Question: What is the underlying meaning of Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture” and how does it encompass both Petrarchan and Ovidian discourses of desire?
During the Seventeenth Century, eroticism in literature was deemed outrageous and was rarely published or performed. However, a group of male poets often gathered to share their writings between one another. This group comprised of a number of renowned poets that we celebrate today including Jon Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Carew. Carew’s poetry is notoriously erotic, far beyond the norm of his era. Carew’s most noted erotic poem A Rapture deals with the courtship of his desire, Celia. Embedded in A Rapture are underlying meanings, mainly dealing with obsessive desire and power. Thomas Carew’s poetry encompasses both Petrarchan and Ovidian discourses of desire, more specifically the obsessive male desire and the attainment of power.
In order to understand and make meaning out of Carew’s A Rapture, it is important to recognize the literary influences that contributed to Carew’s literature. Carew’s poems have a strong presence of desire. Petrarch invented the language of desire in the 1300’s, focusing on the obsessive male self. The speakers in Petrarch’s poems were highly self aware, recognizing that ones self has been taken over by desire, creating a fragmented consciousness and a persona who is divided against themselves. Petrarch’s love, Laura, is married to somebody else, which leads to his writings, articulations of a broken self that cannot stop desiring Laura.
The other prominent literary influence that is present in Carew’s poems is Ovid. Ovid dealt with seeking power, the ability to obtain and lose power in regard to desire. Christopher Marlowe translated Ovid and set it f...
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...), and “I the smooth, calm oceán invade” (Line 82). The speaker uses words such as ‘seize’ and ‘invade’, seemingly giving him the power over Celia where she is unquestioning.
The final stanzas of the poem come back to Honor, highlighting it as untrustworthy because of it originating from man. The speaker also goes on to say, in a bid to get Celia to sleep with him, that Honor has “oppressed women by dictating that chaste women are more honorable” (Smith, 2012), ‘nor is it just that he Should fetter your soft sex with chastity, Which Nature made unapt for abstinence’ (Lines 151-153). The speaker ends the poem by highlighting the contradictory resentment that exists between Honor, and religion & nature, respectively; ‘tell me why This goblin Honor which the world adores Should make men atheists and not women whores’ (Lines 164-166).
Looking at Carew’s A Rapture
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
Very different from traditional writings of the past was the new flourish of troubadour poetry. Troubadour poetry, derived of courtly romances, focused on the idea of unrequited love. “A young man of the knightly class loved a lady”, most often, “the lady was married to the young man’s lord”. The courtly lover would compose highly lyrical and erotic poems in honor of his lady, and the troubadour was filled with rapture even at the slightest kindness that the lady might offer him.3 This new literary artifice provides us clues to the cultural changes that took place in medieval Europe during this time.
Comparing The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd. and the stark contrast of the treatment of an identical theme, that of love within the framework of pastoral life. I intend to look at each poem separately to give my interpretation of the poet's intentions and then discuss their techniques and how the chosen techniques affect the portal of an identical theme. The poem The Passionate Shepherd to His Love appears to be about the Elizabethan courtly ideal of living with the barest necessities, like.
During the 17th century, certain poets wrote poems with the specific purpose of persuading a woman to have sexual intercourse with them. Three of these seduction poems utilize several strategies to do this: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning” and “The Flea.” Some of the reasoning used by both poets is similar to the reasoning used today by men to convince women to have sexual intercourse with them. These gimmicks vary from poem to poem but coincide with modern day rationalization. The tactics used in 17th century seduction poems are relevant and similar to the seduction tactics used in the 21st century.
This essay will argue that the eschatology of the Book of Revelation forms an integral part of John’s attempt within the pages of his book to form a literary world in which the forms, figures, and forces of the earthly realm are critiqued and unmasked through the re-focalization of existence from the perspective of heaven. It will attempt to show that, in response to the social, political, religious, and economic circumstances of his readers, the Book of Revelation forms a counter imaginative reality. Through drawing upon an inaugurated sense of eschatology and evocative imagery, John is able to pull the reader in and show them the true face of the imperial world and consequences of its ideology, forcing the reader allegiance to fall with either ‘Babylon’ or the New Jerusalem.
