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Banha Universit y
Facult y of A rt s
English Depart ment
‫نموذج اإلجابه الخاص‬
‫بمادة شعر القرنين السادس والسابع عشر‬
‫الفرقة الثانيه‬
‫قسم اللغة اإلنجليزية‬
‫كلية اآلداب‬
A Guiding M odel A nswer for
Six t eent h and Sevent eent h Cent uries Poet ry
Second Grade
First Term ( December 2 7 , 2 0 1 2 )
Facult y of A rt s
Prepared by
M ohammad A l-Hussini M ansour A rab, Ph.D.
Universit y of N evada, Reno ( USA )
Banha University
Second Grade
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Faculty of Arts
Department of English
(December 27, 2012)
Time: 2 hours
Six t eent h and Sevent eent h Cent uries Poet ry
Note: Time limit for each question is 1 hour and the grade for each is 7.5 marks
I. Respond to only one of the two following questions:
1. The conventions of courtly love, deriving from twelfth century Provençal poetry, are the usual
basis of many Elizabethan poets' imagery, in which these poets attack the artificiality of that
tradition. This is manifest in some of the poems, which you have studied this term, that project
a definitive expression of these poets attitude toward courtly love. Explain that attitude with
reference to four Elizabethan poems?
2. In the Middle Ages, the relationships of men and women were governed, in literature at least,
by a code of conduct and set of ideals called courtly love. That tradition reached the
Elizabethan poets through two main sources, Chaucer and Petrarch, and became the usual basis
of their love poetry. Most 16th-century love poetry, which expresses the laments of the
unrequited or deserted lover rather than the joys of mutuality, attacks the artificiality of that
tradition. Explain that attitude with reference to four Elizabethan poems?
II. Respond to only one of the two following questions:
1. Metaphysical poetry of the 17th century is characterized by a strong dependence on irony and
paradox and by the use of the conceit as well as such figures as catachresis and oxymoron. Its
strategy of address is typically dramatic rather than narrative or descriptive. Explain this
statement with reference to four Metaphysical poems?
2. In literary discussions, the term "Metaphysical" usually applies to those poets of the
seventeenth century, John Donne and his followers, who challenged the conventions of the
Renaissance lyric and wrote poems that questioned and probed the meaning of human
existence, the individual's place in the universe, and his or her relationship to God.
Metaphysical poetry is intellectually challenging and often difficult and starling in its ideas.
The metaphysical poets used the conceit, which uses unconventional comparisons, and
paradox to provoke thought and state mysterious truths. Explain this statement with reference
to four Metaphysical poems?
Good Luck
Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab
Answers
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Question # One:
The conventions of courtly love, deriving from twelfth century Provençal poetry, are the usual
basis of many Elizabethan poets' imagery, in which these poets attack the artificiality of that
tradition. This is manifest in some of the poems, which you have studied this term, that project a
definitive expression of these poets attitude toward courtly love. Explain that attitude with
reference to four Elizabethan poems?
Answer:
In the middle Ages, the relationships of men and women were governed, in literature at
least, by a code of conduct and set of ideals called courtly love. Based on ideas found in writings
of the Latin poet Ovid, the courtly love ideal was a part of the knight's life of chivalry. Courtly
romances followed a conventional pattern: lovers fell in love completely, at first sight; they felt
absolutely overwhelmed by emotion so that they became restless, sick, pale, and distracted; they
sigh, weep or complain about their state, feeling weak and helpless from the effects of love and
from despairing of ever being worthy to be loved in return. If the lady recognizes the courtly
lover, he is joyous and inspired with hope; he undertakes to perform some difficult or dangerous
task to prove his worthiness. Meanwhile, he keeps his love a secret and protects the lady's name
and reputation, defending it with his life, if necessary. Thus, courtly love combines an
idealization of the lady with sensuous, even illicit, pleasure. The courtly lover is, above all,
absolutely faithful despite all obstacles and delays. In short, this tradition concerns the
relationship between the great lady and her courtier "servant." Love is treated variously as
sickness, servitude, worship, and war. The lover is in agony, the lady disdainful, her beauties
idealized by comparisons with nature. The tradition reached the Elizabethan poets through two
main sources, Chaucer and Petrarch, whose poems to Laura, filled with religious imagery and
praise of the mistress for her spiritual superiority as well as her beauty.
