ASSIGNMENT PAPER 2
The poem is an elegy in name but not in form;it employs a style similar to that of contemporary odes, but it embodies a meditation on death, and remembrance after death. The poem argues that the remembrance can be good and bad, and the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure rustics buried in the churchyard.
The two versions of the poem, Stanzas and Elegy, approach death differently; the first contains a stoic response to death, but the final version contains an epitaph which serves to repress the narrator's fear of dying.
With its discussion of, and focus on, the obscure and the known, the poem has possible political ramifications, but it does not make any definite claims on politics to be more universal in its approach to life and death.
Claimed as "probably still today the best-known and best-loved poem in English",the Elegy quickly became popular. It was printed many times and in a variety of formats, translated into many languages, and praised by critics even after Gray's other poetry had fallen out of favour. Later critics tended to comment on its language and universal aspects, but some felt the ending was unconvincing—failing to resolve the questions the poem raised—or that the poem did not do enough to present a political statement that would serve to help the obscure rustic poor who form its central image.
- Composition: c. 1745-1750
- Publication: 1751
- Base text: 1768
- Metre: iambic pentameter
- Rhyme scheme: abab
- Stanza: elegiac (heroic) stanza
- Genre: elegy, retirement / graveyard poetry.
| Born | 22 January 1572 London, England |
|---|---|
| Died | 31 March 1631 (aged 59) London, England |
| Occupation | Poet, priest, lawyer |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | Hart Hall, Oxford University of cambridge |
| Genre | Satire, love poetry, elegy, sermons |
| Subject | Love, sexuality, religion, death |
| Literary movement | Metaphysical poetry |
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques.
His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism.Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children.In 1615 he was ordained deacon and then Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Holy Orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He also served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614.
The speaker directly addresses and personifies Death, telling it not to be arrogant just because some people find death scary and intimidating. In fact, death is neither of these things because people don’t really die when death—whom the speaker pities—comes to them; nor will the speaker truly die when death arrives for him.
Comparing death to rest and sleep—which are like images of death—the speaker anticipates death to be even more pleasurable than these activities. Furthermore, it’s often the best people who go with death—which represents nothing more than the resting of the body and the arrival of the soul in the afterlife.
Death is fully controlled by fate and luck, and often administered by rulers or people acting desperately. The speaker points out that death is also associated with poison, war, and illness. Drugs and magic spells are more effective than death when it comes to rest. With all this in mind, what possible reason could death have for being so puffed up with pride?
Death is nothing but a mere sleep in between people’s earthly lives and the eternal afterlife, in which death can visit them no more. It is instead death—or a certain idea of death as something to be scared of—that is going to die.
SIMILAR THEMES IN BOTH POEM
DEATH
Death in "DEATH BE NOT PROUD " :-
In Death Be Not Proud, Johnny faces an overwhelming adversary for anyone, let alone a teenager: death. The poem by ##John Donne# that opens the memoir (Divine Meditation 10) is an attack on death, and, to an extent, Johnny and his family do attack his tumor—through operations, diets, injections, and so on. But more than that, Johnny seems to reach a placid acceptance of death while he fights it. He never tries to defy death, but, rather, he simply loves life too much to let it go.
He twice exclaims, "But I have so much to do, and so little time," and the statement indicates not a fear of death but a desire to live. Johnny even says at one point, in what seems to contradict his optimistic outlook, that the "worst thing is to worry too little" about death. The implication is that one must not agonize over these questions of death but accept them as a battle. And, for Johnny, a battle it is: he endures surgery after surgery, physical debilitation, constant moves in and out of hospitals, and the loss of a normal adolescence, yet he rarely complains.
When he does, it only shows the strength of his conviction to get well. Mostly, he keeps his fears to himself, not out of pride, but to spare others. Everyone who comes to know Johnny finds him remarkably courageous and mature about his fate, one that he rarely acknowledges but seems to be aware of deep down.
Johnny, however, focuses on living his life—furiously keeping up with his lost schoolwork, crafting interesting science experiments, and maintaining contact with friends. While it may simply be good fortune that his life extended far past what the malignancy of his tumor normally would have permitted, one cannot read Death Be Not Proud and not feel that Johnny's unwavering bravery may have had something to do with it.
*Death in "ELEGY WRITTEN IN COUNTRY CHURCHYARD " :-
The central focus of Gray’s elegy is the inevitability of death and how men and women from different social classes are remembered. Strictly speaking, the traditional elegy form memorializes an individual’s death, but Gray expands the form to encompass death as a phenomenon that all of humankind inevitably experiences.
In “Elegy,” Gray meditates on death as it relates to the rustic commoners who populate the village and its country churchyard. The poem attends to those living in a small England village, including the “plowman [who] plods his weary way” home at night and ends his life “in a narrow cell forever laid.” Such scenes are far from the busy world of wealth and power.
Gray places the “rustic forefathers” who lie in the graveyard in opposition to the mocking personification of “Ambition” and the “disdainful smile” of Grandeur, who presumably look upon the rustics buried in the graveyard with contempt. Gray’s opening salvo in this contrast between two vastly different social classes emphasizes death’s universality: just as the poor and common people are subject to death, “the paths of glory lead but to the grave” as well. Death is blind to mankind’s social constructs such as class distinction. Death is the ultimate leveler.
Comments
Post a Comment