Difference between revisions of "Matthew Arnold"
From Commonplace Book
(Created page with "==Dover Beach== * the most impt thing, as Charles would say, is that "the sea of faith" is still pretty full in the 1850s: so in a way this isn't so much a genuine poem of rel...") |
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==Dover Beach== | ==Dover Beach== | ||
| − | * the most impt thing, as Charles would say, is that "the sea of faith" is still pretty full in the 1850s: so in a way this isn't so much a genuine poem of religious pessimism as a lyric utterance of the position of religious pessimism | + | * the most impt thing, as Charles would say, is that "the sea of faith" is still pretty full in the 1850s: so in a way this isn't so much a genuine poem of religious pessimism as a lyric utterance of the position of religious pessimism (or it is that but it's also an examination of the position) |
* first stanza is 14 lines, like a tangled sonnet | * first stanza is 14 lines, like a tangled sonnet | ||
* strong caesuras moving around in the line in first stanza a rhythmic effect, then in 33-4 it switches so that pauses are less rhythmic than accumulative/enumerative | * strong caesuras moving around in the line in first stanza a rhythmic effect, then in 33-4 it switches so that pauses are less rhythmic than accumulative/enumerative | ||
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* "the moon-blanched land": its light is as alien, it feels like, as the speaker's vision | * "the moon-blanched land": its light is as alien, it feels like, as the speaker's vision | ||
* "so new": again, as [[Armstrong 1993]], the self-consciousness/anxiety about modernity | * "so new": again, as [[Armstrong 1993]], the self-consciousness/anxiety about modernity | ||
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==Empedocles on Etna== | ==Empedocles on Etna== | ||
==The Scholar-Gipsy== | ==The Scholar-Gipsy== | ||
Revision as of 11:50, 14 October 2017
Dover Beach
- the most impt thing, as Charles would say, is that "the sea of faith" is still pretty full in the 1850s: so in a way this isn't so much a genuine poem of religious pessimism as a lyric utterance of the position of religious pessimism (or it is that but it's also an examination of the position)
- first stanza is 14 lines, like a tangled sonnet
- strong caesuras moving around in the line in first stanza a rhythmic effect, then in 33-4 it switches so that pauses are less rhythmic than accumulative/enumerative
- "roar" repeated: of the sea but also embodied, chagrined, and repressed or muffled, like the "ignorant armies clash[ing] by night"
- second stanza: Sophocles and the speaker finding "also in the sound a thought" - empty natural phenomena that the lyric subject fills with a content, dramatizing the struggle of that
- "the moon-blanched land": its light is as alien, it feels like, as the speaker's vision
- "so new": again, as Armstrong 1993, the self-consciousness/anxiety about modernity
