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ENG: 401 20th-Century Poetry (Reference Guide)

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Razon Mahmood:
W.B Yeats has portrayed images of Irish Nature (One of the major themes) in his early poem such as

"THE brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man's image and cry"- The Sorrow of Love

We also find that W.B Yeats had a passionate love for his country and its nature. He has used different places of Ireland as the titles of his poetry- "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", "The Wild Swans At Coole" etc.  

One of the most important things that he is probably an 'Escapist ' like John Keats. He also longs for leading a peaceful life out of the materialistic and busy city. He has portrayed grandeur beauty of the nature to show nature as a place where peace lies. He has also portrayed the wild images of the nature which reflect something violent. Acknowledging Yeats' portrayal of two aspects (Peace and violent) through the description of nature we can compare him with William Blake. The collection of poems "Songs of Innocence (1974)" and "Songs of Experience (1794)" are developed through the innocence to experience. The images of nature used in the "Songs of Innocence" (The Echoing Green)are different from the images of the "Songs of Experience" (Tyger). Similarly, we find the use of images of the poem ""The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1880 )" is different from "The Second Coming (1919)".  

Actually nature plays the most important role in the development of poetry.  


I have found an excellent document on -  Nature Themes in Keats's “To Autumn” and Yeats's “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”  (retrieved from- http://hubpages.com/hub/Nature-as-an-Escape-or-a-Force-of-Change-Keats-Innisfree-Yeats)  

