Studying English Literature

As a pragmatic and as an empirical thinker Bacon subscribed to the fundamental Renaissance ideals—Sepantia (search for knowledge) and Eloquentia (the art of rhetoric). Here in the essay Of Truth he supplements his search for truth by going back to the theories of the classical thinkers and also by taking out analogies from everyday life. It is to be noted here that his explication of the theme is impassioned and he succeeds in providing almost neutral judgements on the matter. Again, it is seen that Bacon’s last essays, though written in the same aphoristic manner, stylistically are different in that he supplied more analogies and examples to support or explain his arguments. As this essay belongs to the latter group, we find ample analogies and examples. Bacon, while explaining the reasons as to why people evade truth, talks of the Greek philosophical school of sceptics, set up by Pyrro. Those philosophers would question the validity of truth and constantly change their opinions. Bac...

In the poem The Retreate Henry Vaughan deals with the loss of the heavenly glory experienced during the childhood and expresses a fanciful desire to get back that original stage. The theme, on the surface level, appears very simple; but going into the deeper the reader will find that the poem is founded on the diverse European idealistic, psychological, religious/mystical and philosophical doctrines in the western culture. On the socio-cultural level, the poem can be interpreted as a reflection of the urge for liberating the human psyche from the torments and tyrannies of civilization, an urge which, it must be said, has been expressed by Vaughan in the purest, distilled and highly cultivated form of thought. On the psychological level, the desire to go back to a happy childhood can be interpreted, Freud said, as an escape from the hard realities of life in the defence mechanism of regression, as a daydrea...

Prelude Wordsworth Generally speaking, The Prelude is a historical record of the growth of Wordsworth’s poetic imagination. It can be called an epic expansion of many poems like the Recluse, and The Excursion and, of course, the Tintern Abbey. The poem derived from many a thing: from the projected Recluse, from Coleridge’s suggestion about the French Revolution and, above all, from Wordsworth’s strenuous introspection. The end-product was a poem in which the poet furnished detailed record of the conditions in which he grew up and of the processes out of which he emerged as a poet of man and nature. In this the poem seems to have strong affinity with Wordsworth’s much read poem Tintern Abbey, which traces the development of his poetic career. But it must be stated here that The prelude is not an autobiography in the ordinary sense though he himself described the poem as “the story of my life; it is an autobiography in the sense that it offers in the poem the story of making of a poet. I...

One Day I Wrote Her Name… Spenser The Text of the Poem One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Agayne I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray. Vayne men, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay, A mortall thing so to immortalize, For I my selve shall lyke to this decay, And eek my name bee wyped out lykewize. Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your vertues rare shall eternize, And in the hevens wryte your glorious name. Where whenas death shall al the world subdew, Our love shall live, and later life renew. With Amoretti Spenser descended on the permanent paradox, namely the principle of change inherent in nature that causes merciless mutations to everything in this world. This is a paradox which baffled the European intellectuals historically since...

I FIND NO PEACE Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) The Text I find no peace, and all my war is done. I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice. I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise; And nought I have, and all the world I season. That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison And holdeth me not--yet can I scape no wise-- Nor letteth me live nor die at my device, And yet of death it giveth me occasion. Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain. I desire to perish, and yet I ask health. I love another, and thus I hate myself. I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain; Likewise displeaseth me both life and death, And my delight is causer of this strife. Critical Essay If the modern reader reads few lines from Surrey’s Epitaph on Sir Thomas Wyatt , he/she can easily understand how he appeared before his contemporaries as the first Renaissance gentleman-poet. Surrey writes in the very year of Wyatt’s death that he had a courtier’s eye, a scholar’s tongu...