kevin rene sandy p. garcia

Central Bicol States University of Agriculture sipocot

TERM PAPER                                                                                (WORLD LITERATURE)

Prepared by:                                                                       Kevin Rene Sandy P. Garcia

Submitted to:

Ms. Giselle Artiaga

Instructor 

J. 435

Much madness is divines’ Sense--
To a discerning Eye---
Much Sense--the starkest Madness---
It’s the Majority---
In this, as All, prevail---
Assent--and you are sane---
Demur--you're straightway dangerous--- And handled with Chain--

c. 1862 (1890)

Literary analyses

Themes

A few themes occupied the poet: love, nature, doubt and faith, suffering, death, immortality - these John Donne has called the great granite obsessions of humankind.

Love: Though she was lonely and isolated, Emily appears to have loved deeply, perhaps only those who have "loved and lost" can love, with an intensity and desire which can never be fulfilled in the reality of the lovers' touch. Examples: #511, 478, 640.

Nature: A fascination with nature consumed Emily. She summed all her lyrics as "the simple news that nature told," (#441); she loved "nature's creatures" no matter how insignificant - the robin, the hummingbird, the bee, the butterfly, the rat (#1356 "The rat is the concisest tenant"). Only the serpent gave her a chill - #986. Other poems: #130, 214, 285, 318, 322, 328, 333, 526, 1463.)

Faith And Doubt: Emily's theological orientation was Puritan - she was taught all the premises of Calvinistic dogma - but she reacted strenuously against two of them: infant damnation and God's sovereign election of His own. There was another force alive in her time that competed for her interests: that was the force of literary transcendentalism. This explains a kind of paradoxical or ambivalent attitude toward matters religious. She loved to speak of a compassionate Savior and the grandeur of the Scriptures, but she disliked the hypocrisy and arbitrariness of institutional church. In one of her poems she approached God in prayer, but she could only worship, she could not pray (#564). At times she came to God in great confidence as in #1052. In another she addresses Him progressively as "Burglar, Banker, Father." (#49) There are other lyrics which express grave doubt as in # 338, 185 and 376. Other examples are #324,, 1207.

Pain And Sufferin: Emily displays an obsession with pain and suffering; there is an eagerness in her to examine pain, to measure it, to calculate it, to intellectualize it as fully as possible. Her last stanzas become a catalog of grief and its causes: death, want, cold, despair, exile. In #241, Emily says "I like a look of Agony." Examples # 252, 258, 650.

Death: Many readers have been intrigued by Dickinson's ability to probe the fact of human death. She often adopts the pose of having already died before she writes her lyric - #712 and 465. She can look straight at approaching death - # 1100 and 547. Other examples # 49, 182, 1078, 1624, 1732

Structural Patterns:

Major pattern is that of a sermon: statement or introduction of topic, elaboration, and conclusion. There are three variations of this major pattern:

1. The poet makes her initial announcement of topic in an unfigured line (examples: #241, #329)

2. She uses a figure for that purpose (#318, #401).

3. She repeats her statement and its elaboration a number of times before drawing a conclusion (#324).

The Character of Her Verse

1. Highly compressed, compact, shy of being exposed.

2. Her style is elliptical - she will say no more than she must - suggesting either a quality of uncertainty or one of finality.

3. Her lyrics are her highly subjective. One-fifth of them begin with "I" - she knows no other consciousness.

4. Ambiguity of meaning and syntax. Wrote Higginson: "She almost always grasped whatever she sought, but with some fracture of grammar and dictionary on the way."

5. Concreteness - it is nearly a theorem of lyric poetry that it is as good as it is concrete. Even when she is talking of the most abstract of subjects, Emily specifies it by elaborating it in the concreteness of simile or metaphor.

6. Use of poetic forms such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance; also onomatopoetic effects, #465.

7. Obscurity. Higginson said " ... she was obscure, and sometimes inscrutable; and though obscurity is sometimes, in Coleridge's phrase,

CONCLUSION

Now therefore, I conclude that studying different kinds of literary piece, we will know what the authors trying to convey to the reader, about his/her thought, observation even their own opinion.