Sir Thomas Wyatt's love poems, like most 16th-century love poetry, express the laments
of the unrequited or deserted lover rather than the joys of mutuality; and his sonnets introduce
many of the topoi that became so popular in the Elizabethan sonnet: sexual love as a hunt, the
lover as a ship running aground on the rocks. It should be noted that in his experiments with
Petrarch, Wyatt chafed at the indignities suffered by the courtly lover. By contrast, the
sonneteers emphasized with relish the travails of the lover, who almost luxuriates in his state of
rejection.
Wyatt's treatment of the tradition he inherited adapts to it the conditions of his own
insecure times. He uses the love convention to speak not only of his lack of satisfaction in love
but about his unhappiness at other aspects of ill fortune. Since a direct judgment on
contemporary events could have been dangerous to his political career, even to his life, it is likely
that Wyatt used the guise of a disappointed lover to interpret the sense of betrayal, the
melancholy, and the insecurity inherent in his career. That sense of insecurity is expressed in his
use of love conventions, in which he explores and comes to terms with the feeling of betrayal.
He brings the motif of disappointed love, to bear on the problems of expressing the strong and
deep emotions of a sensitive individual, the complexities of a divided mind.
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Wyatt's sonnet "Whoso list to hunt" centers on the "chase," a courtly sport that provides
an apt metaphor for the pursuit of love and power at Henry's court, where the speaker advises
other suitors that they may pursue the hind/lady as vainly as he has and give her up with as much
difficulty. The poem concludes that the chase should be given over, for the motto on the hind's
collar suggests that although she has been claimed by someone more powerful than they, she will
not be constrained by anyone.
The Petrarchan sonnet on which the sonnet is based has a visionary, dreamlike quality,
picturing the lady as a white hind in a beautiful spring landscape disappearing from the poet's ken
because Caesar (presumably God) has set her free (presumably by death). The tone of Wyatt's
version is quite different. The mention of the hind is developed into an extended hunting
metaphor. Instead of the solitary lover, he becomes a member of a crowd of hunters (suitors).
He has thus introduced a dramatic situation, plunging into it abruptly and colloquially with direct
address. The natural description of the original is replaced by the immediate, realistic atmosphere
of the hunt, into which Petrarch's mention of the hind has led him: the pressing rivals, the net, the
hot pursuit. His use of rhythm conveys this physical experience, as heavy stresses on the
alliterated "Fainting I follow" suggest limping or labored breath, with the poet's abrupt aboutface, the "turn" in the poem, coming in the middle of the sharply divided line. Wyatt attacks the
artificiality of the courtly love tradition, remarking that to pursue this lady is "in vain," as in the
preceding sonnet—a waste of effort. Unlike Petrarch's modest Laura, this lady is wild and
spirited. She is inaccessible not because she is called by God but because she has already been
claimed by his social superior (it is usually assumed that "Caesar" is Henry VIII, the hind Anne
Boleyn). He further strains the convention by seeking reciprocity of affection, as opposed to onesided worship of an ideal; to the Petrarchan lover, the pursuit, the service, is its own reward.
The conceit that Wyatt borrows directly from Petrarch, the image of the woman as a deer,
recurs in "They flee from me," which combines eroticism with a contempt for the beloved's
changefulness. The dominant image, like that of "Whoso list to hunt," is of animals, but it is
uncertain what animal the poet has in mind: deer, birds, or simply women. The wild and bestial
is contrasted with the tame, courtly, and civilized quality suggested by the words "gentle" and
"gentleness." The main rhetorical device is a simple contrast of past with present tense, past joys
with present loss. The use of "they" in the first line may point to a sense of desertion by all the
speaker's friends, as an ironic contrast between loyal animals and disloyal men. The men are
ultimately seen as even lower on the animal scale than the falcons, as the men are compared to
lice leaving a dead body.
