mould from the traditional revenge tragedy hero; he does not budge a jot unless he has exhausted thinking about all the sides of an action. These results in his irresolution and debases him from acting on the spur of the moment when action is most needed. Naturally he attributes his failures to a powerful destiny. But this sense of destiny does not appear in the first half of the play because in this part we see Hamlet vigorously trying to fit himself against the disjointed times. It is only when one failure follows close upon the heels of another that fatalism steals upon his min. When Horiatis asks him how the letter which sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their doomed was scaled, Hamlet remarks resignedly, “why, even in that was heaven ordinate”. While ginning an account of his escape from the hands of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says

15

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how We will.

Hamlet is found of quibbles and word-pay and of conceits and turns of thought such as common in the poets whom Johnson called metaphysical. Sometimes, no doubt, he plays with words and ideas chiefly in order to mystify thwart and annoy. Nevertheless in this trait there is something very characteristic. We should be greatly surprised to find it marked in Othello or Lear, in Macbeth, and infect, we find it in hardly at all. One reason of this may perhaps be that these characters are all later creations than Hamlet, and the Shakespeare’s own fondness for this kind of play. But the main is surely that this tendency, as we see it in Hamlet, be tokens a nimbleness and flerkibility of mind which in characteristics of him and not of the later less many sided heroes.

Hamlet’s efforts to restrain his emotions make him a melancholic character. He is the only character of Shakespeare who suffers from melancholy throughout a play and wins the sympathy of the audience. His melancholy is due to double shock of his father’s death and his mother’s “O’er hasty marriage”, and the times capable task which is imposed on him by his father’s ghost. His very first appearance is marked by the “dejected visage” mourning for his father. His melancholy ends only with his death. As his melancholy deepens he suffers from depression, speculates on death and contemplates suicide. It is mainly due to his melancholy that he is found of soliloquies and aridest, and the whole play is interspersed with these. It is in these soliloquies that we see Hamlet taking us into his confidence, laying as soul bare, spending his energy in mere words and thoughts and unburdening his heart with empty generalizations. The symptoms of his melancholy manifest themselves further in his aposiopesis or sudden breaks in the speech “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue”. We see a similar symptom in his repetition of words a common trick of style in Hamlet “O God, O God”, “Fie on’t oh fie”, “Thrift”, “Indeed, indeed”, “very like, very like”, this style of repetition shows that Hamlet can not easily make up his mind.

The action of Shakespearean tragedy progress through conflict which is both internal and external. The external conflict is between the hero and other characters and the internal is within the mind of the hero. In Hamlet we find the external conflict between Hamlet and Claudius and Hamlet and Laertes. The internal conflict is within the mind of Hamlet and is revealed to us through his soliloquies. Throughout the play we witness this conflict of Hamlet in which he broods over his incapability to act, his irresolution and hence his wish to die to escape from the worldly tortures and sufferings. Hamlet undergoes this internal conflict which is a mutual torture and the consequence is that at times he takes recourse to madness as an escape.

16

Shakespeare’s Hamlet has all the elements of seneean revenge play; however, his treatment of the revenge makes the work much more than a mere revenge tragedy. Though it is a tragedy of “blood and horror” the treatment of the theme is not as crude and gross as that of the conventional revenge tragedy. These elements have been refined to raise Hamlet far above cheap melodrama. In Hamlet Shakespeare presents a revenge that is both ruthless and reluctant. As a revenge he must act, on behalf of outraged virtue, to restore a violate order, set right what is “out of joint”. But the act he is impelled to do, involves him in evil of the kind which he would punish. As the ruthless revenge he exemplifies in own person the will which is inseparable from the good in human nature, as the reluctant revenge he can symbolize the good’s abhorrence of it.

Jogging’s remarks on Hamlet that “it is not to be regarded as a tragedy of revenge , but as a tragedy of the human soul” is true for Shakespeare has portrayed Hamlet as a man of irresolution in spite of his extraordinary intellectual genius and personality. Whenever he is called to act upon the Ghost’s injunction, he vacillates due to conflict which is going on within this mind. He meditates upon each of his action and reflects on life this makes him an inactive man. The theme of revenge is seen In on narrow sense in Hamlet, it is part of a much broader much more universal vision the issue of the human condition “To be or not to be” is a question that Hamlet muses upon. It is the premise of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as of the traditional Hamlet legend that a son should revenge his father’s death. But Shakespeare’s concept of revenge is not simple. The question of revenge is caught up with issues of good and evil. Evil is implicit in very task of revenge which nature imposes on Hamlet. Thus the theme of revenge becomes part of the fundamental conflict the play exhibits in Hamlet.

The problem of madness is perhaps the most madding problem in Hamlet. Some critics are of the opinion that under the pressure of these two circumstances his mother’s hasty marriage and the Ghost’s revelation Hamlet loses his season. When he appears for the first time in act I, scene II, he is not in a normal state of mind. More than the sudden death of his father, his mother’s frailty shocks him and this produce in him disgust for the affairs of life, an apathetic and moody inclination to put an end to his misery by self slaughter. After the Ghost’s revelation, he sinks into a morbid state of mind, so that he finds no interest at all in the world or mankind. The goodly earth appears a “sterile promontory”. The bright firmament appears only a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapors”. Man delights him not, nor woman either. This state of mind is very near insanity. Ophelia’s description of Hamlet to Polonius when he called on her in her closet further strengthens the idea of madness to be real. She discloses:

Lord Hamlet, with all his double all embraced, no hat upon his head, his 17

Stockings fouled unaltered, and down-gyred to his ankle pale his shirt, his Knees knocking each other, and with a look so piteous in purport, as if he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors.The conversation between Hamlet and Polonius in act II, scene II, is also quotable to support the theory that Hamlet is really mad. He calls Polonius a fishmonger and further insults him with his remarks on his daughter: “Let her not walk the sun, conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to it”Friendly, his strange behavior at Ophelia’s funeral is supposed to show the genuineness of his madness. But all the above given evidence does not prove his madness to be real. There is more evidence that his madness is assumed, for he acts normally. When he chooses to and in the presence of those with whom it is safe to do so. We agree with Dighton when he says, “in every single instance in which Hamlet’s madness is manifested, he has good reason for assuming that madness, while, on the other hand, whenever there was no need to hoodwink anyone, his thought, language and action, bear no resemblance to unsoundness of intellect. He talks rationally and shows great intellectual power in his conversation with Horiatis. He receives the players with kind courtesy and his refinement of behavior towards them that he is not mad.Polonius observes:“Though this is madness, yet there is method in it”.

Stop ford Brooke gives an account for the universality of Hamlet in a nutshell: “Hamlet is supposed to be entirely different, both in intellectual power and in strangeness of phantasm and feelings, from the common run of educated men, to be in a clan apart. It is not really so, and one proof of that is that so many hundreds of thousands of men and women, when they listen to them, listen to their own souls. The thoughts he has, they have had, the imaginative dreams and feelings he expresses have passed through their minds. The question he puts to life, the questioning he has had about death, those he has had about suicide when he is alone and the impatience he has with the troubles he is called upon to face and the demands which they make upon him, the impulses under which he has to perform the demands and to the baffle with the troubles; the fading of chose impulses as fresh thoughts occur to him and make him glad to forget them are all common to millions of men and women who belong to the pensive, sensitive, imaginative, contemplative, idealizing type of humanity which thinks rather than acts, is quiet rather than stirring, dreaming rather than practical’ to whom the soul is more than the howdy, the mystic more than the material life. Whenever the persons of that type exist, in poverty or in riches, among peasants or princes we find Hamlet, and they find themselves in Hamlet. And the wonder of the play consists not in the mental apartness of Hamlet from the rest of the world, but in the amazing power of

18

the power of the poet who made him, who embodied in him the representation of one million people type of humanity, who made him so act, so speak, that he set before us not only the type, but almost all the variations within that type, almost all the main directions of their thoughts and feelings about the life of man. T he thoughts Hamlet expresses are not of exception range or excellence. They do not set him on a pinnacle above other men. They are as thoughts alone, the ordinary thoughts of his type in enlivened youth with a turn for philosophy. What does make his thoughts apparently greater and deeper than those of other young men of his temperament is the noble passion of their clothing, the splendor of words.

Hamlet poses several unanswerable questions and this symbolizes, not loose ends in the play but its unrivalled imaginative power. Hamlet is a “problematic play” and in this fact lays its enduring appeal.