Nature as an Escape or a Force of Change

“To Autumn” by John Keats and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats both feature speakers who harbor great affection for nature; their major difference lies in the speakers’ perceptions of what nature is. To Yeats’s speaker nature is a calm inactive location; to Keats’s speaker nature is an awesome, ever changing, active force.
Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is presented as the wistful daydream of an escapist speaker who wishes he were in nature but is not. To this speaker nature is an extremely satisfying place to relax; he finds it relaxing because he believes nature to be a passive inanimate, but still thoroughly pleasant, location. This passivity and unchanging state is important to the speaker because the bustle and constant change is why he long to be out of the city.
Yeats has laid “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” out in three four line stanzas; each stanza is composed of three lines of hexameter followed by a concluding line in tetrameter. The poem’s short length is perfect for a wistful daydream and its fairly simple meter helps the calm tone of the poem. The rhythm also helps give the poem a relaxed feel. The simple abab rhyme scheme and lack of anything but full rhymes gives the poem a relaxed pattern without the hiccups a half rhyme might give a reader.
Yeats quite deftly uses his choice of words to control the tone, sound, literal meaning, and figurative meaning all at the same time. To Yeats’s speaker nature is passive; one of the main ways this is revealed to the reader is the total absence of action verbs referring to nature or any of its elements. Yeats’s nature seems to do little but exist. The phrases discussing nature accentuate its relaxing qualities without acknowledging any others, and the sounds of the poem are equally uniform in their omission of any but the most relaxing sounds. This idealized view of the world is a natural hallmark of the mental refuge of someone who wishes to escape from their current circumstances.
In line four of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” a glade is described only as “bee-loud.” Anyone who ever raised honeybees knows that the buzz of bees is a constant sound it rarely changes volume or pitch suddenly. A constant hum such as this is perfect for the speaker’s bastion of relaxation. The closest the speaker comes to attributing an action verb to an element of nature is in line six where “the cricket sings.” Normally singing would count as an action verb but in this case the fact that it is a cricket song takes away from the sense of motion or activity. Like the buzzing of bees, the chirping of crickets usually occurs when hoards are all making the exact same sound at the same time. Crickets will continue to make this same exact sound far longer than it takes for the human brain to classify it as background noise and tune it out. “lake water lapping” in line ten also falls into this category. It will occur all day every day in exactly the same way unless a boat drives by. The lapping of water on the shore is significant as well because it is traditionally symbolic of relaxation. Sounds like the buzzing of bees and the lapping of water on the shore are so stereotypically calm and relaxing that people even buy CDs with recordings of them to relax, Yeats’s speaker was essentially doing this generations before technology would have allowed him to.
Line seven states that “midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow” people certainly appreciate things that glimmer and glow however most things which are described as such are things such as gems and jewelry; inanimate objects which serve no purpose other than to be looked at. This message of the sky’s inactivity is also indicated by their verb; is. In a way the Lake the speaker visits in his mind is free cheap art; it doesn’t need to be anything but pleasant when he looks at it.
Line eight contains what seems to be the poems most deliberate use of diction. A straightforward summary of the line would say something along the lines of, “in the evening songbirds can be heard flying around.” Instead Yeats writes, “evening full of linnet’s wings.” In this way he manages to say what he wants about the night without the use of any action verbs that would break the calm inactive pattern elements of the natural world follow in the poem. “Flying” must be avoided because its denotation is most certainly active and energy consuming while its connotation is, if anything, more inappropriate. Instead of using an action verb Yeats uses a basic being verb and the adjective full whose connotations and denotation coincide perfectly with the wistful relaxing tone of the poem. Something flying is using a lot of energy to go somewhere and will be tired afterwards. When someone is full they have just eaten and tend to be sleepy; they don’t need to do anything. Also worth mentioning is the fact that even though Yeats mentioned a songbird he did not mention a songbird singing which, while pleasant, is energetic, lively, and fleeting and thus off limits in this speaker’s one person vacation home.
 There are some action words used in the LakeIsle of Innisfree, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,” (1) and, “a small cabin build there.”  Arise, go, go, and build are thus the first four verbs used in the poem. All of these first verbs have definite active energetic connotations and the repetition of go emphasizes them even more. All of this energy belongs to the speaker, demonstrating that the speaker does not simply wish for a place where nothing happens. Rather the speaker longs to be somewhere where he alone controls and instigates activity. After quickly going to Innisfree and changing things to suit himself the speaker needs to do nothing, which makes it the idea location for an escapist fantasy.
Both Yeats and Keats show great affection for and appreciation of the idea of nature, their difference is in how they perceive that idea. In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” nature took on the form of a place; the lake isle and its surroundings. In “To Autumn” nature is perceived in the season autumn. This difference in what aspect of nature is focused on by the two speakers is responsible for the wildly different tone’s and style.
As a force elements of nature work as bringers and instruments of change as well as subjects of it. In light of this Keats’s poem shows autumn powerfully and energetically changing the world until it too changed. Something so powerful was destroyed by the same force it was an instrument of.
“To Autumn” is composed of three 11 line stanzas of iambic pentameter. Each stanza has the same ababcdedffe rhyme scheme. Thematically the poem is also divided into three parts; each of which discusses a significantly different stage of autumn. The separation of the stanzas clearly sets these three sections of the poem apart emphasizing the differences between each stage of autumn’s progression. The fixed form and identical rhyme schemes make it easier for the poem to maintain the awed sensibility of Keats’s speaker. The repeating form also makes the contrast between the tone and topics of the three stanzas starker than they otherwise would be. Like a control group in a scientific experiment the difference in tone between two things is easier to see if everything other than the tone is the same. Another benefit of the repeating form is that the stages of autumn’s affect on the poem almost parallel the effects of the season on the world; the exact same location can look beautiful and colorful at autumn’s beginning yet look ugly as sin by the end of the season.
When read literally, the poem tells a story of the autumn season. At first autumn and its friend the sun rush to make sure everything finishes growing big enough, plentiful enough, and good enough. In the second stanza the poem tells readers of autumn as a working girl struggling to finish the hay harvest. Finally a literal interpretation of the third stanza tells of the animals singing in celebration of autumn’s accomplishments and mourning over its coming to an end.
In the first stanza “To Autumn” seems to be working franticly. In the first stanza every verb attributed to autumn is an action verb conveying the completion of some task. More specifically these verbs together give the impression of exhaustive effort of every kind. In line 3 the word ‘load’ brings to mind awkward heavy objects and the attempts to wrestle them into place. In line five Keats uses bend, a word most often used to describe a strong metal giving way before great force. The word evokes images of the strong man at the circus twisting iron bars with his bare hands. Both load and bend give the reader a sense of the great physical strength and stamina the speaker attributes to autumn. The tasks of autumn are not only physical but mental for in line three he must conspire, something usually reserved for criminal masterminds planning their biggest heist yet. Spiritual effort is also undertaken by our brave hero autumn his loading the tree he has conspired to bend also needs a blessing. Using diction as well as personification evokes the same kind of respect and pity that one would give a single mother of three working multiple jobs. Admiration for someone who is confronted with difficult challenges and overcomes them is a natural human reaction and Keats uses that.
In “To Autumn’s” second stanza, figurative language is used extensively. Autumn is now portrayed as an exhausted female farmer struggling to bring in her crop. This metaphor is very straightforward, the weather and many biological processes begin shutting down but not all and not completely giving the impression that autumn is trying to hold on and continue as it had at the beginning but lacks the power to do so.  The final line of the stanza says, “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.” This one line combines its sound, vivid imagery, word connotations, and repetition to perfectly encapsulate the tone of the second stanza. At this point “To Autumn” is different from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” because its tone seems tortured rather than by being more energetic. In spite of this the speaker still seams in awe of autumn; its struggle to fight the inevitable seems, if anything, even more noble than the constant easy triumph of the first stanza.
The third paragraph’s tone is the furthest removed from the others. In it autumn has entered its final stage and has all but died and given way to winter. The presentation of autumn as something awesome comes to a climax with its imagery, diction, and sound. The animals of the world come out to mourn and sing. Describing the scene merely as animals singing and crying does not really convey the emotion and image the speaker has painted. Animals do not just sing even creatures as small as gnats mourn in “a wailful choir.” lambs, a traditional symbol for innocence, bleat from the hills. All of these things happening at once as the harvested bare hills are turned “a rosy hue” a color reminiscent of blood. Unlike The Lake Isle of Innisfree, in “To Autumn” the songbird can be heard doing more than flapping in the night; they whistle. Coincidentally “To Autumn” as well as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” feature singing crickets. There is a difference however, in terms of what their song adds to each poem. When the crickets in “To Autumn” sing they sing along with a plethora of others, an accompaniment rather than a single note played constantly. The image, the idea of all these animals coming out and loudly singing together is grandiose; a spectacle whose scale can most easily be compared to the opening scene from the Lion King in terms of symbolism and the awe inspired.
In spite of all these differences the poems still clearly belong to the same movement. Though the choices were different the two poems utilize diction in the same fashion, their forms are not too dissimilar considering the diverse range of possible forms. In spite of the wildly different tones both poets felt that singing crickets conveyed their feelings. Most importantly both Yeats and Keats’s poems above all else display affection for nature.
  
