Presentation Paper 9

Representation of India in Modern British Literature from Ramiz39

Daybreak; H. W. Longfellow

Daybreak

The fifth poem in the Class XI WBCHSE English B syllabus is 'Daybreak' written by the internationally  popular American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.The poem is very lyrical in nature ('Lyrical' has been used only as an adjective here and this poem is not grammatically a 'Lyric'.)Longfellow was one of those poets who had the ability to create magic with almost anything! This poem can definitely the reader imagine how a jolly rush of wind is blowing cheerfully,making the components of the environment respond to its flow.

Read on to find the complete analysis of the poem.

Daybreak

Credit : Source

A wind came up out of the sea,

And said, "O mists, make room for me." 

It hailed the ships, and cried, "Sail on,

Ye mariners, the night is gone." 

And hurried landward far away,

Crying, "Awake! it is the day." 

It said unto the forest, "Shout!

Hang all your leafy banners out!" 

It touched the wood-bird's folded wing,

And said, "O bird, awake and sing." 

And o'er the farms, "O chanticleer,

Your clarion blow; the day is near." 

It whispered to the fields of corn,

"Bow down, and hail the coming morn." 

It shouted through the belfry-tower,

"Awake, O bell! proclaim the hour." 

It crossed the churchyard with a sigh,

And said, "Not yet! in quiet lie."

Poem Analysis,Summarisation And Explanation

'Daybreak' has been written in 9 rhyming couplets and follows the spirited progression of a gush of wind as it rises out of the sea and crosses onto the land,announcing the arrival of the day. (Adding a little note,due to phenomena of high and low pressure arising from the difference in temperature because of the climate around the sea,winds generally flow from the sea to the land at day and the vice versa happens at night.)

As given in the textbook,Longfellow presents day as a special presence that is hailed and before whom everybody bows.However,it can also be interpreted and personified as a source of joy and freshness that it keeps spreading around itself.

Primarily,the wind rushes out and clears the mist as if almost telling the mist to make room for it.It announces the beginning of a fresh morning giving an indication to the mariners who can now set sail as they would be able to steer their ship through the waters,now that the night is gone.And then it ultimately leaves the sea and makes its way towards the land ending the reign of sleep and announcing the rise of day.

It makes the foliage in the forest move along merrily as if almost telling them to hang their leafy banners out.It awakens the wood-bird (possibly a Wood thrush,owing to the fact hat is found in North America and is reported to have one of the sweetest vocalisations among birds.) and encourages it to sing by touching it's wing.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(Photograph Source)

The sixth couplet describes the surroundings and the time by adding the fact that the wind encourages the rooster (expressed in the poem as the chanticleer) to bellow her clarion as it is the arrival of day.

The next couplet again shifts to the merry journey of the wind and makes the corn fields bow to the morning.It makes the church bell ring (belfry tower refers to the tower that houses the bell in a church.) and thus makes it announce the arrival of the hour,that of an early morning.

The literary term used in this couplet particularly is personification.The morning here is personified as a respectable personality in front of whom the corn fields show reverence by bowing down.

The last couplet is a legendary touch and transforms the entire mood of the poem.As the wind passes the churchyard,it slows down ('with a sigh' has been used to describe that the wind now is decelerated) and it does not disturb the souls sleeping under the ground in the churchyard as it feels it is not the hour for them to wake up.

This brings out Longfellow's style of imparting cultural and moral values in his poetry.

The Slave's Dream (H. W. Longfellow)

The Slave's Dream

The poem "The Slave’s Dream" opens with a vivid and startling image of a man lying near a field of “ungathered rice.” In his hand, he holds a sickle, apparently for use in harvesting the crop. However, he has been lying long enough for his “matted hair” to form an imprint in the sand. The man, a slave, sleeps and dreams of his native homeland.

In the slave’s dreams, he is back in his homeland, riding along the majestic Niger River. In his dream, he has been transformed into a “kingly” presence. He surveys the palm trees on the plain and hears the caravans of travelers descend from the mountains. In this vast expanse of land, there is freedom of movement and the dreamer avails himself of the opportunities.