19

JHON KEATS

“ ODE ON A GRACIEN URN”

Urn, vase- like containers made of pottery or stone with rounded bodies and narrow nests, were used in ancient Greece and Rome to preserve the ashes of the dead. Many of these vessels, often beautifully decorated with paints or carved designs, survived in private collections or in public institution, such as the British museum. The urn to which this ode is addressed is less likely the one particular example than an imaginary object, made up of details from many such urns or other work of art that Keats could have seen in museum or reproduce in books of engravings. For example in stanza 4 the ‘ heifer lowing at the skies’ , may have been suggested by the fragments of the Elgin marbles, part of the Parthenon frieze brought from Athens , and exhibited in the British museum. And the “little town” in the same stanza could have been inspired by one of the pastoral landscapes by the French painter, Claude (1600 – 82), which Keats particularly admired.In the early 19th century it was by no means unusual to make a work of painting or sculpture the subject of a poem. From 1810 to 1820 the subject of the oxford university poetry competition had been a work of classical sculpture or architecture. In this sonnet , “ upon a sight of a beautiful picture” , Wordsworth praised a work of art that could capture a movement of life and preserve it , unchanged , for ever and given ‘ to one brief moment caught from feeling time / the appropriate calm of blest eternity’. Wordsworth felt ‘ a peculiar satisfaction’ in having anticipated Keats’ thought in the “ ode on a Grecian urn” from his own poem. In its treatment of the relationship between imagination and reality, the temporal and immortal, this ode is very close to the “ode to a nightingale” although it is much less personal in tone; notice that the word “I” does not appear at all in the poem.Keats first question the urn, personified as a bride of quietness, a child of time and a teller of postural tales, about the scenes decorating its sides. Are the figures human or gods? What is this wild, amorous pursuit of reluctant maidens, resembling a Bacchanalian revel?In the second stanza the poet claims that the world pictured on the urn is superior reality ; its music is sweeter , its songs never ending and although the lover can never reach the girl he desire, she will always be beautiful and his love will never fade.

20

In the third stanza he exclaims without mounting excitement at the happiness of this world of perpetual spring and music where lovers, fore ever in a blissful state of anticipation, are spared the disappointments and disillusions of mortal passions.In the fourth stanza new since arose his curiosity; a priest leads a cow , garlanded with flowers , in procession to the sacrifice. This prompts the poet to wonder about the town from which they have come, left eternally devoid of inhabitants. The silent urn, with life frozen on its surface, is perplexing as the idea of eternity. The only consolation the urn offers, as a work of art that outlasts human lives, is the single thought, that beauty and truth are one and the same.The ‘ ode on a Grecian urn’ deals with dramatically with the paradox that a work of art that is silent, motionless, made of cold mark able and by its very function associated with death, can suggest a world of warmth, colour, music, vitality and passionate feeling. This paradox is summed up in the phrase, cold pastoral’, and there are other examples of such apparent self-contradiction in the poem as “ heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” and “ ditties of ho tone” puns, such as ‘ attic… attitude and ambiguities, such as the play on “still” in the first line, illustrate the mysterious, indefinable nature of relationship between life and art.The number of question the poet addresses to the urn and the figures on it shoe how convincingly ‘ real the world picture on urn seems to be; so real that the poet is led to imagine a ‘ little town’ , not figured on the urn , from which the procession has come , leaving the town forever empty and silent.Critical discussion of this ode has tended to concentrate on the last two lines. Even if we take “beauty is truth, truth beauty” to is a quari philosophical statement uttered by the urn. And the following words to be a spontaneous message of reassurance also spoken by urn, we still left with a problem. What does this means? This has been extensively debated, and the general feeling is that these two lines offers too glib and facile a solution to the mystery Keats has dramatized so vividly in the ode. It is clear from his letters that Keats had for some time been preoccupied with the relationship between beauty and truth, although he knew he lacked the philosophical knowledge and training to deal with these concepts.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALEAccording to Charles brown,” the ode to a nightingale was written one spring morning in the garden of wentesarth place, Hampstead. Apparently Keats took a chair on to the garden under a plum tree and, when he returns indoors two or three hours later, was seemed to push few scraps of papers behind few books. These

21

scraps, brown claimed, contained Keats’s poetic feeling on the song of the nightingale. What Brown saw was probably an early draft rather than the complete ode, but the anecdote (related many years after the event) sound plausible because the ode has sack an air of spontaneity and dramatic immediacy. Like a Shakespearean soliloquy it gives the effect of a profound, personal experience actually lived through within the scare of its eighty lines the poet himself dominates the poem; the word “I” occur in almost every stanza and the poem opens a close on a note of a cute self-consciousness. At a first reading the ode appears to be a perfect example of words worth definition of poetry; “the spontaneous overview of powerful feeling”It should be remembered, however, that the nightingale, had been a traditional subject for poetry from the middle age. In classical legend the nightingale was a beautiful girl whom the gods turned into a bird after she had been raped and had her tongue cut out by her attackers; hence the association with melancholy and with un happy love which figure in many poems about the nightingale. Milton called the nightingale “most musical”, and most melancholy which Keats probably knew well, reverse the tradition of melancholy nightingale and describe its song as an exuberant out burst of joy. in “ O nightingale” words worth refer to its harmony and fierce “ . And in the nightingale “ a conversation poem” the song reminded Coleridge that, “ in nature there is nothing melancholy” and seemed “ always ful of love and joyous” For them, as far many poets before them the nightingale songs was a poetic inspiration and a stimulus to mediation on, for example, nature, love and morality. So in making the apparent happiness of the nightingale song the focus of his longing to escape from the world of human sufferings, Keats is, characteristically, creating some thing individual and personal out of long established of poetic tradition.At the beginning of the ode the poet finds himself in a state of painful lethargy, at most as if he had taken poison, or drugs and was sinking into unconsciousness. This is not caused by jealousy of the nightingale’s happiness but by an excessive delight in the bird’s song of approaching summer.In second stanza he longs for wine, with its association of Mediterranean sun and pleasure, to help him vanish with the nightingale into the darkness of the forest.In the third stanza he enumerates all that he would like to forget of the world’s sufferings misery illness old age and premature death the feelings of beauty and the brevity of love. He argues himself onwards in his fight and in the fourth stanza reaches the nightingale with the aid not of wine but of poetic inspiration. Although there is a moon light filters through the dense foliage and he can identify the difference woodland flowers by there scent alone.In stanza six as the poet listens to the song the nightingale in the enveloping darkness he feels that this would be the perfect moment to achieve his previously felt wish to die

22

Stanza seven opens with sudden leap of thought the poet claims that nightingale is a creature that does not die. Its song has been heard throughout the ages by rich and poor alike by the exile Ruth of the bible and even round the deserted shores of fairyland but the word for long jolts him back to self concessiousness imagination fails the nightingales song fades into distance and poet is left wondering whether his experience has been a vision or a more day dream and whether he is even now awake.

23

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATSW. B. Yeats is one of the foremost poets in English literature ever today. He was the dreamer and visionary, who was fascinated by folk-lore, balled and the superstitious of the Irish peasantry .Yeats, had tried to bring back the simplicity and “altogetherness “ of the earlier ages and blend it with the modern ideas of good and evil. He was of the view that the true singer was one who told the most ancient story so that it applied to the people of his time .Thus, almost all his poems deal with ancient Ireland or employ ancient mythology. Yeats believed that “literature is always personal, always one man’s experiences .But he also believed that there must be a fusion of the impersonal with the personal, of the objective with subjective before really great poetry could be born. But above all, Yeats valued artistic integrity. Poet to him was essentially a visionary who must remain true to his vision. Poetry to him was ‘The commonsense of the soul: it distinguishes greatness from triviality mere fancifulness from beauty that lights up the deeps of thought”.

W .B .Yeats is a unique poet as he is a traditional as well as a modern poet at the same time .T .S. Eliot once said “certainly, for the younger poets of England and America, I am sure that their admiration for Yeats’s poetry has been wholly good. The early poetry of W .B .Yeats is not realistic. There is a distinct echo of the Romantics in the poems of his early period .Even his later poems, despite the realistic diction and an effort to bring his poetry to earth, Yeats is still not free from the spell of fairies, Ghosts, magic and the mysterious world. He is indeed the last romantic. But all the same his later poetry, especially of the last two phases is very realistic.

The pessimistic note is the hall mark of modern poetry; Yeast’s poetry, like that of Eliot and some of the other modern poets is marked with pessimism and disillusionment. After his disappointment with Maud Gonne and her rejection of him and his disenchantment with the Irish National Movement, Yeats started writing bitter and pessimistic poems. But he tried to dispel by philosophizing in his poems.

Yeats has been called “The chief representative” of the symbolist Movement in English literature indeed, Yeats uses in memorable symbols, and sometimes the same symbol for different purposes in different content. Often the symbols are derived from Yeast’s study of the occult, in which case the symbols become difficult to understand for the reader. Most of his

24

symbols, such as the rose, Eros, bird, tree, moon, and sun, are derived from kabalistic and theosophical study.

In Yeats’s own words “a symbol is indeed the only possible expressions of some invisible essence, a transparent lamb about a spiritual flame;”.Symbols are not merely denotative, but also connotative and evocative. In addition to the literal meaning, they also conjure up host of associations before the mind’s eyes Yeats’s remark concerning the symbols appropriate to poetry and the best ways for making them most effective is worth nothing:”it is only by ancient symbols ,by symbols that have number less meanings besides the one or two the writer lays emphasis upon ,or the half score he knows of ,that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the depth abundance Nature.

