British Literature

The night the library burned

On 23 October 1731, a fire broke out in Ashburnham House in Westminster, where Sir Robert Cotton's collection of medieval manuscripts was being stored. Librarians threw books out of the windows. Some volumes were lost outright; many came out with their edges eaten away. One of the survivors was a battered codex catalogued as Cotton Vitellius A. xv, copied out by two scribes somewhere around the year 1000. It contains four prose pieces and one long poem, and that poem exists in no other copy anywhere on earth. If the fire had reached one more shelf, Beowulf would be a title in an old catalogue and nothing else.

It still has scorched margins. Letters at the edges of the leaves crumbled away over the following century, which is why modern editions of some lines carry square brackets: the editor is telling you that the manuscript is damaged there and the reading is a reconstruction. The poem runs to about 3,182 lines. It has no title in the manuscript. Nobody printed it until 1815, when the Icelandic-Danish scholar Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin published the first edition, more than eight hundred years after the copy was made.

Key idea: English literature does not begin with a publication. It begins with a single handwritten book that almost burned.

The first three lines, in the language they were written in

Here is how the poem opens. Read it aloud even though you will get it wrong; the wrongness is the point.

Hwaet! we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum,
theod-cyninga thrym gefrunon,
hu tha aethelingas ellen fremedon.

That is the poem in modern letters. In the actual spelling, using the letters Old English used, it looks like this:

Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in gēar-dagum,
þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Three letters there are not in your alphabet. The letter þ is called thorn and the letter ð is called eth; both say "th". The letter æ is called ash, and it says the vowel in "cat". The straight lines over some vowels are a modern editor's addition, marking a long vowel, the way the first vowel in "father" is longer than the one in "fat".

Now the words, one at a time:

Put together: Listen. We have heard of the glory of the people-kings of the Spear-Danes in days gone by, and how those princes did brave deeds. Francis Barton Gummere, translating in 1910, made it: "Lo, praise of the prowess of people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped, we have heard, and what honor the athelings won."

Look at the table again. Two of the ten words came through to you unchanged. Roughly half died. This is why Old English is taught as a foreign language at university, with grammar tables and vocabulary lists, while Chaucer, four hundred years later, can be read with a glossary and patience. Old English had four cases, three genders and endings that told you what a noun was doing in the sentence, which meant word order could bend. After 1066 the Norman conquerors spoke French, English went underground as the language of people who did not run anything, and when it came back up it had shed most of its endings and swallowed thousands of French words.

The engine of the line

Forget rhyme. Old English poetry does not rhyme, and it does not count syllables. It counts stresses and repeats consonants. Every line is built the same way:

• The line splits into two half-lines with a pause between them, called the caesura.
• Each half-line carries two strong stresses. Four stresses to a line.
• The first stress of the second half-line is the boss. Whatever sound it starts with, one or both stresses in the first half-line must start with the same sound.
• The fourth stress, the last one in the line, does not alliterate. That is a rule, not an accident, and it stops the line from sounding like a tongue-twister.
• Any vowel alliterates with any other vowel.

Test it on the three lines above. In the first, Gār and gēar both begin with g, and the last stress, dagum, does not. In the second, þēod and þrym both begin with th, and gefrūnon does not. In the third, æþelingas and ellen begin with different vowels, which counts as alliteration in this system, and fremedon, the fourth stress, stands outside it.

Try the shape in modern English and you can hear what it does. "The storm-wind struck, and the stone walls shook." Four stresses, two halves, s carrying three of them. It is a line built for a hall with a fire in it and a hundred people listening, and it moves in blocks you can hold in your head.

Why this matters: Alliteration here is not decoration. It is the structural steel. Take it out and the line stops being a line.

Two words for the sea

Because the poet needed a stressed word starting with a particular sound in a particular place, Old English verse leans hard on compounds, and on a specialised kind of compound called the kenning: a two-word riddle standing in for a plain noun. The sea is the hron-rād, the whale-road. A ship is a sea-wood. A body is a bone-house. A king is a ring-giver. A battle is a spear-din.

Gummere's translation keeps one for you in the opening passage, where neighbouring tribes across the sea must obey Scyld: they are the folk "who house by the whale-path". A kenning does two jobs at once. It solves the poet's sound problem, and it makes you look at the thing twice. The sea stops being water and becomes a road with something enormous moving under it.