 
  

Razon Mahmood:
                                                                            Assignment on Helen

Introduction:

Helen, known as Helen of Troy, is the most important character in literature. It was she for whom the destructive Trojan War was taken place. She was stunningly beautiful and her beauty caused many destructions. 

Birth and Parentage:

There is a controversy about the birth of Helen. It is believed that Helen was born from an egg laid by Leda, wife of the Spartan king Tyndareus . Helen’s mother, Leda, was seduced by the most powerful god Zeus in the shape of a swan. At the same night, Tyndareus also impregnated his wife. Later on, Leda laid two eggs; Helen and Clytemnestra were born from the first egg, and Castor and Pollux were born from the second egg. From another source, we find that Lead was not seduced by Zeus but it was Nemesis who was seduced by the father of all gods and laid an egg which, later on, was take cared by Leda. It is also supposed that Zeus wanted to kill of a part of humanity as the earth was overpopulated. Zeus, the father of Helen, used her as a tool of destructing a part of earthly people.   

Consequences of Helen beauty: 

During that time, Helen was famous for her stunning beauty. The story of her beauty was spread out everywhere. When she reached puberty, she was kidnapped by Athenian king named Theseus who took her to Aphidna, a small city north of Athens. When her brothers, Castor and Pollux, came to know that they raised an army and captured Aphidna. They returned their sister to Sparta. One question was raised about the virginity of Helen as she was stayed long time at Athens. It’s really interesting that the people of Athens didn’t know anything about her abduction. Her stunning beauty caused the first war. The destructive war of Troy was caused for her beauty.   
       
 Marriage and Children:   

