Mark Kremer
Ms. Boagni
British Literature
4 April 2014
Introduction
The 17th century in England was full of political discourse and unrest. The English Civil War had occurred from 1642-1651 between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers which had over 50,000 casualties. The result of the war led to Oliver Cromwall becoming the leader of England. After Cromwall's reign Charles II lead England in the beginning of the Restoration Period which brought upon the return of the King to the throne of England. It also brought a new type of literature which Robert Herrick thrived in. Robert Herrick lived during the heyday of the Restoration era and wrote his most famous book of poems known as, "Hesperides." However, Herrick was also known for his poetry on many other themes. Because of his ideas of carpe diem and love, his pastoral/nature themes, and time Robert Herrick is an excellent example of a 17th Century poet as shown in his poems "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time," "Upon Julia’s Clothes," and "To Blossoms."
Robert Herrick was best known for writing on the theme of carpe diem and love. Carpe diem is a Latin expression when translated means seize the day. It came to England from “the classical writers of ancient Greece and Rome” (Glancy, 43). It was very “popular in seduction poems of the seventeenth century” (Glancy, 43). Seize the day talks about living life to the fullest and living for today, not tomorrow. Echoing the use of carpe diem in seduction poems, Herrick is a master of this technique, writing to many “fictional women…on the subject of life’s brevity” (Glancy, 43). Perhaps his most famous poem, “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” best illustrates this concept of capre diem in the opening stanza, “Gather ye rosebuds whil...
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...a calming feeling. His poem, “To Blossoms” concentrates on leaves and how nature shows it’s beauty but briefly when he says, “Twas pity Nature brought ye forth Merely to show your worth, And lose you quite.” (Herrick, n. page). Herrick sympathizes with the leaves for not being able to show how valuable they are to nature for a long time period. He further emphasizes on this sympathy when he calls the leaves, “lovely leaves, where we May read…” (Herrick, n. page). Herrick talks about the petals of blossoms and he alludes to them representing life and how they are pledges that are from nature. These so called pledges state that if we live a good life, then nature will be fair to us and help us prosper and achieve our goals and dreams. His views on nature and how it is a metaphor for life is what allowed Herrick to become one of the greatest poets of his generations.
Whenever she encounter fields of flowers, she becomes captivated by the allure of the flowers. After seeing the flowers she is“stuck, I’m taken, I’m conquered, and I’m washed into it.” Nature captures her mind and hypnotizes her with its beauty, it becomes all she sees and experiences. Nature stops her in her tracks, and completely captures her attention.When she sees fields of flowers she “drops to the sand, I can’t move.” She becomes immobilized in its beauty, it controls her and becomes the only important thing on her mind. On the other hand, the complexity of nature also makes her overwhelmed. She states that the roses leave her “filled to the last edges with an immobilizing happiness. And is this not also terrible?” The rose’s beauty becomes too overbearing for Oliver, and keeps her captive from everything else; It becomes too much of a sensory overload. Nature has the ability to work with both sides, beauty and an
The statement "violets, roses, carnations, lilies-of-the-valley somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus naturally in the snow" I feel was referring to how Paul felt inside while in New York. He finally could be at peace with himself and felt as though his life had blossomed, the story makes reference by Paul feeling that everything was perfect now, he was the kind of person he always wanted to be, perfect like the flowers. He no longer had to "wonder whether he was destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it all", looking for what he longed to enjoy, even if it were not forever.
... the end of the poem until “the rose tree’s thread of scent draws thin and snaps upon the air”, terminating life and dictating the start of another season.
...er inner desperation for happiness that many individuals seek. In the second and third line of the piece, Plath introduces the protagonist, “Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi” and his ailment, “He is recuperating from something on the lung.” She then says how he comes to the field of daffodils to be happy, and in lines seven and eight, why he has come. “There is a dignity to this; there is a formality-/The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.” In this she says that it is respectful to come to the field to die, because there is where he is happy and that the flowers can heal him, as seen in the simile they are “vivid as bandages”. The last stanza ends the story of Percy with, “And the octogenarian loves the little flocks./He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing./The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.”
Robert Frost is considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Frost’s work has been regarded by many as unique. Frost’s poems mainly take place in nature, and it is through nature that he uses sense appealing-vocabulary to immerse the reader into the poem. In the poem, “Hardwood Groves”, Frost uses a Hardwood Tree that is losing its leaves as a symbol of life’s vicissitudes. “Frost recognizes that before things in life are raised up, they must fall down” (Bloom 22).
...ed. In order for flowers to grow they have to be watered, be pollinated, and have oxygen. Wind helps flowers pollinate and the water helps it grow. Instead of Toomer saying all of this in the poem, he paints a vivid picture for all of his readers to see. He says that “thunder blossoms” and it seems that he wants us to understand that nature, in all its destruction, can be beautiful as well.