The ‘bird symbol’ is one of the most important symbols in Yeats’s poems .It is a striking example of the dynamic nature of the Yeats an symbol which grows, changes and acquires greater depth and density in their progression. A similar process may be traced in the ‘beast imagery’. In the second coming are two fabulous creatures which are used as symbols by Yeasts in his poems…..

A shape with lion body and the head of a man A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is morning his slow thighs, while all about it? Reel shadows of the indignant desert bird.

Yeats’s symbols are all pervasive. There are a number of poems that are organized around certain key –symbols and each succeeding poem shed light on the previous poems and “illuminates their senses “.It symbolizes intellectual beauty, austerity ,the beauty of women ,specially that of Maud Gonne and Ireland as well. The ‘Swans’ in wild Swans of Code is another ever – recurring symbol:

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is rose. All’s changed since I, hearing at tvilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above my head, Trod with a lighter tread. Yeats poetry is replete with symbols. He has been regarded as one of the greatest symbolists in English literature. His symbols are derived from occult studies which included a fascination for fairies, banshees, astrology, automatic writing and prophetic dreams. According to Yeats the value of a symbol is in its richness or

25

indefiniteness of reference. This, he feels, makes it much more mysterious and powerful than allegory with its single meaning. Like 'the rose', the symbol of the 'dance' is closely connected with Yeats's "system" and often appears in his poetry. It is used, at times to indicate pattirued movement and at times to indicate joyous inagy. Upon a Dying Lady is a poem in which the woman's soul "flies to the pre-destined dancing place". Of course, this pre-destined dancing place suggests all that is traditionally associated with a heavenly after life...perfect unity, peace and joy. In the closing stanza of the poem called Among School Children the concept of unity is invoked once again by the symbol of the 'dance'. The first four lines of closing stanza depict a heavenly or an ideal state of balance and unity but the focus in the last four lines shifts to life itself giving the suggestion that one cannot separate the past from the whole, nor buddy from spirit, or being from becoming.

Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut-true, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dance fromthe dance?

Here the ideal state of balance and unity is associated with the symbol of dance. 'Byzantium', too has been used by Yeats as a symbol for unity and perfection. Yeats felt that Byzantium and its golden age is symbolic or a kind of unity and perfection such as the world had never known before or since. He believed that the religious, aesthetic and practical life were one in the carly Byzantium. He saw in the Byzantium culture and unity of being , a state in which art and life interpenetrated each other. In his poem sailing to 'Byzantium', becomes the symbol of a perfect world. An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its martal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificance; And therefore i have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. Pinto writes: "The religious who served as a means to purity and intensity Yeats's in all his life was symbolism and the high priest of the great French Symbolist Movement was Mallarme. Yeats was a good French scholar but

26

Arthur Symon's translation of Mallarme’s poems was useful to him". A study of the symbolism in the poem the second coming will show us the nature of the symbols Yeats was wont to use. They are taken partly from private doctrine, partly from Yeats direct sense of the world about him and partly from both these sources. For Yeats one of the qualities that made life valuable under the dying aristocratic social tradition was the "ceremony of innocence", a phrase that occurs in this poem. The expression of "Falcon and the Falconer" have both a symbolic and a doctrinal reference. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart;the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, which the worst Are full of passionate intensity. The tower in his poems is both a traditional and a personal symbol. It is used to suggest loneliness and seclusion, tradition or national heritage, or even violence and blood-thirstiness. Anyhow, Yeats use of symbols is complete and rich. Symbols, indeed, give "dumb thing voices and bodiless things bodies", in Yeats's poetry. The rose, the swan, the tower, the winding stair, spinning tops-all assume a life of their own and speak to the reader, often of different things. T.S.Eliot stressed the need for poetry in the modern age to be more and more indirect and complex in order to be able to capture the complexity of life in our age. This complexity and lack of directness have led to the elements of obscurity creeping into much of the modern poetry and Yeats's poetry is no exception. The factors that are responsible for the obscurity in parts of Yeats's poetry are quite a few. To begin with symbolism is extremely complex and this complexity is uncased Substantially by the dependence of his symbolism on the symptom forward in his great prose work, A Vision. To add to all this, there are influences of occultism, mysticism and Irish myths logy and legend. The fact that Yeats was knew to replace traditional Greek and Roman mythological figures from Irish folk lore also results in comparative novelty of these figures, at least for non-Irish readers which add considerably to the obscurity in some of his poems.

The fact is that the symbols in his poetry were invented personality by Yeats accounts for the longer part of the obscurity in his poetry. symbols like “THE Swan”, “The Tower”, “The Winding stair”, and figures

27

like , ‘Hanrahan’ with the kinds of association ,Yeats some time gives such symbols were not likely to be known to the readers. In the same way the rough beard that slouches towards Bethel home to be born, with its sphinx –like image was not a figure familiar to most Christians as a substitute for Christ.

Eliot had talked of the need for a modern poet who could force ‘to dislocate if necessary, language into meaning’. This naturally necessitates some of the connecting links from sentences being taken away. The style as a result becomes cryptic and ‘telegraphic’. Yeats also uses this device some time. The kind of obscurity which is common to most poets. But we would do well to remember that in Yeats’s case obscurity is not the result of a carelessness in style but of his constant desire to attempt not only a bringing together of opposites but also of his attempt to give poetry as much of density and profundity as possible . More over even when there is some dislocation in language, it is more the result of the need to keep pace with thought which develops as it moves. It is something international. The part of his obscurity results from another of the positive virtues of his poetry i.e. his condensed rich language.

This sort of language is the result of concentrating into his phrases years of passionate and obsessive thought expressing in a beautiful and lucied style. A. g. stock rightly points out Yeats’s style is stripped of all ornament and utterly depended on the intense life of his mind. When he is difficult it is because of the thought which is not confused, but too well-unit and too remote from most people’s preconceptions, to be followed easily”. Very few poets of the modern age here written as much about their family and their friends Yeast has done. In doing so he has been remarkably successful in enlarging them to heroic proportions .Many of Yeast’s poems are based directly upon events that actually affected him greatly. The most important factor in Yeast’s personal poetry is his lore for Maud Gonne informs the most powerful of his personal poems, The Tower in which he asks passionately:

Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or woman lost? Of on The loss, admit you turned aside From a great labyrinth out of pride, Corn dice, some silly over-sub He thought Or anything called conscience ones; And that if memory secure, the sun’s Under eclipse and the day blotted out.The poems among school children, Ester 1916 bring in quite a few personal touches, whereas sailing .To Byzantium tries to tackle personal problems on universal level .The problem of old age always haunted Yeast which is presented

28

very effectively in this Byzantium poems. However, this problem of old age is of relevance not only to Yeats but to all men and in all age .Yeast’s success in turning his personal emotions and likes and dislikes into great poetry was really remarkable. Very few modern poets have succeeded in turning the powers of poetry to such an effective personal use and yet preserve the necessity Impersonality of poetry in which Yeats believed as T.S Eliot did.

One of Yeats‘s concern in his later poetry was old age and what it brought with it. Among other things, old age is seen as the symbol if the tyranny of time. At the same time rage against the limitations of age and society that is put upon an old man keep occurring again and again his poetry. One of Yeats‘s most personal poems the tower brings with these lines; What should do with this absurdity? O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail?The above lines from Yeats poems make it sufficiently clear that Yeats did detest old age .T he interesting about hatred of old age is that the source of this hatred is the absurdity resulting from the fact that as he grows older his imaginations becomes more passionate and fantastical: Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible.

A powerful impression of Yeats’s anguish in the face of old age appears at the beginning of his famous poem sailing to byzou time:That is no country for old men . The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees those dying generations –at their song.

In the next stanza he talks of the limited alternatives available to the old man who, to Yeats is no more than tattered coat upon a stick :

An aged man is but a paltry thing .A tattered coat upon a stick, unless,Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress.

In the poem , politics, he laments the lose of his youth .

But O that I were young again, 29

And held her in my arms ;

Old age and what its brings with it are recurring theme in Yeats’s poetry and they are responsible for some of the most poignenent and passionate poetry that came from his poem. Yeats’s attitude to old age can not be typified. He sees as a time when the continuing vigor of the mind revolt against the increasing feebleness of the body. On the one hand he seems to say that in old age one should try to stress clear of the sensual mire. On the other hand, he commands the value of desire and vigor of mind even if the body is decaying, for in that the spirit of his ability to create poetry. Legeouis and cazamian writer: “with Yeats the affinities of temperament have been at work exercising a secret magnetism on the rich found of suggestion stored in the ancient spirit of Ireland, and extracting from it all that could be harmonized with the delicacy of subtle art. Yeats; s poetry has become increasing intellectual. It possess and still has precious gifts of nature, it knew how to rise with words the spell of the mysterious atmosphere, how to effect outlines of material objects in a dreamy mistiness.” Yeast’s poetry reflects his deeply felt conviction that mean’s life is governed by a “system” which in corporate a cyclic progress through phases. The present generation, he felt, belonged to phase nineteen in which “The dramatic unity of being is no longer possible, for the being is compelled to live in a fragment of itself”. Man is for ever trying to attain the unity, of being in which all conflicts co-exist harmoniously and the dance and the dancer are not separate. That’s why human Endeavour is one of the themes in Yeast’s poetry.