When the time of her marriage came, many suitors came to marry her among them were Hesiod and Hyginus . Menelaus sent his brother, Agamemnon, to represent him. The list of suitors was 25-30 in number. They were Odysseus, son of Laertes; Diomedes, son of Tydeus; Antilochus, son of Nestor; Agapenor, son of Ancaeus; Sthenelus, son of Capaneus; Amphimachus, son of Cteatus; Thalpius, son of Eurytus; Meges, son of Phyleus; Amphilochus, son of Amphiaraus; Menestheus, son of Peteos; Schedius and Epistrophus, sons of Iphitus; Polyxenus, son of Agasthenes; Peneleus, son of Hippalcimus; Leitus, son of Alector; Ajax, son of Oileus; Ascalaphus and Ialmenus, sons of Ares; Elephenor, son of Chalcodon; Eumelus, son of Admetus; Polypoetes, son of Peirithous; Leonteus, son of Coronus; Podaleirius and Machaon, sons of Asclepius; Philoctetes, son of Poeas; Eurypylus, son of Euaemon; Protesilaus and Podarces, sons of Iphiclus; Menelaus, son of Pleisthenes (or Atreus); Ajax and Teucer, sons of Telamon; Patroclus, son of Menoetius; and Idomeneus, son of Deucalion. Helen’s stepfather Tyndareus fell into great problem to choose his daughter’s suitor.
*Odysseus was one of the suitors, but had brought no gifts, because he believed he had little chance to win the contest. He thus promised to solve the problem, if Tyndareus in turn would support him in his courting of Penelope, the daughter of Icarius. Tyndareus readily agreed and Odysseus proposed that, before the decision was made, all the suitors should swear a most solemn oath to defend the chosen husband against whoever should quarrel with him. After the suitors had sworn not to retaliate, Menelaus was chosen to be Helen's husband. As a sign of the importance of the pact, Tyndareus sacrificed a horse.Helen and Menelaus became rulers of Sparta, after Tyndareus abdicated. (* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen#Birth)
She gave birth to Hermione, Aethiolas, Maraphius, and Pleisthenes.

Seduction of Helen by Paris: 

According to some writer, there was a plague in Sparta during the early marriage of Helen and Menelaus. He was advised by an oracle to go to Troy to observe propitiatory rites at the graves of Lycus and Chimaereus. He went there according to the advice of an oracle. He was returned to Sparta with the companionship of Paris, the price of Troy. Paris came to Troy because he had accidently killed his friend in an athletic contest and needed purification. When he was staying at Sparta, he had got many opportunities to see the most beautiful woman in the earth. But Menelaus had to leave for to attend funeral ceremonies for his grandfather Catreus. He left Paris at Sparta who was entertained by his wife. Helen fell in love with the handsome visitor. Being the queen, Helen had sufficient right to come and go out of the kingdom. Before coming back of Menelaus, Paris and she left Sparta by the ship of Paris.
It is also supposed that she was taken by force and Aphrodite helped Paris. Aphrodite deceived her by giving Paris the appearance of Menelaus. There were some minor adventures befell on them. At last they reached at Troy.       

The Trojan War:

When Menelaus came back from Crete and found his wife missing, he told it his brother Agamemnon. Agamemnon was furious because it was not only his family’s dishonor but he felt insulted as Helen was his sister-in-law. He sent some convoys to the king of Troy giving back Helen. But the convoys were refused by the king. The great heroes including Achilles, Odysseus, and Agamemnon prepared themselves for the war. Armies were recruited and ships were built. The former suitors of Helen were joined in the war. A thousand of ships were sailed towards Troy for the war. The war was lasted for ten years and the city of troy was destroyed.

The ending of Helen story:

Helen returned to Sparta with Menelaus and regretted for her sin. She lived with Menelaus. According to one source (The Odyssey), it is supposed that she was encountered by Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. According to another source (Orestes by Euripides), it is supposed that she had been taken up to Olympus when Menelaus returned to Sparta.

Conclusion:

In the book Women of Classical Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary (1991) Robert E. Bell   says “The most fascinating thing about Helen was her story…….. She herself seemed almost oblivious to the horrors that surrounded her. She displayed very little emotion and no remorse. She seemed removed and largely unaffected by the outcome of the war. In most accounts of her final years she was not even made to pay for her part in the calamity that touched virtually every family in Greece.” 
Despite of many controversies about the birth and death, it is believed that Helen was the most beautiful woman in the earth who had became a valuable source of writing in the world literature.     
 
 

Submitted by:
Razon Mahmood
I.D No: 072-10-355 (11th Batch)
Department of English
Daffodil International University 



References:
Graves Robert, 1985, The Greek Myth, Volume Two, Penguin Book Ltd, England
World Wide Web:
http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Helen.html (13th October, 2010)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen#Birth (13th October, 2010)
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hd/abouthelen.htm (15th October, 2010)
   

jafar_bre:
 dear  Razon Mahmood , may be you can  learn more.if you   see  the movie troy 1,2,3,,,,,,,,,,,,,

best of luck

Razon Mahmood:
Thank you Jafar. I have seen the movie. There is another movie named "The Helen of Troy", which is also based on the story of Helen and Trojan war.     

Razon Mahmood:
English Illinois is one the best web source where everyone will get some healthy articles regarding Modern American Poetry. Follow the link to get those now!!!- http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets.htm

For getting information about T.S Eliot and his poetry please follow the link- http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/eliot.htm

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