What a hall was for

The poem's first setting is a building. Hrothgar, king of the Danes, orders a mead-hall raised, "of halls the noblest", and names it Heorot, meaning Hart, after the antlers over the door. Modern readers slide past this. The first audience did not, because the hall was the whole political system in one room.

A lord gave his warriors food, drink, armour, gold rings and a place by the fire. In exchange they fought for him and, if it came to it, died beside him. There is a word for the bond, comitatus, borrowed from the Roman historian Tacitus, who described the same arrangement among Germanic tribes centuries earlier. The hall was where the exchange was performed in public: the gift handed over where everyone could see it, the poet singing the giver's name. Exile, being put outside the hall, was the worst punishment the culture could imagine, worse than a wound.

The poem is set among the Danes and the Geats in southern Scandinavia, not in England, and it looks back several centuries from whenever it was composed. One event in it can be dated from outside the poem: Hygelac, Beowulf's lord and uncle, dies raiding the Frisian coast, and a Frankish historian records a Danish king with the same name killed on a raid in roughly the 520s. Everything else, including Beowulf himself, has no independent record.

The monster is a neighbour

Now read how the poem introduces Grendel, in Gummere's translation:

So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel a winsome life, till one began to fashion evils, that field of hell. Grendel this monster grim was called, march-riever mighty, in moorland living, in fen and fastness; fief of the giants the hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel.

Work through what that actually says. Grendel starts listening because the hall is loud. He lives in the fen, on the moor, in the ground outside the settlement. He is under a sentence of exile passed by God. And his family line is traced to Cain, the first murderer in the book of Genesis, who was driven out for killing his brother.

So the monster is the exact photographic negative of the hall. Heorot is light, noise, company, gifts, a lord. Grendel is dark, silence, solitude, no gifts, no lord. He is not a dragon from somewhere else. He is what a man becomes when he is put outside, which is why the poem later says, with real menace, that he would never approach the throne or receive treasure: even in victory he is shut out of the one transaction that made you a person in this world.

Then the attack, again in Gummere:

Went he forth to find at fall of night that haughty house, and heed wherever the Ring-Danes, outrevelled, to rest had gone. Found within it the atheling band asleep after feasting and fearless of sorrow, of human hardship.

Notice how much of that is about the Danes and how little about the monster. They are "outrevelled", worn out with feasting. They are "fearless of sorrow". The poem tells you they feel safe two words before it kills thirty of them. The horror is placed in their comfort, not in Grendel's teeth, and you get no description of what he looks like at all. The poet never gives one, anywhere, beyond size and a hand.

The point: Grendel frightens because he is defined by what he lacks, and what he lacks is everything the audience valued.

Common misconceptions

• Beowulf is a pagan poem, or a Christian one. It is both at once, and arguing for either alone means ignoring half the text. The poet knows Genesis and names Cain and Abel, calls God the Wielder of Wonder, and has characters cremate a king with grave-goods and speak of fate, wyrd, as a force. A Christian poet is writing about ancestors who were not Christians, and does not seem embarrassed about it.
• It is an English story. No character in it is English. The Danes, Geats and Swedes all live in Scandinavia, and England is never the setting. The poem is in English; the story is imported.
• Old English is just English spelled oddly. Half the vocabulary is gone and the grammar is unrecognisable. You cannot read it by squinting, and no one expects you to.
• It was always a classic. For most of its recorded life it was treated as a quarry for historical and linguistic facts. The change is usually dated to 1936, when J. R. R. Tolkien told the British Academy that scholars had been mining the poem for data and ignoring the poetry, and that the monsters were the point rather than an embarrassment.

What to carry forward

• One manuscript, around the year 1000, damaged by fire in 1731, and no second copy.
• The line has four stresses, a caesura, and alliteration carried by the first stress of the second half-line; the fourth stress never joins in.
• Kennings compress and defamiliarise: whale-road, bone-house, ring-giver.
• The hall is the political and emotional centre; exile is the worst fate available.
• Grendel is built as the hall's opposite, and is given a biblical ancestor.
• In short: the sound of the line and the shape of the hall explain almost everything else in the poem.