30

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

There are certain obvious flaws in Wordsworth’s theory of poetry, which sound, rather too simple and primitive. The result was that it provoked a considerable volume of immediate protest from the reading public. Wordsworth, no doubt, was guided by a sound instinct when he said “avoid poetic diction”. But while he was right in condemning a too specialized language of poetry, he made the mistake of advocating a language that was always in a danger of becoming “trivial and mean”. He over looked the fact that poets use language purer and more passionate than the language of Shepherds, Coleridge remarks“The best part of language is the product of philosophers, not of clowns or Shepherds”.

Coleridge seems to be right when he objected to Wordsworth’s views about poetry “as contradictory both to other parts of the same preface and to the author’s own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves”. He himself could not follow what he had proposed. But whatever may or may not be the intrinsic in value of Wordsworth’s theories, from the point of view of the history of English poetry, they are important. The reaction to the manner of poetry of the school of pope was heralded by Cowper, Burms and Crabbe. They asserted, indirectly, that poetry depends upon emotion not on polish. To Wordsworth, poetry was the expression of his own deep feelings. Hence he repudiated rhetoric. Later he erected his own practice in to general principles. His theories at least brought to the force that side of the subject which had been ignored too long. They helped in bringing an art, which had been conventionalized and arterialized too Much, back to the normal mode of English thought and speech.

The question of diction in poetry has been of great significance from the days of Aristotle to the modern times. The problem of using appropriate words in order to convey a particular idea has vexed the critics down the ages. Aristotle, Dante and many more have urged the poet to have a dignified or noble vocabulary. The deliberate archaism of Spenser indicates an abuse among minor poets in most periods. Revolting against this Wordsworth protested that poetry should use the language of prose. His 20th century excesses have included slang, commercial abbreviations, not only foreignisms but foreign words in the last seven lines of the waste land are four languages.T.S.Eloit writes in the use of poetry and the use of criticism “The poetry of a people takes its life from the people’s speech and in turn gives life to it”.

31

When Wordsworth led a campaign against the diction and style of his predecessors, he was fully justified, but at the same time, we must know, he was not doing something very original. As regards the negative side of his theory, his condemnation of the pedantic and stock poetic diction of the neo-classicists and his advice to avoid it, his approach is perfectly correct. His exposition of the phenomenon how the earlier poets wrote from genuine passions and thus used a language which, though unusual, was still the language of men and how the later poets without being animated by genuine passion tried to express themselves in the same old phraseology and thus an over usage and misuse of the some figures and phrases, a monotonously memorized poetic diction was created was not only approved but also appreciated even by Coleridge. But infect the real controversy is concerned with the positive side of his theory the kind of language by which he wants to replace the old poetic diction. On positive side Wordsworth asserts that the language appropriate for poetry is “a selection of the real language o men in a state of vivid sensation”. He further qualifies the “men” of this sentence by calling them “humble and rustic people”. There are mainly two arguments with which he supports his theory. First as the rustic and humble people “hourly communicate” with natural objects and as the best part of language is originally derived from the objects of nature, the language of these rustics is most appropriate for poetry. Secondly, “from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their inter course, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and elaborated expressions”.

In order to convince us about the appropriateness of simple and prosaic language of the rustics for poetry, Wordsworth also makes this assertion that except for mere there exists no essential difference between the language of prose and the language of poetry “the language of prose may yet be well adopted to poetry, a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good prose…,there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition”. But we find Coleridge reducing Wordsworth’s theory to almost nothing, by giving, through repudiation of all his arguments. Both the main arguments on which Wordsworth had based the claim of the rustic language as the appropriate medium for poetry are completely refuted by Coleridge. Coleridge thimbles that the premises of the first argument the assertion that the best part of English language s formed from the objects of nature with which the rustics hourly communicate is wrong. According to him an uneducated rustic has a too scanty vocabulary to reflect discriminately on these objects. Moreover the best part of the language is not derived from the natural objects but from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. Secondly, best about the second argument of Wordsworth, Coleridge’s answer is that just like formidable sophistication, a complete negation

32

of it will also create impediments in the formation of healthy feelings and reflecting mind. Moreover Coleridge believes that natural surroundings can affect only that man who possesses education and original sensibility, or at least one of these two. But an uneducated rustic aims almost solely to convey isolated facts, either those of his scanty experiences or his traditional beliefs.

Coleridge argued that education and not the lack of it, tends, to make a poet. Uneducated men are disorderly in their writing. If the peasantry of Wordsworth’s Westmoreland and Cumberland spoke a pure and vigorous language, this came not from uninstructed communion with nature, but from a spirit of independence and from a social religious education and acquaintance with the Bible and Hymnbook. Thus Coleridge shows that these arguments do not prove the appropriateness of the language of rustics for poetry.

After repudiating these arguments, Coleridge comes to the main theory and analysis it. He thinks that in the phrase “a selection of the real language of men” the word real is vague. In fact the language of different men differs according to their knowledge, a activity and depth of feelings. No how to measure the reality of the language of a man. One kind of speech (socially defined) can not be more real then the other. But in a given instance it may be either more or less poetic. The addition of the phrase “in a state of excitement” is also inadequate because to expression of a man’s strong feelings and emotions must necessarily depend on the number and qualities of general truths and conceptions and images with which his mind had been previously stored. Then Coleridge takes the word “selection” and asserts that a rustics language after being purified from all provincialism and grossness, and reconstructed according to the rules of grammar will not differ from the language of any other man of common experience, however learned and refined he may be, except as for as the notions, which the rustic has to convey are few and more indiscriminate. Thus Coleridge reduces the merit of Wordsworth to this that there is nothing peculiar about him, and that his theory is useless if not injurious.Coleridge also challenges Wordsworth’s assertion that there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and that of prose except meter. According to Coleridge what Wordsworth has prove by the example of gray’s sonnet is that here is a passage which may be equally appropriate both for poetry and prose, but he has not proved that there may not be or that there do not exist certain modes of expression and order of sentences which are in their fit and natural place in a prose composition, but would be quite heterogeneous in metrical writing and vice versa. The language of Spenser’s Faerie queen is not prosaic at all yet who can say is not poetry? Then there exists a difference between common prose and conversation, why not between prose and metrical composition? In this

33

way Coleridge establishes a difference between the language of prose and that of poetry.Now if we examine Coleridge’s own answer to the question: “what kind of language should be used in poetry?” he seems to say that it is an individual poets instinct and genius which dictates the diction for the particular experience or the idea that he wants to convey and nothing can be imposed from outside. However it is safe to say with Mr. Herbert read that “it is a mistake to imagine that any theory, of poetry, descends to accidentals of diction and meter can be universal in its scope”. From the point of view of the history of English poetry, Wordsworth’s theory of diction is very important. His views brought to the fore that side of the subject which had been ignored too long. They helped in bringing an art, which had been conventionalized and arterialized too much, back to the normal mode of English thought and speech.

WORDSWORTH’S THEORY OF POETRY

In the history of English literature, words worth stands for tow dominant ideas, the poetry of nature and the poetry o simplicity. During his long lie he composed a large number of poems but the years 1799-98 are his best period. The lyrical ballads were written in collaboration with his friend Coleridge. To the second edition of the lyrical ballads (1800) Wordsworths added a preface or a critical essay named “observations” and in 1802 an appendix on poetic diction was also added to the preface. This addition of the lyrical ballads, and particularly the”observation” were received by the critics with extreme hostility, which left words unmoved. Wordsworth’s theories concerning poetry and the language of poetry censed a great controversy it is interesting that as a poet Words Worth emerges with these complex theories already evolved and difficulty stated. They were the outcome of discussions with Coleridge about the nature and unction of poetry while the two poets lived in close companionship in 1797 and 1798.

According to Words Worth: Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, it is the impassioned expressions which is the countenance o all sciences. But perhaps a more famous opinion o Wordsworth is: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings it takes its origins from emotions

34

recollected in tranquility ;the emotion is contemplicated till ,by a species of reactions ,the tranquility disappears ,and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation , is gradually produced ,and does itself actually exist inn the mind. In this mood successful composition begins and in a similar mood it is carried out.

In this passage, Wordsworth has described, what to him, is the process which leads to the production o poetry .Indirectly also we are told which facilities came into play in the process. We can also distinguish the stages through which an experience passes before it appears in the form of a poem. First, there is the emotion set up by an experience or by an object .then there is an interval of time during which the non-essential elements in the experience are un-consciously purged off.

In this second stage, memory plays an important part .It throws off the drors unmeaning fact, controls what is to be retained and shapes into beautiful forms what it retains. Wordsworth believed that if habitually consulted, memory will supply a poet with his most valuable materials: ho loved solitude for it aids the working of memory. This idea of an interval but weens experience observation and composition is an important part of Wordsworth’s theory of poetry. He believed that the method of composing poetry sometimes often the experience or incident reproduced with deeper truth the original impression. The third stage was recollection, when the expressions, thus purged, were recalled. At the fourth stage the emotion was gradually set up in the mind again. Composition was the last stage. We might thus characterize the stages; Sensation, Contemplation, Recollection, Recreation and Composition.