The words carpe diem mean “seize the day” in Latin. It is a theme that has been used throughout the history of literature and has been a popular philosophy in teaching from the times of Socrates and Plato up to the modern English classroom. Carpe diem says to us that life isn’t something we have forever, and every passing moment is another opportunity to make the most out of the few precious years that we have left. In the poems “A Fine, a Private Place” by Diane Ackerman and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, carpe diem is the underlying theme that ties them together, yet there are still a few key differences throughout each of these two poems that shows two very different perspectives on how one goes about seizing their day.
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Rober Herrick and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” have many similarities and differences. The tone of the speakers, the audience each poem is directed to, and the theme make up some of the literary elements that help fit this description.
Learn to grasp the moment as time is always fleeting. In the poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” the speaker speaks to a group of virgins about how to make good use of their time while they are still young and in their prime. Similarly, the poem “To His Coy Mistress” the speaker in this poem tells the mistress how life is short and to have sex with him before they die. With both poems being written during the Renaissance period, they share similar aspects of time with each other. Although the poems by Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell both addresses the matter of time being very short, their perception of time is portrayed differently through the use of rhyme schemes, imagery, and striking metaphors.
Christopher Marlowe is a late sixteenth-century writer sometimes placed “close to Shakespeare in his achievement” (Ribner 212); Marlowe's pastoral poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599) was even initially “ascribed to Shakespeare” (Brooke 393). With a different tone than most of his dramatic work, Marlowe's poetry often includes a male and a female character in a real or imagined romantic relationship. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” portrays a somewhat powerful male character who performs all of the action, while the female character is portrayed as passive and superficial. Like many of the metaphysical poets of the next century, Marlowe's sixteenth century male character uses rhetoric to seduce the female character (which is paradoxical since the men tend to praise and ideal chaste women), and in the case of Marlowe's Shepherd, the rhetoric he uses tends to focus on superficial promises of idealistic love and pleasure. He enforces the common theme of carpe diem suggesting that there will be immediate gratification of their sexual passions, escaping societal rules and returning to a pristine condition of happiness. Furthermore, the Shepherd is often so preoccupied with convincing his lover “to come live with” him and be his “love” (Marlowe 20), that at times he becomes forceful, sexual and aggressive by using double entendres and hidden sexual images. Thus, in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” not only does Marlowe's poetry reinforce gender stereotypes of the male as active and the female as acted upon, Marlowe's male character goes one step further and use aggression to get what he wants from his female lover: her body.
The 16th century marks the end of the Middle Ages and opens the world to a different point of view. While the focus of the Middle Ages was mainly religion, the Renaissance centers on new ideas concerning the human life. More and more people learn to read and enjoy the stories of the Antiquity, allowing them to base their ideas and stories in the old stories, while also expanding them and relating it to the man of the 16th century. One of the great writes of the Antiquity was Horace, whose theme of Carpe Diem or seize the day, has been taken on by many Renaissance writers, including Pierre de Ronsard. In many of his poems, for instance in the “Ode to Cassandre” and “Quand vous serez bien vieille…”, Ronsard uses the theme of Carpe Diem in order to illustrate to his muses the shortness of life and beauty, urging them to accept his love without wait.
The tone at the beginning of the poem is meant to be one of awe than somber because the main components of the sonnet: the spider, moth, heal-all flower, and cloth are all white. The reader is also given a fresh perspective as the speaker, Robert Frost, is observing this in the morning. During the first stanza, Frost uses euphony to set the scene and tone as he describes the spider as dimpled and on a flower. As the second and third lines continue, the use of simile is portrayed when Frost compares a white flower to a satin cloth. A heal-all flower is usually shades of purple (Kansas Herbs), not fully white, which symbol...
Marvell's piece is structured as a poem but flows as a classical argument. He uses the three stanzas to address the issues of time, love, and sex. In doing so, he creates his own standpoint and satirizes his audience in the process. Using appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos; logical reasoning; and even a hint of the Rogerian technique - Marvell proves that acting now is essential. The logical argument for the "carpe diem" theme is built up from beginning to end.
In the first stanza, the poet seems to be offering a conventional romanticized view of Nature:
When a man becomes old and has nothing to look forward to he will always look back, back to what are called the good old days. These days were full of young innocence, and no worries. Wordsworth describes these childhood days by saying that "A single Field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone: The Pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"(190) Another example of how Wordsworth uses nature as a way of dwelling on his past childhood experiences is when he writes "O joy! That in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!" (192) Here an ember represents our fading years through life and nature is remembering the childhood that has escaped over the years. As far as Wordsworth and his moods go I think he is very touched by nature. I can picture him seeing life and feeling it in every flower, ant, and piece of grass that crosses his path. The emotion he feels is strongly suggested in this line "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." (193) Not only is this showi...