Kontrasty i ich funkcje w "The Wanderer"
There was a visible change of mood. There was a contrast between attitudes of the wanderer and the wise man role model toward the life. The function of contrasts was didactic
WANDERER
WISE MAN
lament over his loss;
he complaints; very personal and emotional complaint;
no single thing which stay the same; there is nothing stable; general impermanence of the world;
his answer is despair; disagreement; the fight with wyrd; He is looking for a new Lord; He looks for an earthly solution;
should be patient;
shouldn’t complain; should agree with wyrd;
he stands on land – it’s stable; he stands by the ruins of mead-hall – it’s empty; Even the most powerful civilization passes; Ubi sunt – “Where are?”;
Found the Lord who will never die; General philosophical meditation; no despair – acceptance and peace;
There is also contrast between:
earth – heaven
heavenly castle – ruins of mead-hall
Features of elegiac poetry on the example of "Wanderer"
An elegy is a lament, or a mourning for the dead or things past. A reflection on the death of someone or on sorrow and longing for the better days of times past
ELEGY
examples: “the Seafarer”, “The Wanderer”, “the Book of the Duchess”
Sonety Szekspira - pochodzenie i charakterystyka gatunku, tematu.
A sonnet, a form of poetry invented in Italy, has 14 lines with a specific rhyme scheme. The topic of most sonnets written in Shakespeare's time is love–or a theme related to love but also deal with such themes as beauty, politics, and mortality.. Early English sonnets are often adaptations of Petrarch.
1. The Italian sonnet is divided into an octave, which is eight lines, and a sestet, which is six lines. The English sonnet is divided into three quatrains, in other words, twelve lines, and a couplet.
2. The rhyme scheme for the Italian sonnet is a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a for the octave and either c-d-e-c-d-e, or c-d-c-d-c-d
The rhyme scheme for the English sonnet is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.
Readers of the sonnets today commonly refer to these characters as the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. The narrator expresses admiration for the Fair Youth's beauty, and later has an affair with the Dark Lady. It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical.
One interpretation is that Shakespeare's Sonnets are in part a pastiche or parody of the three centuries-long tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets; in them, Shakespeare consciously inverts conventional gender roles as delineated in Petrarchan sonnets to create a more complex and potentially troubling depiction of human love. Shakespeare also violated many sonnet rules which had been strictly obeyed by his fellow poets: he speaks on human evils that do not have to do with love, he comments on political events, he makes fun of love, he parodies beauty, he plays with gender roles, he speaks openly about sex and even introduces witty pornography.
Dojrzałe tragedie.
Mature tragedies – it’s a technical term. men’s relation to the world, the nature of the world, values, moral judgments; is morality a part of nature?. In the latter part of William Shakespeare's career, there seems to be an apparent shift in the content of his plays. Shakespeare's writing seems to move into a darker realm, as his writing formulas seem to evolve in his later years. His most earliest notable tragedies are works like Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus. While these were - and still remain - some of Shakespeare's most popular works, they are not generally considered to be his most powerful and moving tragedies. Those honors are generally bestowed upon the so-dubbed "mature" tragedies: Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear being the most discussed. What are the changes in Shakespeare's writing that make these later works so powerful? One obvious answer is that Shakespeare's growth and experience over the years allowed him to refine and hone his skills of writing.; a lot of psychological analysis;
Chivalric convention and their realization in sir Gawain...
Discuss the love motif in Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It
Writer David Bevington finds in the play what he refers to as the dark side of love. He writes that the fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and by applying a love potion to Titania’s eyes, forcing her to fall in love with Bottom as an ass.[4] In the forest, both couples are met by problems. Hermia and Lysander are both met by Puck, who provides some comedic relief in the play by confusing the four lovers in the forest. Despite the darkness and difficulty that obstructs the love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is still a comedy as Benedetto Croce indicates. He writes, “love is sincere, yet deceives and is deceived; it imagines itself to be firm and constant, and turns out to be fragile and fleeting”. This passage, like the play juxtaposes one idea next to another. The play is a comedy, yet it harbors serious ideas. At the end of the play, Hermia and Lysander, happily married, watch the play about the unfortunate lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, and are able to enjoy and laugh about the play, not realizing the similarities between them. Although their story is very similar to that of Pyramus and Thisbe, it does not end in tragic death.[6] Hermia and Lysander are both oblivious to the dark side of their love. They are not aware of the possible outcome that could have taken place at the forest.
As You Like It spoofs many of the conventions of poetry and literature dealing with love, such as the idea that love is a disease that brings suffering and torment to the lover, or the assumption that the male lover is the slave or servant of his mistress. These ideas are central features of the courtly love tradition, which greatly influenced European literature for hundreds of years before Shakespeare’s time. In As You Like It, characters lament the suffering caused by their love, but these laments are all unconvincing and ridiculous. While Orlando’s metrically incompetent poems conform to the notion that he should “live and die [Rosalind’s] slave,” these sentiments are roundly ridiculed (III.ii.142). Even Silvius, the untutored shepherd, assumes the role of the tortured lover, asking his beloved Phoebe to notice “the wounds invisible / That love’s keen arrows make” (III.v.31–32). But Silvius’s request for Phoebe’s attention implies that the enslaved lover can loosen the chains of love and that all romantic wounds can be healed—otherwise, his request for notice would be pointless. In general, As You Like It breaks with the courtly love tradition by portraying love as a force for happiness and fulfillment and ridicules those who revel in their own suffering.