Sources

1. Anonymous. (c. 975-1025). Beowulf (A. J. Wyatt, Ed., 1894). Cambridge University Press. Old English text at Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
2. Anonymous. (1910). Beowulf (F. B. Gummere, Trans.). In The Harvard Classics. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Beowulf. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Tolkien, J. R. R. (1936). Beowulf: The monsters and the critics. Proceedings of the British Academy, 22, 245-295.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. A). W. W. Norton.

Is this a compliment?

Here is a line about a nun, written around 1390. Decide, before reading on, whether the poet admires her.

She was so charitable and so pitous, She woulde weep if that she saw a mouse Caught in a trap, if it were dead or bled.

Every word in it is positive. Charitable. Full of pity. She weeps. And yet something is off, and you can probably feel it before you can say it. Naming it is what this lesson is for.

A customs official starts a poem

Geoffrey Chaucer was not a professional poet. From 1374 to 1386 he was comptroller of customs for the port of London, which meant checking the collector's books on the wool trade, the most valuable export England had. A medievalist describing the job put it bluntly: the comptroller existed to police the collector, on the assumption that the collector would cheat. Chaucer did that for twelve years, and wrote at night. He had also been a soldier, a diplomat in Italy and a member of parliament for Kent, so he knew both knights and men who forged receipts, and both turn up in his poem.

He began The Canterbury Tales in the late 1380s and was still writing it when he died in 1400. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the corner that later filled up with writers because he was there first.

Two facts about his world matter for the poem. The Black Death had killed something between a third and a half of England's people in 1348 and 1349, and again in later waves. Survivors who worked with their hands found their labour suddenly scarce and valuable, and when parliament tried to freeze wages and then imposed a poll tax, the result was the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, in which rebels entered London, burned John of Gaunt's palace and beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury. Chaucer was living in London at the time. A poem that puts a knight, a miller and a cook on the same road, taking turns, is written in a country where the question of who owes what to whom has just been fought over in the streets.

Remember: the pilgrimage is not a quaint device. It is the one setting in which all those ranks could plausibly travel, eat and argue together.

The first eighteen lines, and how to say them

This is Middle English, four hundred years after Beowulf, and the difference is the difference between a foreign language and a difficult dialect.

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

Word for word: when April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein in the kind of moisture that brings out the flower; when the west wind has breathed life into the tender shoots in every wood and heath, and the young sun has run half its course in the Ram; and small birds make melody that sleep all the night with open eye, because nature pricks them in their hearts, then people long to go on pilgrimages.

Four things will get you through most Middle English:

• Pronounce the final -e. Soote is two syllables, sweete is two, halfe is two. Say them and the lines come out at ten beats each; swallow them and the metre collapses.
• The prefix y- marks a past participle. Yronne is "run", yfalle is "fallen". It is the same prefix that survives in German gelaufen.
• The vowels have not shifted yet. Between about 1400 and 1700 the long vowels of English moved, so Chaucer's "soote" rhymed roughly with modern "boat" and his "ye" (eye) sounded closer to "ee".
• Unfamiliar words are usually French. Licour, vertu, corages, pilgrimages: the Norman conquest put a French layer over the English one, and Chaucer uses both freely.

The syntax is doing something too. That is one sentence, eighteen lines long, and it withholds its main clause until "Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages". Everything before it is weather and biology: rain, sap, wind, a sprouting shoot, birds too restless to sleep. Then people, restless in the same way. The poem's opening move is to file the religious impulse under spring fever, and it does it without saying anything rude.

Twenty-nine people at an inn

The frame is simple. The narrator stops at the Tabard, an inn in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, on his way to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Twenty-nine other pilgrims arrive. The innkeeper, Harry Bailey, proposes a contest: each pilgrim tells stories on the road, two out and two back, and whoever tells the best gets a free supper. Four tales from thirty pilgrims would be about a hundred and twenty stories. Chaucer finished twenty-four. The work is unfinished, and the manuscripts do not even agree on the order.

Before the contest starts, the narrator describes each pilgrim in turn. Medieval writers had a ready-made scheme for this. Society was supposed to consist of three estates: those who fight, those who pray, and those who work. Chaucer opens in that order, with a Knight, then church people, then the rest. And then the scheme breaks, because his England no longer fits it.