It is often said that Wordsworth gave importance to feelings in poetry and ignored thoughts. But we must keep in mind what Wordsworth, commenting on the importance o purpose in a poem, has said; “For all god poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; and though this be true. Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced in any variety of subject but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influence of feelings are modified and directed by our thoughts.” So we must remember that while Words worth like other romantics, demanded spontaneity, it was not that of a careless or thoughtless person.

Wordsworth also discards Aristotelian doctrine. For him, the plot, or situation, is not the first thing. It is the feeling that macters. In his own poems “The feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and the action and situation to the feeling.” This principle raises a very vital issue

35

concerning the form of poetry. This led Wordsworth to under value art of poetic form. Sometimes he totally failed to reveal to his reader the important feeling that he detected mind that he neglected to reveal their deeper significance to the reader.

The romantic rated experience, personal experience very high. Scott James writes; “I think we may go so far as to say that Wordsworth valued art for the sake of experience, rather than experience for the sake of art. These was nothing he prized so much as the state of mind experienced in his happiest contemplation of nature, and nothing he so much wished to hand on through his poems. We may clearly recognize and arrest about Wordsworth that the experience of the poet in contact with nature was of supreme value to him; and it was this certainty of its supreme worth which made him deem it a divine intimation.” The state of awareness of spiritual significance in common things was for Wordsworth the consummation of poetic experience, the sum mum bonum of the poetic life.

The function of poetry, according to Wordsworth, is to afford delight. The poet consoles the afflicted and leads man to virtue. He extends the range of human sensibility and thus good to men. Joy, according to him, is the motive and background of poetry. As for his own poetry, critics have referred to the “healing quality” of his poetry and the joy that it records and seeks to communicate. “The end of poetry”, remarks Wordsworth, “is to produce excitement of in co-existence with an over balance of pleasure”. Talking of the poet, he notes: “The poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human being.” The poet must take care that “whatever passions he communications to his reader, those passions, if his reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should always be a companied with an over-balance of pleasure.” He stresses the importance of metre in poetry because it is helpful in achieving the end of poetry: “It would not be a useful employment to apply this principle to the consideration of metre, and to show that metre is hence enabled to afford much pleasure, and to point out in what manner that pleasure is produced.”

According to Wordsworth, the poet is a seer. He is a man speaking to man but he sees more truly and therefore feels more deeply; His business is to teach men to see and to full. A poet differs from others men in his more concentrated and in tenser feelings. These powers several a new world to him. Perception is the work of imagination. It is the result of the working of outer importance through the senses and inner power s of the mind. It is thus the soul or imagination of the poet which invents things with grandeur and beauty.

According to Wordsworth, “Poet does not write for poets alone, but for men.” Keeping this view, he declares of his poetry: “These will also be found in

36

these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction.” This he does to bring his language near to the language of men. He recommends for poetry the language of men living in humble and rustie conditions of life because, according to him, such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language, he says, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets.

THESE ARE CERTAIN OBVIOUS FLAWS IN WORDSWORTH’S THEORY BOF POETRY, WHICH SOUND, RATHER TO SIMPLE AND PRIMITIVE. THE RESULT WAS THAT IT PROOVED.

THE PRELUDE

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The prelude is the essential living document for the interpretation of words worth’s life and poetry. it was in the month of 1978 that Wordsworth conceived the idea of writing the history of the growth of his own mind . Partly on the suggestion of Coleridge, and spurred on by his enthusiastic encouragement, he had determine to compose a great philosophic poem to be unlike THE RECLUS, or views on Man, nature, and society. Of this only two parts were completed – The Excursion and the prelude. In the preface to the Excursion he says of the prelude:

The preparatory poem is biographical, and conduct the history of the author’s mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently mature for entering upon the arduous labor which he has proposed to himself.

This autobiographical poem gives an account of the poet’s childhood, youth and early manhood; but it can’t be adequately understood as merely the story of the imagination, and incident to this account – the story of his association write Annete Vollen, for example – are except to find in this poem a frank account of Wordsworth’s personal life; it is the life of his poetic personality that is recorded.

37

This is made clear from the beginning, when the poet invokes the breeze - a traditional symbol of inspiration – and seek for a theme:

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,A visitant that which it fans my cheekDoth seen half – conscious of the joy it brings From the green fields , and from yon azure sky.

The breeze blows from nature, but also from heaven itself.

What dwelling shall receive me? In what vale Shall be my harbour? Under what nature what grove

Shall I take up my home? And what clean streamShall with its murmur cull me into rest?To earth is all before me…………….`

so Wordsworth preparing himself like Milton for his task , reminds us of the last lines of Paradise lost:

The world was all before them, where to choose, their place of rest, and providence their guide words worth choosing his own dwelling- place of the mind , and his own poetic direction, echoes Milton’s words with evident deliberation:

The earth is all before me

And he declares that if his guide is but a wandering cloud ‘he cannot miss his way. The life he has chosen is one of the ease and undisturbed delights –but the liberty he enjoys would be useless without the poetic gift:

Dear liberty ;yet what it avail But for a gift consecrates the joy ? For I, me thought, while the sweet breath of heaven Was blowing on my body, felt within A correspondent breeze, that gently moved With quickening virtue, but is now become A tempest, redundant energy, Vexing its own creation.

The theme of the poem is the loss of the paradise of childhood, and of the regaining of that paradise through the power of the developed imagination. words

38

worth is conscious of t attempting for his own age what Milton did for his; in an age of science, however the challenge of the imagination is a new one. It is not in the heaven, but in the human mind itself that he must seek for the source of joy and power. For this the Prelude is a psychological poem, in the sense that it deals with the ‘Vital Soul’ of the poet, the inner resources on which he can draw in his task of giving significance to man’s life.At the very outset it must be clear to us that The Prelude is not an autobiography in the usual sense. of course in the preface to the excursion the poet has told us that preparatory poem is ‘ biographical’ but he has also clearly stated that it conducts the history of the author’s mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently mature for entering upon the arduous labor which he had proposed to himself. So it may be biographical, but still not so in a straightforward and chronological way. Here events follow each other in the order in which they happened. The poet has discarded the simply chronological arrangement in favor of one which would just stress on the essential importance certain expressions and stats of mind. To the poet the subjective aspect is much more important than the objective aspect of the poem. So we must be clear in our mind that the subject is not ‘My Life’ but ‘The Making of the poet’ although Words worth has used the phase ‘The story of my life’ at the end of book 1. and Prof. Garred has rightly said that “the propose of the prelude may, indeed, be said to be search out and Seize and hold, among the many seemingly alien and incongruous image of self cast up by reflection, the image of the poet’s true being, of his slowly self realization individualize, of that in him in virtue of which he is a’ dedicated spirit’.

In book 1 and 2 we have Wordsworth’s childhood and boyhood experiences amid the lovely nature surroundings. Here in lies the greater significance of these two books. And from the poet we get that his poetic life began, as it were on the banks of the Derivent when he was just a sucking babe. When he found himself-

Baffled and plagued a mind that every hour Turns to recreant to her task He appeals to the Derivent ………was it for this

That one of this fairest of all rivers loved, To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song.

And when the boy Wordsworth was transplanted to that ‘beloved vale’ of Hawkshead in esthwaite it began, to some extent, consciously . the benign influence of nature to shape and mould his character poetic personality had already started :

39

Fair seed time had my soul, and I grew upFostered alike by beauty and by fear;

But the awakening of the poet’s love of nature is the most significant element in his early education. at the early age it was just a normal and healthy boy’s love open air sport and past time amidst lovely surroundings of nature . The first book is studied with several impressive incidents showing us the means by which nature effect her discipline on young Wordsworth by evoking the emotions of pleasure and fear. Thus on a hot summer day the child would have pure animal pleasure by bathing or basking:

Oh, many a time have it a five years s child In a small mill – race served from his stream. Made one long bathing of a summer’s day; Basked in the sum, and plunged and basked again Alternate, all a summer’s day……………………..

Another very significant aspect that strikes us in the prelude is that init the poet has traced the three stages of his love of nature. In the first phase, as a child we find the poet deriving simple animal or sensuous delight in nature. In the second stage he could have mystical and spiritual pleasure from his deep and close contact with nature leading to the love of man and this change brings bout a calmer and sober attitude: ……………….in this time Of dereliction and dismay , I yet Despair not of our nature……..

