Studying English Literature

(Objective questions) 1. What does “La Belle la Belle” mean? Ans: “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is French phrse which means in English “a beautiful lady without mercy”. 2. How does Keats describe the Knight-at-arms in La Belle Dame Sans Merci? Ans: In La Belle la Belle the poet sees a knight wandering alone. He is pale and haggard, and his face shows signs of agony. He has been deserted by a fairy after being seduced to her cave. 3. “The sedge has wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.” Why does the poet refer to this kind of natural setting? Ans: The sedge is kind of long grass growing by the margins of lakes and rivers. It dies down in winter. With the onset of winter the birds have either gone away or stopped singing. Keats’s purpose here is to create an atmosphere of desolation and deprivation. The condition in the natural world has been used to refer to the condition of desolation and deprivation in the human world. 4. “The squirrel’s granary is ful, And the harvest’s don...

(Objective questions) 1. Explain the metaphor “unravish’d bride of quietness”. Ans: In his ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats finds the urn in a perfect condition of peace and quietness. The clamorous changes in the human world have not had any impact on it. He imagines that the urn is wedded to silence and peace. 2. Explain the metaphor “foster child of Silence and slow time”. Ans: In his ode on a Grecian Urn John Keats finds the urn in a perfect condition of peace and quietness. The clamorous changes in the human world have not had any impact on it. It has remained preserved from the eyes of men in the lap of time, which moves very slow for it, as a child is preserved by its mother. 3. Whom does Keats address as “sylvan historian” and why? Ans: John Keats addresses the urn as “sylvan historian” because its decorations contain a description of countryside or of a pastoral setting. 4. “In Temple or the dales of Arcady”? What does Keats refer to in the line? Ans: John Keats h...

The Old English Beowulf holds a unique place as the oldest epic narrative in any modern European tongue. Although Beowulf is primal, nothing is primitive about it. It is above all a work of artifice; though if we accept C. S. Lewis’s classification of “epics of growth” and “epic of art”, Beowulf is obviously an epic of growth. Modern scholars like Milman Parry and A. B. Lord, working on the origins of epic poetry have come to the conclusion that like other great epics of the ancient civilizations, Beowulf was also an oral epic, written down by trained clerics. Like other oral epics, Beowulf has a formulaic character, using words, ideas and other stylistic features. The same formulaic character can be found in the epics of Homer. But Beowulf has other important epic qualities. The Iliad is also a striking example of the unity, which is essential to epic. Aristotle, who insisted on the principle of unity in epic, pointed to the Iliad as a perfect example of a poem, in which everything...

1. “Let not ambition mock…lead but to the grave.” (ll. 29—36) Ans. In these lines from the poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the poet Thomas Gray, standing in a country churchyard, reflects upon the generalised past lives of the villagers and admonishes ambitious rich persons not to laugh at the poor persons underground and persons living in grandeur not to listen to their stories. Then he sardonically adds, as a note of caution, that whatever human beings possess or achieve in this world, their ultimate destination is the grave. As the poet watches the ordinary graves of ordinary villagers, he recalls some snapshots of their generalised lives. He finds that they led their lives, of course, in poverty, but they lived in happiness. They did their day-to-day activities and enjoyed their domestic joys in their own ways. They remained outside the great political or military fields and remained quite unknown to the world. In fact, the circle of their existence was very limited, a...

In choosing the classical form of tragedy for his Samson Agonistes, Milton decided to work on a distinctively unpopular medium. For, classically modelled tragedy had never been popular in England. Even Ben Jonson, excused himself for not obeying the Aristotelian rules and not having a proper chorus in his Sejanus. But with his contempt for mere popularity, Milton did not feel obliged to modify the form of classical tragedy to suit the purpose of what Jonson called “popular delight”. J. B. Broadbank has said that Samson Agonistes is actually more regularly Aristotelian in construction that any extant Greek tragedy. Milton has introduced a chorus which tries to be faithful to Aristotle’s precepts. Aristotle emphasised that the chorus must be regarded as one of the actors as part of the whole and as joining in the action. Milton’s chorus contributes to the overall dramatic effect by its continuous presence: it is able both to sympathise with Samson and to give an external point of view wh...

In Man and Superman Shaw was not writing a regular play; he only united up dialogue, discussion, arguments for the purpose of making them appear as plays. Still the incidents of situations in the play do in one way or the other perpetuate the pursuit of man by woman—of Tanner by Ann. The most interesting is the Hell Scene where the traditional Don Giovanni motif is most comically inverted in the spirit of parody to substantiate Shaw’s thesis that it is the woman basically who is boa-constrictor from whom the new Don Juan flies away to save his person. The Hell Scene has been grafted on the plot from outside and it does not grow from the soil of the story. Its central business is to highlight the central motive of the play—the chase of man by woman as part of the process of Creative Evolution as well as the edification of hell as a most dynamic, therefore desirable condition of existence which ensures happiness of humanity. The metamorphosis of the characters like Tanner and Ann su...

Shaw conceived of Louka as a strong willed woman, necessary for his dramatic purpose of exposing the vanity of the upper-class and the political purpose of showing the socialist principle of showing equality among individuals in a society. It must be said that it was daring attempt on Shaw’s part to lead and raise a maidservant to the status of an aristocratic lady. But he does not do this as a kind of poetic justice or as a matter of mercy; he makes her capable of realising her aims and object by her worth as a human being and by her strong will power. In the beginning of the play Louka is presented as a maid-servant having some sort of tension with the lady she serves. She behaves in defiant manners and her physical movements, gestures and postures produce the impression of haughtiness and discontent. The audience ascribe this to typical feminine jealousy of a servant for the lady of the same age, but in Act II they understand that she is Raina’s rival in love and is eyeing somethin...