The Merchant talks constantly about his profits and is secretly in debt. The Wife of Bath makes cloth, has had five husbands, and has been to Jerusalem three times. Neither is a knight, a priest or a peasant. They are the fourteenth century's new middle, and the poem notices them before the political theory does.

The Prioress, read slowly

Back to the nun. Her portrait, in a modernised-spelling edition, includes these details:

That of her smiling was full simple and coy; Her greatest oathe was but by Saint Loy; And she was cleped Madame Eglentine. Full well she sang the service divine, Entuned in her nose full seemly; And French she spake full fair and fetisly, After the school of Stratford atte Bow, For French of Paris was to her unknow.

Take the facts one at a time. She is a nun, so she has taken vows of poverty and withdrawal from the world. Her name, Eglentine, is not a saint's name; it is the name of a heroine in a French romance. She speaks French, the language of status, but a provincial London convent French, and the narrator tells us so while appearing to praise her. Her table manners get nine lines. Her theology gets none.

Then the mouse. A nun's charity is supposed to go to the poor. Hers goes to a trapped mouse and, a few lines later, to small dogs she feeds on roasted meat and white bread while, outside the convent, people were eating bread of beans. Nothing in the portrait is a criticism. Every sentence is admiring. The criticism comes entirely from what the narrator chooses to admire.

That gap, between what a speaker says and what the writer lets you see, is irony. Chaucer's is the hardest kind to catch, because there is no wink. The narrator is a slightly dim enthusiast who thinks everyone he meets is excellent. He tells you the Monk ignores the rule that says monks should stay in their cloister, and adds that he agrees with the Monk. He tells you the Friar knows every barmaid in town better than he knows the lepers, and calls him a worthy man. You supply the judgement. The poem never does.

The upshot: when a narrator praises a detail that does not deserve praise, the detail is the evidence and the praise is the joke.

Common misconceptions

• Chaucer wrote in Old English. He wrote Middle English, roughly four hundred years after Beowulf and two hundred before Shakespeare. Old English needs a translation. Chaucer needs a glossary and a slow first page.
• The Tales are finished, and modern editions just cut them short. Chaucer planned about a hundred and twenty stories and completed twenty-four, some of them interrupted mid-sentence on purpose.
• Chaucer invented English poetry. English verse existed for centuries before him. What he did was write ambitious poetry in English at a moment when the prestigious languages for it were French and Latin.
• The narrator is Chaucer. The narrator is a character called Chaucer who is much more easily impressed than the poet who invented him, and the distance between them is where the comedy lives.

Write the period essay

Prompt: Choose one pilgrim from the General Prologue and show, using three specific details, how Chaucer criticises a figure his narrator claims to admire. Write one paragraph, about 180 words, quoting exactly.

Model paragraph: The Prioress is condemned by her own portrait, and never once by her narrator. The first detail is her name. A woman who has vowed poverty and withdrawal is called Madame Eglentine, a name out of French romance rather than out of the calendar of saints, and the narrator reports it as charmingly as he reports everything else. The second is her French, spoken "after the school of Stratford atte Bow, For French of Paris was to her unknow". The line praises her fluency and, in the same breath, locates it in a suburban convent rather than a court, so the compliment carries its own correction. The third is the mouse. She weeps over a mouse in a trap, and feeds roast meat and white bread to her lapdogs, at a time when poor households ate bread made from beans. Charity aimed at animals is charity pointed away from the people her order exists to serve. The narrator sees only tenderness; the details add up to a woman performing gentility rather than religion.

Worth holding on to: a literary paragraph is claim, then quotation, then the sentence that explains what the quotation proves. The comment is the part that earns the marks.

Pulling it together

• Chaucer wrote as a working customs official in a London that had just survived plague and revolt.
• Middle English is readable once you pronounce the final -e, recognise y- as a past-participle marker, and expect French words.
• The eighteen-line opening sentence quietly files pilgrimage under spring restlessness.
• The pilgrimage frame gathers every rank, including the moneyed people the three-estate model cannot place.
• Chaucer's irony works by praise: the narrator admires, the details convict, and the reader judges.
• Bottom line: read the portraits for what is described rather than for how it is described.

Sources

1. Chaucer, G. (c. 1387-1400). The Canterbury Tales. Middle English text of the General Prologue with word-for-word gloss in Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org.
2. Chaucer, G. (1993). The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems (D. L. Purves, Ed.). Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Geoffrey Chaucer. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. A). W. W. Norton.