The dreamer, now a respected family head, sees his lovely wife and their adoring children. His family grasps his hand and they affectionately kiss his face. Though he is sleeping, the dreamer cries and his tear falls into the sand. The image of a tenderly devoted family apparently presents a stark contrast his current realities.

In the dream, the dreamer then begins an uninhibited ride across his homeland. With chains of gold as reigns for his horse, he propels his horse onward, following the flight of beautiful flamingos. His ride carries him across the plains to the beautiful ocean side. These wonderfully colorful and vibrant visual images are accentuated by the free and native sounds of the wild. Animals, including the lion, the hyena and the river horse, march triumphantly through his dream, breaking the infinite silence.

The desert and the forest are personified, each conveying an exultant cry of freedom. The forest of his dream can boast of a “myriad tongues.” On the other hand, the desert “blasts” a claim to uninhibited freedom. Both prospects move the dreaming man so forcefully that he is startled by the mere possibility. They each gleefully, perhaps recklessly, suggest the potential for life without chains, without limitations. This freedom, this wild abandon, is what the slave most desires.

In the final stanza, the wearied dreamer has been discovered and is lashed repeatedly with “the driver’s whip.” Although he is lying in direct sunlight, he neither feels the scorching sun nor the stinging lashes. His body is “lifeless.” He has dreamt his final dream and his soul has been freed from the bonds of slavery. The system that perpetuates his enslavement offers no paths to freedom. Rather than live a life of enslavement, the dreamer dies because death is the only means of attaining freedom of any kind.

La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

La Belle Dame Sans Mercy

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

Analysis

There are two versions of this very famous ballad. The first version is from the original manuscript and the second version is its first published form. The first is generally considered the best; it was altered upon publication. We do not know who did the alteration.

The original version is found in a letter to Keats’s brother, George, and dated Weds 21 April 1819. Keats typically wrote a running commentary to George and his wife Georgiana in America, then loosely grouped the pages together as one long letter. The letter which contains La Belle spans almost three months, from 14 February to 3 May 1819. It also contains other famous poems, including ‘Why did I laugh tonight?’ which ends, prophetically enough, ‘Verse, fame and Beauty are intense indeed / But Death intenser – Death is Life’s high mead.’ Also included are ‘To Sleep’ and ‘On Fame.’ The letter ends with the beautiful Ode to Psyche, of which Keats wrote: ‘The following Poem – the last I have written is the first and the only one with which I have taken even moderate pains – I have for the most part dash’d of[f] my lines in a hurry – ‘

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy/Pity) was dashed off, then, and largely dismissed by Keats himself. It was first published in the Indicator on 10 May 1820 and has since become one of his most celebrated poems.

Note: In 1893, the pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse was inspired by La Belle Dame Sans Merci to create one of his most famous works

The Bluest Eye.

The Bluest Eye.

One of Morrison’s common themes is community versus the individual. This theme confronts race issues through the consideration of the individual as other and the examination of a community’s unwillingness to provide for or support the oppressed. Early in The Bluest Eye, Claudia MacTeer relates how she and her sister Frieda learn about their community. Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. . . . We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre.

In listening to this “dance,” the girls learn how to behave, what to believe, and how to view the individuals in the community. Pecola’s pregnancy, specifically, is related through this communal gossip.

Another community issue is intraracial tension. Maureen Peal, the wealthy light-skinned girl who temporarily befriends Pecola, and Geraldine, the light-skinned Southern mother of Junior, personify the issue of skin tone. Their denunciation of Pecola reflects the rejection of African Americans through white oppression.

Family is the strongest example of community in the novel. While the MacTeer family protects Frieda from Mr. Henry’s advances, more important is the contrast between the MacTeer parents and the Breedlove parents. Claudia’s father protects his child, while Cholly Breedlove is his daughter’s predator.