Thus, slowly words worth through his sense experience has become creator and receiver both has acquired that highest intellectual power imagination. In the last book of prelude the poet reveals in its various aspects as the faculty of creation, the faculty par excellence is really the here, the leading figure, the presiding genius of the prelude. words worth was deeply conscious of the power which fostered his genius , and when he probed in to his source he found that it to him originally through special awareness of nature; it was there that shaft opened which reached down to anew world of life. Words worth also considered nature to be our best guide and teacher. To him books were all dull and dreary. Probably we all can remember those oft- quoted lines:

One impulse from a vernal wood May teacher you more of man

Of moral evil and good 40

Than all sages can

For words worth nature was an eternal source of great comfort and strength. When, after the failure of the great hopes and ideas of the French Revolution, the poet was passing through a strenuous mental and spiritual cries and when his mental horizon was darkened by doubts and disappointment, it was the lovely and peaceful surroundings of the Lake District that brought peace and solace to his dejected soul. The theme of the influence of nature on man is the noblest part of words worth’s teaching in poetry. Nature is the best educator and she is ever interested in man and tries to impress human mind from its earliest dawn:“ I believe that nature often times , when she would frame a favored being, from his earliest dawn of infancy doth open up the clouds as at the touch of lightening , seeking him with great visitation.”Nature in words worth poetry is not regarded as a background for his pictures of men nor, as mere mirror reflecting the feelings of man, but rather as a wonderful power around as calming and influencing our sounds . He looked at nature as the mystic of the old days read the page of holy writing. As essentially Wordsworthian feature of his treatment of nature in his intense spirituality.De Quincy observed: “ words worth has his passion for nature fixed in his blood , it was the necessity of his being like that of the mulberry leaf to the silkworm , and through his commerce with nature did he love and breath . Hence it was from truth of his love that knowledge grew. If words worth had a favorite subject it was nature and he treated of man it was essentially in relation to nature. It was the love of nature that led him to the love of man”Let man react his sensibilities to the beauty of the sunset , the quiet dark night , the fragrance of flowers, the calm strength of mountains, and freshness of the vernal wood, and he will be possessed of peace that would lend a co lour to his life. This is the mystical conception of nature of Wordsworth. He called nature “the murse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being”.To more than infant softness, giving me ……among the fretful dwelling of mankind,a for, a dim earnest , of the calm …………..that nature breaths among the hills and groves ….. The poet of the prelude is the poet of solitude.

I was taught to feel perhaps too much The self- sufficing power of solitude;

Far from all resorts of mirth did Wordsworth commune with objects of nature, shared their solitariness, by cutting himself off from the noisy and crowded city life. It is not that Wordsworth alone sought solitude: solitude also, wanted

41

Wordsworth. Talking of words worth’s love for loneliness, Bradley observes: “what is lovely is spirit. To call a thing lovely or solitary is, with him to say that it opens a bright or solemn vista into infinity, solitude to words worth did not mean as it means to us:Emptiness absence of life. To us, life means visible movement of creature. He perceived a, a spirit in solitude. Is that spirit absent among the crowds? No, it is all pervading; but in the midst of through and the noise, its speech Becomes in audible to us. Thus he retired at intervals to the solitary objects of nature to gain from their speaking presence an exaltation of mind and delight on which he fed his mind.Every man’s life is best written by himself, “said DR. Johnson. Wordsworth took the hint and produced what legouis describes “ the unique auto biographical poem “. “ words worth’s the prelude is the greatest autobiography in verse in English”. Remarks wren Gardiner. Words worth calls it: “a poem on my own earlier life”. In the closing lines of book 1, the poet says that it would form a part of story of his life which he aspired to record in the following books. it is again in book 1 that words worth tells Coleridge that the poem would help the latter in knowing “ how the heart was framed of him thou lovest.”The connection between words worth’s poetry and his personal experience is the closest kind, he undertook the writing of the prelude in the mood of self examination. The poet aspired to create a literary work that might live; and he considered it right to examinee his power for such a task before he actually undertook it. The result was the Prelude. The poem is thus words worth assessment of his own power and a record of those influences that mould him. “ the genius of words worth is a genius that turned inward upon itself ,” says Ralugh “ and in this psychological account if the growth of his own mind , and of the most significant of the influences that shaped it , he has done the biographer’s works once and for all”.His boy hood in the beloved vale is the most memorable of all poetic boyhoods and the first two books of the prelude reach the highest level of spirituality autobiography and touch now and then the highest level of English poetry by simply recording with the perfect fidelity what ever in it bore upon the growth of his mind. Wordsworth in his “fair seed time” had wandered in the company of nature, seen her summer beauty and wintry colds, and experienced her spring spells and autumn mellowness: he had it was become, as it were, a part of nature.It was his firm belief that nature took keen interest in the framing of human min. we are told how he was led by nature one evening , when he “ went alone in a shepherd’s boat,” the journey in the boat is described and the reader is told how a huge cliff rose between the poet and the stars and “ like a living thing” strode after him.

“Write trembling hands I turned .42

And through the silent water stole my way Back to the cavern of the willow tree”

The prelude is not to be the viewed only as a poem of words worth’s life; it is the key supplied by the poet himself to unlock the door leading to his poetic chamber. With the help of this long, personal poem, a reader can understand and interpret the rest of the words worth poetry more intelligently. It is a guide book for understanding comprehensively the unbroken relationship between human life and nature, without which life of words worth was no life. His childhood becomes responsible for making words worth a great poet of nature. The prelude is the essential document for the interpretation of words worth’s life and poetry.

Three things must impress even the casual reader of this poem: words worth love to be alone, he is never lonely to nature; he is less lonely when lonely; 2, like every other child, who spends much time in the woods and fields, he feels the presence of same living spirit, real though unseen, and companionable though silent; 3, his early impressions make him what he, later on, becomes: “the child in the father of man” It is quite known to us that words worth had an epic mission. His highest ambition was to compose that great poem, the recluse, which was to be the monumental work of his life. we also known that the prelude was just to be the introduction to that great poem , but still we must accept “that the prelude derive its energy and inspiration , its dignity and its religious aura from that larger epic mission towards which it was to lead . Then Milton was Wordsworth ‘s poet – hero and it was but nature for a dedicated spirit, also sinning greatly, to talk his epic task with high seriousness” A critical and close observation will reveal that in theme, style and structure it has close resemblance with an epic. Of course, the theme here in this poem is the loss of the paradise of the childhood, then to regain that blessed stage through highly developed power of imagination and mystic experience of inexplicable delight through contacts with sublime and beautiful aspects of nature. A modern American critics has very finally summed it up in this way : “ if we ready to grant the prelude the other three epic qualities which tillyard distinguishes – high seriousness , sustained exercise of will, and even amplitude and breath we are hard put to think of the prelude for all its declamatory movements, as a spokesman of its age : the egotistical sublime must be its very nature have rejected such demands”.

The prelude is an autobiographical and presents the growth of the poet’s mind (as subtitle indicates), as it pass through different stages. Though it was published after his death (1805) it had been planned and begun sometime in 1799 and finished in 1805. It was address and dedicated to his friend Coleridge. it may be said that the prelude is the most interesting and characteristic work of the poet

43

. “this record of a growth of a poet’s mind,” says Morley , “ told by the poet himself with all the sincerity of which he was capable is never likely to be popular”. But its value as a human document is unquestionable, and this value is enhanced by the poet’s introspective power and his accurate deli nation of details. The prelude records the history of the poet’s inner life from his childhood up to the time when he settled down at Grasmere. The prelude can not claim a high place as a work of poetic art, though it is invaluable for its autobiographical interest. it has too many dull and ever prosaic passages , and the narration is often interrupted by digression but there is real poetry , thrown in with careless abundance , and the long poem , divided into 14 books has a certain measure of unity in spite of its digression . The prelude is indeed a remarkable poem, in that it is the poet’s own record of the growth of his mind. In spite of its occasional dullness, it is “in its whole effect unique in impressive power, as a picture of the advance of a serious spirit from childhood and school time through close contact with stirring and enormous events to that decisive stage when it has found the sources of its strength”

44

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEYShelley’s poetry is characterized by a great intensity of feeling. It is poetry of passion. Emotion which Shelley for exceeds the normal limits. He was a hypersensitive person. A person of a kind will always experience the extremes of feeling. The sadness of such a person will tend to deepen into despair, and the joy will tend to develop into a state of rapture. The poetry of Shelley fully illustrates this. We have intense sadness in his work, and a rapturous joy. Of course the note of sadness and despair is predominant, which the mood of joy is very occasional. Shelley was deeply dissatisfied with the present of mankind, but he was very hope full about the future. Therefore, it is chiefly when he speaks of the future that a mood of joy finds utterance.Most of the poems of Shelley are cries of pain and anguish. There is a strong feeling of desire and longing in his poems. He is always hungering and thirsting for what is unattainable and impossible. His desire, to use his own, words, is the desire of the moth for the star. As a lyric poet Shelley is among the very greatest. His song is pure inspiration, a thinking of lightness, melody and grace. With such work, says Hudson, formal criticism has little concern: to analyze is futile, to praise is superfluous. Shelly is an intense lyricist as Alexander Pope is an intense satirist. He converts forms as drama, prose, essay, romance, satire etc, into lyrics. Shelley’s lyrics represent the highest achievement of romantic poetry. The beauty of his lyrics is hardly surpassed by the poems of any other English writer. Spontaneity was one of the most sticking features of Shelley’s lyrics. They seem to have been written without the effort, and are in his respect like the singing of the skylark whose music he elaborates in one of his best known poems. His lyrics come directly from his heart. What can be more spontaneous than the following lines and addressed to a skylark:

Better than all measuresOf delightful soundBetter then all treasuresThat in books or foundThy skill to poet were , thou scorner of the ground!Teach me half the gladnessThat they brain must known,Such harmonious madnessFrom my lips would flowThe world should listen then- as I am listening now.