A dead man's poems go on sale

In June 1557 a London printer called Richard Tottel published a book of poems by several hands, most of them dead. It is usually called Tottel's Miscellany. Two of the contributors mattered enormously: Thomas Wyatt, who had died in 1542, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, executed in 1547 at the age of thirty. Both had spent time as diplomats in Italy. Both had come back carrying a fourteen-line form invented there, the sonnet, and had begun rebuilding it in English. Tottel's book went through edition after edition. Within a generation every ambitious English poet was writing sonnets, and within fifty years one of them had written a hundred and fifty-four.

The Italian form came from Petrarch, who spent decades writing sonnets to a woman called Laura, mostly about how unavailable she was. English poets took the machine and changed its gearing, for a reason that is purely technical: Italian rhymes easily and English does not. An Italian sonnet needs only four or five rhyme sounds. English poets kept running out, so they loosened the scheme, and in doing so they changed what the form could argue.

Two shapes, two arguments

That turn has a name: the volta, Italian for turn. It is the hinge where the poem changes direction, and finding it is the single most useful thing you can do with a sonnet. Look for a word that signals it: but, yet, and yet, so, then, therefore.

Every one of these poems is written in iambic pentameter: five pairs of syllables per line, each pair going soft-LOUD. Say this line and thump the desk on every capital: "Shall I / com-PARE / thee TO / a SUM / mer's DAY". That is the default hum of English verse from 1550 to 1900, and it matters mostly because poets break it. When a line suddenly refuses the beat, something is happening.

Key idea: the sonnet is not a container for a feeling. It is a fourteen-line argument with a turn built into it.

Wyatt: a hunt that cannot be won

Wyatt was a courtier under Henry VIII, which was dangerous work. He was imprisoned in the Tower in 1536, in the weeks when Anne Boleyn and five men accused with her were executed, and released. Here is his best-known sonnet, in modern spelling:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind!
But as for me, alas, I may no more;
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

List means "cares to". A hind is a female deer. Read it once as a hunting poem and it is exhausting: a man who cannot stop chasing an animal he cannot catch, and who tells you so with a flat, tired image, seeking to hold the wind in a net.

Then the last two lines change what you have been reading. The deer wears a collar. The Latin, Noli me tangere, means "Do not touch me", and the collar says she belongs to Caesar. Roman emperors were said to have marked their deer that way so no one would hunt them. So the animal is not wild at all. She is owned, and the hunt was never available. Readers have linked this since the sixteenth century to Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII. There is no proof, and you do not need it: the poem is about wanting something that a more powerful man has already claimed, and about knowing better and continuing anyway.

Notice what Wyatt does with the pentameter. "I am of them that furthest come behind" is regular and defeated. "Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore" stumbles, because the beat lands on "Faint" at the start instead of the second syllable. The line performs the faltering it describes.

Sidney: a poem about not being able to write the poem

Philip Sidney wrote a sequence of 108 sonnets, Astrophil and Stella, in the early 1580s. The first one describes a writer stuck:

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn'd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay ...
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

Turning others' leaves means flipping through other poets' pages for something to steal. The joke is that this complaint about borrowed writing is itself a sonnet, in a borrowed Italian form, in a sequence modelled on Petrarch's. And the last line is quotable enough to have survived four hundred and forty years, which rather proves the Muse's point.

Shakespeare, three times

Shakespeare's sonnets were printed in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, probably without the author's involvement. There are 154. Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to a young man; 127 to 152 concern a woman the poems call dark. That fact surprises people, and it is worth knowing before you read number 18, which is usually misquoted at weddings.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date

Look at the vocabulary: lease, date, possession, untrimm'd. This is the language of property law and accounting. Summer is a tenant with a short lease. Beauty is a holding that can be lost. The poem then makes an extraordinary claim in its last two lines:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

"This" is the poem itself. The boast is not that the young man is beautiful. It is that the writing will outlast him, and you, and everyone, and that reading it is what keeps him alive. You are, at this moment, the proof or the refutation.