The concept of love has long been the preferred topic of conversation among prominent male poets. Towards the closing of the sixteenth century, however, the emerging of the female poet took place. With the introduction of Queen Elizabeth, an initial path was now cleared for future women poets to share their views on the acclaimed topic of love. Due to this clashing of ideas, the conflicting views of two exceedingly different sexes could manifest itself. Who better to discuss the topic of love then Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who expresses her ideas with intelligence comparable to the best male poets, and Emerson, world renowned for his poignant opinions? In accordance with the long history of conflict between males and females, both Emerson’s "Give All to Love" and Browning’s "Sonnet 43" convey the pleasure love brings, but while Emerson’s poem urges the retention of individualism in a relationship, Browning pleads for a complete surrender to love.
As the practice of homosexual love became more widespread, poetry became more erotic, celebrating beautiful boys. A similar erotic theme was then seen in the homoerotic “friendships” developed between mal...
Otis Wheeler describes how the surge in sentimental dramas was a direct reaction to the coarse comedies of the Restoration wherein man was depicted as ridiculous and nonsensical. In contrast “the drama of sensibility” was a display of the infinite promise of man. In this way the beginnings of the Cult of Sensibility is inextricably linked to the birth of Romanticism, yet where Romanticism preferred the superfluous and exaggerated the Cult of Sensibility preferred the delicate, softer emotions that would bring people together in harmony. As such it is fair to say that although these two styles were borne of a similar distaste for the neoclassical, they developed into very different types of drama. Romanticism created antagonistic protagonists, such as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
Throughout his life... was a man self-haunted, unable to escape from his own drama, unable to find any window that would not give him back the image of himself. Even the mistress of his most passionate love-verses, who must (one supposes) have been a real person, remains for him a mere abstraction of sex: a thing given. He does not see her --does not apparently want to see her; for it is not of her that he writes, but of his relation to her; not of love, but of himself loving.
Aune, David E. “God and Time in the Apocalypse of John” in Apocalypticism, Prophecy and Magic in Early Christianity: Collected Essays. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006.
The poets integrated ?metaphysical conceits? as focal parts of these poems. Along with these, they used effective language as a basis for their convincing arguments, they included subjects of periodical importance (e.g. ?courtship? and ?religion?), and use very clever structures that are manipulated in order to make the poem read in the desired way. The very clear indication of the theme in question was strongly aided by the way in which the personas portrayed the emotions they felt and the way they showed their attitudes towards the subject. Considering all these factors, the poets made critical arguments to the mistresses in order to alter their views, thus changing their minds, on denying the poets the sex that they desired so strongly.
Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh both create speakers who disagree about the nature of romantic love. The titles of the twin poems, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” by Marlowe, and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” by Raleigh, show that they are two sides of a rhetorical exchange. The poems’ structures are identical; each of the shepherd’s optimistic requests has a corresponding refusal from the nymph. Although the word choice and meters are similar in the two poems, the shepherd uses an optimistic tone while the nymph uses a pessimistic one. While both speakers are addressing the concept of love, their distinct uses of diction and imagery underscore how the shepherd’s optimism conflicts with the nymph’s skepticism.
In Francis Petrarch’s sonnets, he describes his unrequited love for a woman, Laura, who has passed away. The way in which Petrarch describes his love for Laura is obsessive and it appears as if he has elevated Laura after her death, which is especially evident in sonnet 126. After this sonnet, Petrarch reflects on his love for Laura by telling the reader about how all his reason is gone and his only purpose in the world is to let others know about the woman whom he loved.
The adjective “nameless” used to describe homoerotic love was never fully articulated until the Oscar Wilde trial. England in the year1895 (Kennedy 5), like Germany, punished sodomy with strict jail time. As in Germany, where it seemed no bourgeois male member of society was safe from speculation of his sexual orientation, famed author, Oscar Wilde was not immune to speculation in England. During his sodomy trial, Wilde, when questioned about the content of a ‘questionable’ poem by Lord Alfred Douglas (Two Loves), Oscar replied with his findings as: “the Love that dare not speak its name” (5). Scholars speculate that this is in fact where John Henry MacKay acquired “nameless”, in order to describe (or not describe) his attracti...