This poem moves between dreaming and waking, fantastic and realistic states of
consciousness. It opens with the speaker remembering former love(s). Its first few lines recall
"Whoso list to hunt" in claiming that those who once sought the speaker were tamed but "now are
wild"; further, "now they range / Busily seeking with a continual change" that the speaker finds
problematic. In the second stanza the speaker recalls a time when the beloved caught him in her
arms, kissed him, and asked, " 'Dear heart, how like you this?' " The poem shifts abruptly to the
present and to reality: "It was no dream: I lay broad waking." Despite the lover's "gentleness" or
"gentility," he has been rejected, and his loss leaves him, if not vengeful, at least sardonic.
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The first stanza establishes the speaker's sense of desertion. The second stanza recalls in
minute detail a specific experience, in the light of which a new irony emerges in the third stanza.
In this final stanza, the dream-vision of Petrarchan convention and the erotic dream of
Chaucerian romance are banished. Once again the poet's insistence on reciprocity in affection has
been violated, yet he reacts not with vengefulness or even rebellion, but with ironic detachment.
He, with his humanity, his gentleness, has kept his part of the bargain. She, however, who once
appeared "gentle, tame and meek," has now reverted to her wild animal nature. "Kindly" may be
taken both in the sense of "according to nature" and ironically in its modern sense. The
suggestion that he should be served better recalls ironically the courtly love tradition of the man's
service to his lady on her pedestal, and thus Wyatt drives home again his insistence on
reciprocity: Should service be given if not deserved? His conclusion is not, as in the courtly love
tradition, and as the poem's opening suggests, one of sentimental agony, but musing, perhaps
even amused understatement. One is left with a question: What does one deserve who repays
loyalty with disloyalty? Yet there remains some sense of the reality and intensity of loss from the
vividness of the scene described in the second stanza. Wyatt's ideal of a reciprocal and
permanent love is more of this world than Petrarch's one-sided idealization, and its existence
belies a charge against him of cynicism.
This poem certainly moves away from the idealized beloved of Petrarchan convention.
Influenced by and commenting on the poems of Petrarch, the love-poem tradition in sixteenth
century English poetry often presents a conflict between Neoplatonic ideas of beauty—the idea
that outward beauty is a reflection of inner goodness and virtue that moves others to be
virtuous—and the fact that physical attractiveness stimulates carnal desires that move men and
women to cast off the virtues of chastity and sexual restraint. Yet Wyatt, although he often
borrows freely from Petrarch, seems unconcerned with presenting the drama of these
contradictory drives. Rather, he uses the language of Petrarch to represent a society in which
promiscuous sexual pursuits are a given and virtue is largely a matter of social manners,
affectations, and pretensions.
Sir Philip Sidney's "Ring out your bells" is a poem about the subject of love. However, it
is the hidden driving force of desire behind the various forms of love that Sidney explores
through the filter of his own experiences and feelings. The flattering compliments of Petrarchan
love sonnets aimed at courting a lady's favors arise from the same ambitious urges of desire as
the hyperboles (conscious exaggerations) used to court a queen or a noble. There is little
difference between practices. Furthermore, when the Platonic lover suffers and rages about his
mistress's scorn and rejection of his worth and faithfulness, his misery underlines the desire
behind his egoistic self-love. Feelings of worth, honor, and personal identity grow from the selfvalidation gained from recognition or reward for deeds accomplished. Human courtiers such as
Sidney felt equally discouraged and frustrated when their valiant efforts were rejected.
In the poem, Sidney works within the traditions and conventions of love poetry. However,
he rejuvenates them by showing what a few changes can do to hackneyed concepts and images.
His double vision, the extended metaphoric comparison of love's trivialities with the solemnity of
death, transforms the Petrarchan/Platonic single-vision lyric into a brief model of a mock-heroic
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romance. This point of view indirectly points out the comical exaggerations, trivialities, and
abuses. Ironically, the final prayer might well express the poet's own desire: "Good lord, deliver
us" from poets who abuse poetry.