45

The speaker invokes the "wild West Wind" of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a "destroyer and preserver," hear him. The speaker calls the wind the "dirge / Of the dying year," and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from "his summer dreams," and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the "sapless foliage" of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him. "Ode to the West Wind" finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap beyond the scope of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and incorporating his own art into his meditation on beauty and the natural world. Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both "destroyer and preserver," and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!" In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that drives "dead thoughts" like "withered leaves" over the universe, to "quicken a new birth"--that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the spring season is a metaphor for a "spring" of human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality--all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees.

The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expressionIn the poem to the skylark, Shelley contrasts the estary and rapture of the bird’s song with the sadness of human life

We look before and after,And pain for what is not;Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraughtOur sweetest songs are those thet tell us of saddest thought.

The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" contains in the abstract that which is approached concretely in "Ode to the West Wind," "To a Sky-Lark," and "The Cloud." After we have worked our way through its seven stanzas, you should have

46

a pretty good "feel" for Shelley's poetic method and be able to make some sense of these other poems on your own.

Before taking a closer look, it is essential that you read the notes on Neo-Platonism. (If you have not yet done so, click here.)

The "Hymn" is a confessional poem on one level, an autobiographical record of Shelley's "conversion" or dedication to Intellectual Beauty. It is also concerned with the basic human questions: Why is there so much beauty? Why is it transient? Why do we suffer pain and anguish? Why is man torn by the antitheses of "love and hate, despondency and hope"?

The footnote in your text defines "intellectual" as "no sensible." Thus we can see Intellectual Beauty as something beyond the senses, a part of the unknown or ideal realm that visits our world from time to time.

He refers to it as the "awful shadow of some unseen Power". What he is aware of is not the thing itself, but rather its shadow, an imperfect copy. And because this presence is something beyond our earthly comprehension, Shelley provides us with a mass of similes in an attempt to make it concrete, a technique which Richard Harter Fugal refers to as "the concretization of the abstract." We may not know what it is, but it is like "summer winds," "moonshine," "hues and harmonies of evening," memory of music fled."

This laments the fleeting presence of the "Spirit of BEAUTY," points to the typically romantic sense of the world as a gloomy "vale of tears," and underscores the contrast between the permanence of beauty and man's impermanence.

Here we find a good example of the often secular nature of the Romantics' explanation of the mysteries of life. Suggesting that Intellectual Beauty alone "Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream," Shelley rejects Christianity as a "vain Endeavour" to find the truth. For him, its prayers ("Frail spells") have done nothing to remove "Doubt, chance, and mutability."

This contains an autobiographical sketch. As a boy, Shelley and his sisters liked to play games which involved the invocation of magical spirits. Here the memory is like a Wordsworthian "spot of time," where from a later vantage point he can see that he was searching for Intellectual Beauty--even calling on "poisonous names" (using traditional prayers) to do so. The closing lines suggest the moment of

47

conversion, his sensing of the spirit. "I shrieked, and clasped my hands in extacy!" may seem a bit overdone to modern readers, but the phrasing follows the Platonic tradition and is similar to that found in Christian mystical experiences.

This marks his youthful dedication to Intellectual Beauty, and suggests a prayer for creative power. He is saying that if Intellectual Beauty were here, the world would be free from all forms of slavery, both physical and intellectual (e.g., traditional religion).

The closing stanza shows Shelley as an adult praying for peace of mind and calm of soul, which the serenity and harmony of Nature will provide.

The lines ". . . to one who worships thee, / and every form containing thee" clearly draw upon the Platonic Doctrine of Accommodation. If we are to know the "true" which exists in an ideal realm, we must accommodate ourselves to its forms (imperfect copies) which we encounter on this earth. Only through them can we gain a sense of the universal, unchanging world of the Empyrean.

The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" exemplifies how Shelley employs genre and genre-linked features in innovative and figurative ways. The poem is in dialogue with the classical hymn, a genre to which tradition grants unusual structural flexibility and in which writers, including Shelley, find both a positive support and a challenge to their innovative skill. The classical hymn presupposes fundamental separation while aspiring to unity, and so provides Shelley with inherent contrary pulls, or inherent dialectics, congenial with his aim to contain an effusive, inspiring power in poetic form. That "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" struggles between containment and effusion is not disputed by critics today, but Shelley's modern readers recognize that dialectic as working primarily in language itself. Questions of genre are frequently passed over, and, despite the generic claim of Shelley's title and the features of classical hymn that appear in the poem, critics are reluctant to come to terms with hymn. In fact, critical discussions of the generic resonances of the "Hymn" often rest on misapprehensions about genres that Shelley himself did not share, particularly that genres exist immutably and apply equally to all past and present literary works.

In short Shelley remains, above all, a lyric poet, the greatest that England or perhaps modern Europe has produced. His influence, in the beginning, was confined to an ‘elite’; Browning and Tennyson cake strongly, under his spell, since then, it has spread, and become a great force in literature, extending to foreign countries, where through certain affinities it has found a way to some talented writers. He is however easily accessible only to such minds as are independent,

48

sensitive and capable of rediscovering in themselves some thing of the freshness and wonder of primitive man.

49

ROBERT BROWNING 

  The Victorian age was fraught with doubts and uncertainties. The development of science and its discoveries led to stupendous upheaval in the sphere of religious father.

There was a general pessimism in the views man’s nature or destiny. Thomas hardy reflects this atmosphere in his no Tennyson; too, we find the element of doubt. In an age torn doubt. Browning's voice clearly and strongly proclaimed on opinion which was hopeful. Optimistic and soothing. It led to the Victorian attitude towards browning that he was a great thinker than a poet.

  Browning was confirmed optimist. His philosophy would naturally have appealed to his contemporaries. He preached God and immortality as central truth of his philosophy of life, and he preached them with supreme conviction in their reality. He looked at the will around him and didn’t lose his robustly optimistic faith. And too many who were asking doubtfully whether life was really worth it, he glares a hopeful inspiration. However, Browning’s optimism is not at all that simple and fate. He indicates that one's struggles are nay in vain, but the struggle has to be made. He an optimist because he considered that the game of life, however difficult and grim, was worth playing out. Even in evil, there was some soul of goodness to be found.

 This firm conviction that life is worth living is Browning’s most important characteristic. "He is, says Rayland, one of the chosen bound who rolled back, as far as England is concerned, the morbid pessimism, and the sickly disdain of active life, which has infected so much of European literature during the present century. Tennyson, Carlyle, Dickens, all in their different ways, hare taught us the same lesson. With less of a polling dignity than Tennyson, has of scornful denunciation than Carlyle, and less of merely amiable sentiment than Dickens, he has shown us how it look life and death bravely in the face."

Browning frequently expresses his view on human life. Like Wordsworth or Shelley, he comes to us with a more or less distinct theory of the relation of man to the universe, and exhibits his theory by means of imaginary characters. And scenes. In a philosophical poet, we do not expect the rigid consistency or the systematic completeness of the speculative thinkers. But we have a right to look for a deeper apprehension of general truths underlining the visible universe a greater thoroughness and steadiness of view than that of the plain man. He was not a profound philosopher than a poet ought to wear. His occasionally uncouth

50

attempts to speak out what he has to say, impress us with the notion that he is striving to utter some truth too deep for ordinary language. He seems to come as one preaching a new revelation, as having a,” message", which he alone can deliver. His interest in the problem of life and thought is an artistic interest in the problem of life and thought is purely practical, though he has besides an artistic interest in human character. He challenges few the old theological and metaphysical dogmas which have satisfied the spiritual needs of so many centuries.

  Browning genius was essentially dramatic. his dramatic beauty of mind is seen in his characterization , and in the unfolding of strong dramatic situations. He also considered drama as the highest form of expressions and psychological analysis, and so his plays were stage failures. His dramatic skills as well as his skills in painting, "Interior landscapes", could be exercised to advantage in the dramatic monologue, and it was of this poetic form that he became the supreme exponent.

The dramatic monologue was used by Browning with amazing skills and success. As huge walker points out,” Browning did not invest the dramatic monologue, but he made it specially his own and no one also has ever put such rich and valued material in to it. "In other words , he could dispense with all, external machinery of action and plot, and concentrate his attention on "the incidents in development of a soul.

 Browning said, my stress lay on incident on development of soul." In each of his monologue, we thus have a situation which proves to be the flash point in the cores of the character's life. The critical point sets the character off   to reminisce, express his opinion, frustration and ambitions and in short, range over his whole life. All he while, he reveals his true nature and soul.