Pauline and Cholly blame segregation from the broader community, because of poverty and racism, for their life choices. Furthermore, the community’s lack of concern for Pecola or her baby is another example of a failure of responsibility. Many of the adults blame Pecola for her pregnancy, and only Claudia and Frieda seem to care about Pecola’s baby. The cruelty of the women in the community extends to their condemnations of the baby. She [Pecola] be lucky if it don’t live. Bound to be the ugliest thing walking. . . . Can’t help but be. Ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground.

Claudia remembers that we were embarrassed for Pecola, hurt for her, and finally we just felt sorry for her. . . . I believe our sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it. . . . [W]e listened for the one who would say “Poor little girl,” or “Poor baby,” but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been.

At the end of the novel, Pecola is left wandering, both literally and symbolically, on the edges of the community that has rejected her.

One distinction between community and individual is self-hatred. Morrison explores this through Pecola’s desire for blue eyes, through Claudia’s hatred of blond-haired and blue-eyed white icons, and through the variety of characters. The Breedlove family member’s self-hatred stems from their belief that they “were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly.” Cholly, alone, is ugly because of his actions.

Another critical concern is the novel’s narrative form. Morrison begins the novel with a passage from an old-fashioned elementary-school primer. This passage presents the typical white family as Dick and Jane, who live in a nice home, have solid parents, and enjoy life. Pieces of this primer are used as a contrast to start most chapters. Immediately following is a brief reminiscence from Claudia, providing basic thematic concerns. The rest of the novel is broken into the four seasons that pass as Pecola’s story is revealed, intertwined with Claudia’s observations. The chapters in each section vary in point of view: first-person, omniscient, and objective.

Claudia’s chapters are always first-person, but in some chapters, she tells the story as a child. The chapters about Pecola also are often presented in first-person; however, she is further victimized because she is never the narrator. Instead, through the words of others, she is pitied (by Claudia), overlooked (by her mother), raped (by her father, Cholly), used and manipulated (by Soaphead), and objectified (by insanity).

Critical Overview of 'Moby Dick'

Moby Dick 

Although his early adventure novels—typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Reburn(1849), and White Jacket (1850)—brought Herman Melvile a notable amount of popularity and financial success during his lifetime, it was not until the 1920’s and 1930’s, nearly fifty years after his death, that he received universal critical recognition as one of the greatest nineteenth century American authors. Melville took part in the first great period of American literature—the period that included Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. For complexity, originality, psychological penetration, breadth, and symbolic richness, Melville achieved his greatest artistic expression with the book he wrote when he was thirty years old, Moby Dick.

Between the time of his birth in New York City and his return there to research and write his masterpiece, Melville had circled the globe of experience—working as a bank messenger, salesman, farmhand, schoolteacher (like his narrator, Ishmael), engineer and surveyor, bowling alley attendant, cabin boy, and whaleman in the Pacific on the Acushnet. His involvement in the mutinous Pacific voyage, combined with accounts of a notorious whale called Mocha Dick that wrought havoc in the 1840’s and 1850’s, certainly influenced the creation of Moby Dick.

The tangled themes of this mighty novel express the artistic genius of a mind that, according to Hawthorne, “could neither believe nor be comfortable in unbelief.” Many of those themes are characteristic of American Romanticism: the “isolated self” and the pain of self-discovery, the insufficiency of conventional practical knowledge in the face of the “power of blackness,” the demoniac center to the world, the confrontation of evil and innocence, the fundamental imperfection of humans, Faustian heroism, the search for the ultimate truth, the inadequacy of human perception. Moby Dick is, moreover, a unique literary form, combining elements of the psychological and picaresque novel, sea story and allegory, the epic of “literal and metaphorical quest,” the satire of social and religious events, the emotional intensity of the lyric genre (in diction and in metaphor), Cervantian romance, Dantesque mysticism, Rabelaisian humor, Shakespearean drama (both tragedy and comedy), journalistic travel book, and scientific treatise on cetology. Melville was inspired by Hawthorne’s example to give his story the unifying quality of a moral parable, although his own particular genius refused to allow that parable an unequivocal, single rendering.