Sir Walter Ralegh's "Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen" is an anatomy of love—its central
theme is the difference between true love and false love: False love is hidden in a swirl of
superficial verbiage; true love is painfully silent. Ralegh's argument follows traditional
Renaissance themes and conventions. For instance, he emphasizes the traditional Elizabethan
view of humankind as torn between passion and reason, emphasizing that his passion would lead
him to write love poems, and praise the queen's saintly perfection, beauty, and glory in order to
win her affection or at least to entertain her. In contrast to despairing lovelorn poetic narrators, he
has let reason dominate for the queen's sake. Revealing his affection openly would not only be
indiscreet and subject to misinterpretation, given her high rank and the fact that so many others
are also charmed by her, but would also be a denial of the depth of his true affection, which, like
deep waters, is so strong that he must be silent. Another poetic convention of courtiers is
exaggerated praise of the beloved, who here is acknowledged to be beyond the reach of mortals.
Question # Two:
In literary discussions, the term "Metaphysical" usually applies to those poets of the seventeenth
century, John Donne and his followers, who challenged the conventions of the Renaissance lyric
and wrote poems that questioned and probed the meaning of human existence, the individual's
place in the universe, and his or her relationship to God. Metaphysical poetry is intellectually
challenging and often difficult and starling in its ideas. The metaphysical poets used the conceit,
which uses unconventional comparisons, and paradox to provoke thought and state mysterious
truths. Explain this statement with reference to four Metaphysical poems?
Answer:
The metaphysical poets used the conceit, which uses unconventional comparisons, and
paradox to provoke thought and state mysterious truths. In "The Life of Cowley," Samuel
Johnson labeled the poetry of John Donne and others of his ilk "metaphysical." In such writing,
Johnson observed, "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together." The images
that Donne employs, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," seem removed from the occasion
of the lovers' parting: death, celestial motion, twin compasses. All, however, carry within them
the promise of reunion, resurrection, and permanence after change. The virtuous man does not
fear death because he knows that at the Last Judgment his body and soul will be rejoined forever
in bliss. Though Donne and his beloved are "dead" when divided, they may part confident in
having a life together hereafter in this world. The comparison of lover and beloved to body and
soul is conventional; Donne extends the idea to make it fresh by incorporating religious
implications, a technique he uses often in his poetry. Since both love and religion are mysterious
and forms of transcendence, the fusion of the two is justified.
The geological-astronomical imagery that introduces the second argument similarly
promises reunion. The separation of sensual lovers is like an earthquake in part because these
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people are "sublunary"; Donne here draws on the belief that everything beneath the moon is
subject to mutability and death. Sublunary lovers fear parting because they can never be certain
that they will see each other again. Just as the cleavages caused by earthquakes do not
necessarily repair themselves, these terrestrial, hence inferior, lovers may not reunite.
Likening lovers to Earth and other planets is typical of Donne and his fellow
Metaphysical poets. Yet the metaphors are not mere poetical trickery. The macrocosm of the
universe and the microcosm of the individual become interchangeable because the metaphors
convey the lovers' feelings. Donne and his beloved are the world to each other.
Donne and his beloved are, like the planets, beyond the realm of change because they are
joined spiritually as well as physically. Since their love is not subject to alteration, they need not
fear parting. Moreover, medieval cosmology maintained that in 36,000 years the planets and
stars would return to their positions at the moment of creation. The completion of this epoch will
mark the apocalypse and resurrection. This image thus unites with and extends the previous one
anticipating the Last Judgment.
The conceit of the twin compasses, probably the most famous of Donne's metaphors,
similarly builds on the previous one. Just as the planets describe a circuit in 36,000 years, so the
compasses make a circle of 360 degrees. It is no accident that the poem has thirty-six lines. The
circle is a traditional symbol of eternal love, since it has no beginning and no end (hence the
tradition of the wedding ring). The completion of the circle once more promises the lovers'
meeting at journey's end.
In a curious sexual reversal, Donne likens his beloved to the masculine principle. Hers is
the foot that grows erect as his point approaches. Hers is the firmness that, phallus-like, fills his
circle and makes it "just"; the word not only implies the completed round and physical reunion
but also circles back to the virtuous (just) man at the beginning of the poem, so that the poem,
like Donne, ends where it began.