The dramatic monologue was peculiarly suited to Browning’s genius. As Prof.Herford points out, "Despite all his appetency for drama, Browning did better work in his dramatic monologue than in his plays.” Each poem redness a single mood, and renders it completely. But it is still only a mood; my last duchess is a life. This poem is the first direct progenitor of Andrea die sartor and the great blank verse monologue, in it we see the form, fully developed. The poem id subtle study in the jealousy of egoism-not  a study so much as creation, and its places before us, the typical duke of the renaissance, with self composer, his selfishness, his cruelty and his genius devotion of art. The scene and the actors in this little drama stand out before us with the most natural clearness.

The bishop doers his tomb at St.Praxed’church is the first monologue in blank verse. “Scarcely at his very best _scarcely in the very greatest monologues of

51

the central series of men and women has browning exceeded this poem? As study in human nature, it has concentrated truth and biting an imaginative realism. As a piece of metrical writing, it has all the originality of an innovation. If browning can scarcely be said to have created this species of blank verse _half familiar, vivid with natural life, full of vigor and beauty, rising and falling, with immuring motion of the sea, from depth, now level and smooth of passion and lulled with the falling breeze if he has not exactly created it, he has certainly adapted, perfected, and made it a new thing In his hand.

The repaid survey of the Browning’s monologues reveals his skills in the use of this form, as well as the distinctive features of his art and technique. He uses this from foe the study of characters, of particular mental state, and of moral crisis in the soul of characters concerned. In his monologues, browning depict an amazingly variety of characters taken from all walks of life. Cowards, rogues, artists, scholar’s saints, all crowd his picture gallery. His character belongs not to any one country and age, but to a number of countries and ages. In each monologue, one character is at the centre, and the substance of the monologue consists of what passes within his soul. In each monologue, the speaker is placed in the most momentous or critical situation of his life and the monologue embodies his reaction to this situation. Unlike a dramatist, browning did not begin slowly with an action leading to the crisis, rather he plunges head long in to the crisis. For this reason, his monologue has an abrupt, but very asserting opening, and at the same time, what has gone before is suggested cleverly or brought out through reforpective meditation and reflection. Thus my last duchess opens with a reference to a picture of the died duchess, with clear indication that is being shown to same one. The language of the monologue conforms closely to the thoughts of process of the speaker concerned. It is the language of informal talk brother’s language, as browning called it niceties of grammar and syntax are ignored. The language is often telegraphic, and the hesitancy and in coherence of the speaker is indicated by the use of parenthesis and dashes. The manner too is sometimes lyrical and emotional, sometimes, narrative and descriptive and other times reflective and reminiscent, in keeping with the varying moods of the speaker. T.S. Young says “it is worth nothing that the monologues are written mostly in verse, free and vigorous in rhythm, racy and actual, bristling with colloquialism.”

It has sometimes been said that Browning’s monologues are satires upon their respective speakers. But this far from the truth. No doubt, the speakers expose their follies and their weakness, but as Chest on point of out the monologue, “are not satires upon their subject; they are not even harsh or unfeeling exposure of them. They are all defenses”. The last ride together is a defense of the lover, and Andrea del sartor offers an excuse for the painter’s maltreatment of his parents. In

52

his curlier monologues, browning is primarily concerned with character portrayal, in his later monologues, he is more interested in case making.

The monologues are ‘dramatic’, and such they most be entirely objective. Browning is amazingly objective in some of them, but more often than not be betrays his own personal point if view. His philosophy of life, his views on god and immortality of the soul, etc, can all be gathered from a study of his monologues. Such subjectivity is unavoidable in a verse form which requires the poet, “to lend his own mind to his characters to unable they defend their actions”.

Hugh walkers rightly say that, “there collection of monologue forms together one of the most precious and profoundly original contributions to the poetic literature of 19th century. The defect which prevented his complete success in the regular drama is not apparent in this cognate form. He talks just what interests him, and consequently he is nearly always inspired, nearly always at his best”. In his analysis of particular mantle states, in his probing in the minds and heart of control characters of his monologues, in short, in his passion for psychoanalysis, browning anticipates, to very great extent. The modern, stream of consciousness technique”.

Browning is primarily the poet of man. The range and variety of his characterization is wide and varied. No other English poet since Shakespeare has shown such a varied and subtle insight in to human character. Wordsworth and Tennyson, too were great painters of character, but there character are all English, while browning goes  to Italy, France Germany and Spain an search of his dramatist persons . Another peculiarity of Browning’s characterization is that his character is all drawn from the city. Unlike Wordsworth, browning has no touch of the rebuses about him; he is the child of cities and not of rural solitude.

  Browning evinces a keen interest were in the worst of human natures, he is as much interested in noble and the generous as in the wicked and the crooked. Browning does not ignore the seamy side of the life as does Wordsworth. Not that his characters are divisible in to good and bad, even his rogues have much good in them. As Chesterton points out “the poet does not hold a brief merely for sinners, he shows that there is some good even in those sinners whom even the sinners have abandoned”.

Browning could verify a character through a few deft touches. Not only the main or central figure, but also the secondary characters are living breathing realities. Even they are curiously alive. But his real interest was not in the externals of characters. His real interest was “in the incidents in the development of soul” and he considers nothing else as a suitable subject of study. That is why he does

53

not define the physical charms of even his female characters. His purpose was primarily, “soul dissection”, and for this purpose he use and perfected the monologue, a poetic form best suited for depicting the soul or psyche of his characters.

His method of painting characters is dramatic; he does not sketch a character directly, but allows the character to soliloquies, and thus himself reveals his own real self. In each monologue, in addition to the principal figures, these are one or more secondary figures that serve as interlocutors, and thus help in bringing out the speaker. Thus in Andréa dale sartor Andréa not only reveals his own character but also that of his wife, lucrezia. In my last duchess, the duke reveals his own sordid nature, as well as the generous and gracious nature of the duchess who is dead.

As a painter of the character, browning is interested in representing the inner side of human beings their mantle and human qualities. His poetry is the poetry of the “great moment”, or “the psychological moment”. He does not depict a complete human action, he does not give us a story moving rapidly towards a crisis, rather he places his characters in the critical movement, the crisis of their lives, a psychological movement which stir their whole personality, and by making them talk by nothing their reaction to the situation, reveals what goes on within their soul.

Browning catches his character in a cool moment of introspection or of guarded self-revelation, and he lets us see in their minds the causes and results of previous actions, as few other poets have been able to do so. In his mostly successful poems, he presents a character in a condition of pause and makes clear to us by means of soliloquy or continued address how he got there. No one has ever given us pictures, so full of significant details, with such an intimate and convincing self_ revelation. If in this way that, through a process of self revelation, browning verifies his characters. In his “characteristic inwardness”, in his exploitation of, “the stream of consciousness”, technique for the depiction of the character, browning is the forerunner of the modern impressionists. Great is his originality and great is his contribution to the art of character delineation.

It was Ruskin who declared that browning was a poet reflecting the Middle Ages. However other critics have refused this statement and offered conclusive evidence to support the contention that Browning’s poetry reflected dominantly the ethos of the Italian renaissance. Indeed the major poems of the browning catch unerringly the spirit of the Italian renaissance with its curious blend of idealism and the depths of the flesh and the elevating flights of the mind.

54

Like the painter of the Italian renaissance, browning too had no dislike for the body, its life, its beauty, power and charm. Fra Lippo Lippi is picture not only man but of the time and its temper, when and its morality had lost their ancient power over society in Florence, when the claim to give to the human nature all its desired had stolen in to the church itself.

In another poem concern with art, namely, Andréa del sarta, we have created for us, the spirit of renaissance again, though of a later vintage than in Fra lippo lippy. Here we have the representation of the conflict between technical perfection and imaginative or idealistic vision. Andrea is the perfect craftsman, but Rafael and Michel Angelo were artists of the soul expressing in their picture ‘the divine discontent of their souls, says Andréa sadly;

        “Ah but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s heaven for? All is silver-gray placid and perfect with my art: the worse!”

 The word imply that the great art of the period reflected the striving of mind for higher regions, the fire of passion and glory of man’s   spirit  through flame boy and colours_all of which sadly was not within reach of Andréa.

 In a grammarian’s funeral we are given the picture of a typical renaissance scholar whose life was dedicated to study of classics in the endeavor to unravel minute niceties of grammar and language. Hero, too, we have the poet capturing through the eulogy of me of pall bearers the spirit of seeking for knowledge that gripped the renaissance mind.

  Two famous poem which reflect to the nicety the atmosphere and ethos of decadent Italian renaissance are my last duchess and the bishop orders his tomb at St.Praxed’s church. The duke of Ferrari is the ultimate picture of the disagreeable aspect of the Italian renaissance. Through the duke’s words is conveyed the very essence of the age, its avarice, shrewd mercenary ekistics, hypocrisy, an exquisite Tate for art devoid of appreciation for life. The poem is remarkable for capturing the spirit of an age in the space of just fifty-six lines.

55