In style and theme, Melville also was influenced by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Dante, Miguel de Cervantes, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Browne, and vastly miscellaneous reading in the New York Public Library (as witnessed by the two “Etymologies” and the marvelous “Extracts” that precede the text itself, items from the writer’s notes and files that he could not bear to discard). It was because they did not know how to respond to its complexities of form and style that the book was “broiled in hell fire” by contemporary readers and critics. Even today, the rich mixture of its verbal texture—an almost euphuistic flamboyance balanced by dry, analytical expository prose—requires a correspondingly unique sensitivity on the part of the reader. The most remarkable thing about the plot is that Moby Dick does not appear physically until after five hundred pages and is not even mentioned by name until nearly two hundred pages into the novel.

Whether it be the knowledge of reality, an embodiment of the primitive forces of nature, the deep subconscious energies of humanity, fate or destiny inevitably victorious over illusory free will, or simply the unknown in experience, it is what Moby Dick stands for that occupies the narrator’s emphasis and the reader’s attention through the greater part of the novel. In many ways, the great white whale may be compared to Spenser’s “blatant beast” who, in The Faerie Queene(1590-1596), also represents the indeterminable elusive quarry and also escapes at the end to continue haunting the world.

Moby Dick is often considered to be the American epic. The novel is replete with the elements characteristic of that genre: the piling up of classical, biblical, historical allusions to provide innumerable parallels and tangents that have the effect of universalizing the scope of action; the narrator’s strong sense of the fatefulness of the events he recounts and his corresponding awareness of his own singular importance as the narrator of momentous—otherwise unrecorded—events; Queequeg as Ishmael’s “heroic companion,” the folk flavor provided by countless proverbial statements; the leisurely pace of the narrative with its frequent digressions and parentheses; the epic confrontation of life and death on a suitably grand stage (the sea) with its consequences for the human city (the Pequod); the employment of microcosms to explicate the whole (for example, the painting in the Spouter Inn, the Nantucket pulpit, the crow’s nest); epithetical characterization; a cyclic notion of time and events; an epic race of heroes (the Nantucket whalers with their biblical and exotic names); the mystical power of objects (Ahab’s chair, the gold coin, or the Pequod itself); the alienated, sulking hero (Ahab); and the use of lists to enhance the impression of an all-inclusive compass. Finally, Moby Dick shares the usually didactic purpose of a folk epic; on one level, its purpose is to teach the reader about whales; on another level, it is to inspire the reader to become an epic hero.

All this richness of purpose and presentation is somehow made enticing by Melville’s masterly invention of his narrator. Ishmael immediately establishes a comfortable rapport with the reader in the unforgettable opening lines of the novel. He is both the objective observer and a participant in the events observed and recounted, both spectator and narrator. Yet he is much more than the conventional wanderer/witness. As a schoolmaster and sometime voyager, he combines his intellectual knowledge with firsthand experience to make him an informed observer and a convincing, moving reporter. Simply by surviving, he transcends the Byronic heroism of Ahab, as the wholesome overcoming the sinister.

The Heart of Darkness.

The Heart of Darkness

Critical Review of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness The understanding of evil and its genesis could not be achieved 
without submerging into the reality of iniquity. In Joseph Conrad's 
"Heart of Darkness", Marlow went through an unsurpassable 
physiological burden of the Congo River to understand the mystic and 
the brilliance of Kurtz's dark and destructive mind and soul; the 
resemblance of true evil. 

This novel portrays the tragic outcome of the severe European dominion 
over the helpless African population and the destruction of 
fundamental human conventions and beliefs. The ignorance and 
misunderstanding with which the colonists were driven to imaginary 
wealth and authority nourished the hidden potential of evil that lies 
within each person and brought a great wave of disaster to the Congo 
River. 

The novel places us into the epicenter of mysterious Congo Jungle, 
full of darkness, savagery, greed and death. Marlow is another ruined 
soul trying to conquer the desolation and disturbance of the Congo 
River. The gloominess of the setting is encouraged by dirty with silt 
river water, and hot tropically climate; which at times is almost 
excruciating. The journey up the river might symbolize a road to hell, 
encountering no salutary and positive things, yet encouraging 
suffering and physiological breakdown.