In the poems of John Donne, another cleric of the seventeenth century, one is sure of the
wantonness, but not entirely convinced of the cleanliness. In George Herbert's love poems, all
addressed to God, one is sure of their intense cleanliness, but something of the wantonness is
(appropriately) lacking. Herrick manages to bring these two somewhat contradictory qualities
into perfect union. Herbert's "Delight in Disorder" is a poem celebrating cleanly wantonness. It
is little more than a long synecdoche or metonymy. While describing the clothes, Herrick is really
hoping for some "sweet disorder" or even a touch of wantonness in the lady associated with them.
An "erring lace" is a much-desired corrective to a straight-laced woman, and a neglectful cuff
might indicate a touch of neglect in adhering to the strict moral precepts inculcated by cautious
elders. A mind that sometimes thinks confusedly and a heart with a touch of the tempestuous are
certainly elements to be desired. Even so, all caution is not to be thrown to the winds—a touch of
civility remains amid the wildness, though it is certainly not the major attribute: It is confined to
the shoestring—hardly a major restraint.
Much of the power of this poem comes in the connotative suggestions of the words.
"Kindles" suggests the beginning of an inner fire, and "wantonness," though its primary meaning
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in the seventeenth century was merely playfulness, did also have its modern suggestion of
lighthearted sexual play. "Distraction" suggests that one's mind can wander from the mundane to
the exciting, and, as was mentioned earlier, an "erring" lace hints that the lady herself might be
willing to wander. The word "enthralls" instead of the more straightforward "encircles" suggests
that it is more than the lady's waist that is captured by the lace embroidery. A "winning" wave in
the petticoat surely gathers a prize of hearts, a "careless" shoestring indicates one who does not
care overmuch for restrictions, and a "wild" civility connotes freedom from the restrictions of a
watchful society. Since love is a witch, it is not absolutely clear that "bewitch" is not strictly
denotative in its effect on the poem. The oxymorons "sweet disorder" and "wild civility" (and
perhaps "fine distraction") serve to create a tension that keeps the reader aware that the poet is
speaking of a woman as well as the clothes she is wearing.
The syntax of the poem also increases its tension. After the declarative statement of the
first couplet, the poem continues in one long sentence with six extensively developed subjects
(lawn, lace, cuff, ribbons, wave, and shoestring) all holding the verb in abeyance, endowing the
poem with the power of suspense.
Robert Herrick "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" is a carpe diem poem, which
means "seize the day." In this sense, virginity is not literal, but is merely a metaphor for a kind of
innocence combined with receptivity that should be exercised as much as possible before it is
lost, which with experience it will be.
The sexual theme is obvious but not simple. It can be understood very differently,
depending on what one takes to be the sex of the reader. The gathering of rosebuds can be a
metaphor for defloration; the rising of the sun, a metaphor for male erection; and "spend," a term
for ejaculation. This reading is not merely sensual; it is also sexually threatening. Defloration is
rape—that is, taking the flower of virginity from an unwilling victim. The reference to the
personified sun is a reference to Apollo, famous for his attempts at ravishment. In a certain
sense, then, the phrase "To the Virgins," could be understood to be a call to attack. In this sense,
the "ye" addressed would be male, and the loss with which the poem is concerned is that of male
potency: Women will be old before pleasure can be taken of them, the "sun" will set too soon, the
energy of youth will pass, and sexual drive with it. As "Old Time" also appears personified, it is
important to remember that Chronos, the god of time, seized power by castrating his rival.
If, on the other hand, one reads the poem as addressed to female virgins, then to gather
rosebuds, in a sense, is to retain the flower of virginity, to gather it to oneself. The twin of the
sun god, Apollo, is the moon goddess, Artemis, who is also the goddess of virginity. With the
setting of the force of male dominance, the twin force of female celibacy rises. In this sense, it is
virginity, one of the few forms of currency a woman had, that is to be hoarded, not lost or
"spent."
When marriage is promoted in the fourth stanza, Herrick is not making a moral distinction
between fornication and sex within the sanctity of wedlock. Instead, marriage is proposed as an
alternative to both sexual violence and sexual withholding, both of which are asocial and
nonproductive. The injunction to "go marry" instead of to "tarry" in this sense has to do with not
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getting caught up in a vicious circle of mutually exclusive possibilities, but to move and grow
into something that is beyond either of them. Thus the poem is expressing a concern about the
state of society. This concern also surfaces in the third stanza if one reads "age" and "times" to
refer not to an individual's years but lo the eras of humankind. Read this way, the lines suggest
that only in the first age, the youth of a civilization, is it at its best; what follows is only a decline.