Celia speaks to the curative powers of love in her introductory scene with Rosalind, in which she implores her cousin to allow “the full weight” of her love to push aside Rosalind’s unhappy thoughts (I.ii.6). As soon as Rosalind takes to Ardenne, she displays her own copious knowledge of the ways of love. Disguised as Ganymede, she tutors Orlando in how to be a more attentive and caring lover, counsels Silvius against prostrating himself for the sake of the all-too-human Phoebe, and scolds Phoebe for her arrogance in playing the shepherd’s disdainful love object. When Rosalind famously insists that “[m]en have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” she argues against the notion that love concerns the perfect, mythic, or unattainable (IV.i.91–92). Unlike Jaques and Touchstone, both of whom have keen eyes and biting tongues trained on the follies of romance, Rosalind does not mean to disparage love. On the contrary, she seeks to teach a version of love that not only can survive in the real world, but can bring delight as well. By the end of the play, having successfully orchestrated four marriages and ensured the happy and peaceful return of a more just government, Rosalind proves that love is a source of incomparable delight.
Religious motif in Old English literature
The Junius manuscript contains three paraphrases of Old Testament texts. These were re-wordings of Biblical passages in Old English, not exact translations, but paraphrasing, sometimes into beautiful poetry in its own right. The first and longest is of Genesis, the second is of Exodus and the third is Daniel. The fourth and last poem, Christ and Satan, which is contained in the second part of the Junius manuscript, does not paraphrase any particular biblical book, but retells a number of episodes from both the Old and New Testament.
The Nowell Codex contains a Biblical poetic paraphrase, which appears right after Beowulf, called Judith, a retelling of the story of Judith. This is not to be confused with Ælfric's homily Judith, which retells the same Biblical story in alliterative prose.
Old English translations of Psalms 51-150 have been preserved, following a prose version of the first 50 Psalms. It is believed there was once a complete psalter based on evidence, but only the first 150 have survived.
There are a number of verse translations of the Gloria in Excelsis, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed, as well as a number of hymns and proverbs.
In addition to Biblical paraphrases are a number of original religious poems, mostly lyrical (non-narrative).
The Exeter Book contains a series of poems entitled Christ, sectioned into Christ I, Christ II and Christ III.
Considered one of the most beautiful of all Old English poems is Dream of the Rood, contained in the Vercelli Book. It is a dream vision of Christ on the cross, with the cross personified, speaking thus:
"I endured much hardship up on that hill. I saw the God of hosts stretched out cruelly. Darkness had covered with clouds the body of the Lord, the bright radiance. A shadow went forth, dark under the heavens. All creation wept, mourned the death of the king. Christ was on the cross."
-- (Dream of the Rood)
The dreamer resolves to trust in the cross, and the dream ends with a vision of heaven.
There are a number of religious debate poems. The longest is Christ and Satan in the Junius manuscript, it deals with the conflict between Christ and Satan during the forty days in the desert. Another debate poem is Solomon and Saturn, surviving in a number of textual fragments, Saturn is portrayed as a magician debating with the wise king Solomon.
The amount of surviving Old English prose is much greater than the amount of poetry. Of the surviving prose, sermons and Latin translations of religious works are the majority.
The most widely known author of Old English was King Alfred, who translated many books from Latin into Old English. These translations include: Gregory the Great's The Pastoral Care, a manual for priests on how to conduct their duties; The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius; and The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine. Alfred was also responsible for a translation of the fifty Psalms into Old English. Other important Old English translations completed by associates of Alfred include: The History of the World by Orosius, a companion piece for Augustine of Hippo's The City of God; the Dialogues of Gregory the Great; and the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede.
Ælfric of Eynsham, wrote in the late 10th and early 11th century. He was the greatest and most prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon sermons, which were copied and adapted for use well into the 13th century. He also wrote a number of saints lives, an Old English work on time-reckoning, pastoral letters, translations of the first six books of the Bible, glosses and translations of other parts of the Bible including Proverbs, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus.
In the same category as Aelfric, and a contemporary, was Wulfstan II, archbishop of York. His sermons were highly stylistic. His best known work is Sermo Lupi ad Anglos in which he blames the sins of the British for the Viking invasions. He wrote a number of clerical legal texts Institutes of Polity and Canons of Edgar.
One of the earliest Old English texts in prose is the Martyrology, information about saints and martyrs according to their anniversaries and feasts in the church calendar. It has survived in six fragments. It is believed to date from the 9th century by an anonymous Mercian author.
The oldest collection of church sermons are the Blickling homilies in the Vercelli Book and dates from the 10th century.
There are a number of saint's lives prose works. Beyond those written by Aelfric are the prose life of Saint Guthlac (Vercelli Book), the life of Saint Margaret and the life of Saint Chad. There are four lives in the Julius manuscript: Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, Saint Mary of Egypt, Saint Eustace and Saint Euphrosyne.
There are many Old English translations of many parts of the Bible. Aelfric translated the first six books of the Bible (the Hexateuch). There is a translation of the Gospels. The most popular was the Gospel of Nicodemus, others included "..the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Vindicta salvatoris, Vision of Saint Paul and the Apocalypse of Thomas".[7]
One of the largest bodies of Old English text is found in the legal texts collected and saved by the religious houses. These include many kinds of texts: records of donations by nobles; wills; documents of emancipation; lists of books and ...
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