It is here that one gets a sense of Herrick's lament for his own times and what he thinks has been
lost.
John Milton's "On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three" exemplifies the
problem-solution organization of the octave-sestet sonnet form. The poet has no sooner stated
that he sees "no bud or blossom" to show for his years than he states that he even looks younger
than his age: "Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth / That I to manhood am arrived so
near." Milton's "semblance" was deceptive in his early twenties, scholars say, because his
delicate, feminine facial features made him appear much younger than he really was.
Moving on from the matter of his outward appearance, Milton returns in the octave's next
lines to the problem of his professional belatedness. He points to some "more timely-happy
spirits" who have achieved feats appropriate with their age, persons whose "ripeness" would
seem to accord with their stage in life: "And inward ripeness doth much less appear, / That some
more timely-happy spirits endu'th." Critics suggest that Milton had in mind close friends who,
like himself, had chosen writing as their profession, but who, unlike Milton, had already
published substantially by their early twenties.
The octave's focus is, therefore, quite clear. The poet is wondering whether his
belatedness to mature might mean that he will never mature at all, whether his ambition to
become a writer of renown may never come to be. This would be a catastrophe for Milton, for he
had set himself by this time a strict course of reading and study, all to the end of becoming a
master of English letters. Indeed, Milton is said to have gone blind in 1651 owing to his
prodigious reading during these years of apprenticeship; he is said to have read, in his early
manhood, everything of note written in English, Latin, Italian, and Greek.
The sestet and final, extra line of Milton's sonnet solves the problem put forth in the
octave by re-conceiving time and ambition. Milton subordinates his own, individual ambitions to
God's will in the sestet, and he substitutes God's eternal time for mortal, human time. Milton has
thus decided by the end of this poem that his own ambitions are secondary to God's plans for
him, that he will submit to God's will, and that in submitting to God's will in this way he no
longer feels keenly the possibility of any personal disappointment. Milton's regret over his
advancing age (mortal time) and belated development pales in significance once the rule and time
of Heaven and God is considered.
Thus, where time is that which is "hasting" or accumulating rapidly in the octave, "Time"
is that which is meaningful only in terms of "the will of Heaven" in the sestet. Time in the poem
seems to "slow down" in the sestet, so that by the end of the poem, it is as if movement has
become an irrelevance under the divine eye which gazes in eternal stasis at the poet (and us), yet
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‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
provides the grace which it is the poet's choice to use in order to transform his relation to time
and ambition.
Milton in the octave is a worried, ambitious young man who is comparing himself to
friends and wondering when he will produce the creative work he so desires to compose. In the
sestet, to the contrary, youthful worry and ambition dissolves as God's will is embraced.
This change of mood and perspective is evident in the very first line of the sestet: "Yet be
it less or more, or soon or slow." Instead of anxious concern over his development ("it"), this line
expresses a sanguine acceptance of whatever the poet's personal pace and capabilities turn out to
be. A creative output minor or major—"less" or "more"—is acceptable; a development "slow" or
quick ("soon") is likewise acceptable. This attitude of acceptance comes about because Milton in
the sestet is not conceiving of himself as an individual, but rather as a servant and subject of the
Christian Almighty, God. What he as an individual wants, he realizes, might not be what God
has in store for him. Regardless of his own wishes, his progress is determined, ultimately, in
"strictest measure," by the Almighty. His "lot" will be that which God decides, and whether it is
"mean" (low) or "high," he will embrace it as "the will of Heaven."
Yet, even as the sestet of the poem replaces worldly, mortal time and ambition with God's
eternal time and will, there are, still, glimmerings of the youthful, hopeful Milton in the poem's
last lines: "As ever in my great Task-Master's eye. / The "great Task-Master" is God." Milton
subordinates his life to God's will, but he is still hoping, at the poem's end, that God's "grace"
portends what he especially longs for, namely greatness as a poet.
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