Sonnet 73 does something harder. Three quatrains, three pictures of ending, each one on a shorter clock:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Autumn: months. Then twilight, which is minutes. Then a fire going out on its own ashes, which is now. The camera moves in, and the time shortens, and the reader is pushed toward the moment of death without the word ever being used plainly. "Bare ruin'd choirs" is a double image: the empty branches look like the roofless stone arches of the abbeys Henry VIII had dissolved twenty years before Shakespeare was born, standing broken in the English countryside where birds had once sung. Then the couplet turns: "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long." Because you can see me dying, you love me harder. The poem's argument is that mortality is what gives love its force.

Sonnet 130 turns the whole tradition over:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

Every line refuses a standard compliment. Poets had spent two centuries comparing eyes to the sun and lips to coral, and Petrarch's imitators had ground the comparisons into dust. Then the couplet: "And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare." She is as rare as any woman lied about with false comparisons. The poem is not an insult to her. It is an insult to other poets, and a love poem made out of refusing to flatter.

The point: in an English sonnet, read the couplet last and hardest. It is where the poem tells you what the previous twelve lines were for.

Common misconceptions

• A sonnet is any short poem about love. It is fourteen lines, almost always in iambic pentameter, with a fixed rhyme scheme and a turn. Plenty of sonnets are about death, politics or writing.
• Sonnet 130 is cruel about the woman. Its target is the stock comparison, not the mistress. The couplet says she is as rare as any woman that false praise has lied about.
• Shakespeare's sonnets are all love poems to a woman. The first 126 address a young man, and the sequence is a good deal stranger and angrier than its reputation.
• Iambic pentameter means the poem sounds like a metronome. The beat is a background expectation. The meaning often sits exactly where a poet breaks it.

Summing up

• The sonnet arrived from Italy through Wyatt and Surrey and was printed for a mass readership in 1557.
• English rhymes poorly, so the form became three quatrains and a couplet, which changed its argument from problem-and-answer to three tries and a verdict.
• The volta is the hinge; find it before you say anything else about a sonnet.
• Wyatt's hind is already owned; the poem is about a hunt that was never available.
• Sonnet 18 boasts about writing, 73 shortens the clock three times, 130 attacks bad comparisons.
• In short: a sonnet is an argument on a timer, and the couplet is the verdict.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (1609). The Sonnets. Thomas Thorpe. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Wyatt, T. (c. 1535). Whoso list to hunt. Text at Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
3. Sidney, P. (1591). Astrophel and Stella. Text at Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
4. Sonnet. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. B). W. W. Norton.

Before you read

Three questions to hold while you work through this lesson. How do you show midnight to three thousand people standing in the afternoon sun? How do you make an audience believe in a castle when the stage has nothing on it but a trapdoor and two doors? And if a character is going to admit something shameful, who exactly are they admitting it to?

Two o'clock, Bankside, 1606

You pay a penny at the door of the Globe, drop it in a box, and stand in the yard on an earth floor. Archaeologists digging the site in 1989 found a layer of hazelnut shells pressed into that floor, which tells you what the audience ate. The building is three storeys, roughly a hundred feet across, open to the sky, and holds around three thousand people. It went up in 1599 and burned down in 1613 when a cannon fired during a performance set the thatch alight.

There are no lights, because the roof is a hole. There is no scenery worth the name. There is no curtain across the front of the stage. Women's parts are played by boys, because English women were not permitted on the public stage until 1660. The company performing is the King's Men, so called because in 1603 the new king took them under his own patronage. William Shakespeare is a shareholder in the building as well as its main supplier of plays, which is why he died a moderately wealthy man.

The play today is short, about two thousand lines, the shortest tragedy he wrote. It starts with thunder.

What an empty stage forces the words to do

Because there is no set, the language has to build the set. Watch the play do it. Duncan arrives at Macbeth's castle and says the air is sweet and the swallows are nesting in the walls, and the audience, standing in an afternoon in Southwark, sees a pleasant castle. Then night falls in the middle of the afternoon, purely by assertion: characters call for torches, speak of the moon being down, complain that it is a rough night. Nobody dims anything. The words do it.

This has a consequence you will feel all through the play. If the dark is made of words, then a character can also make the dark himself. Lady Macbeth asks for "thick night" to wrap itself in the smoke of hell so her knife will not see the wound it makes. She is calling for a stage effect the theatre cannot produce and the poetry can.

Why this matters: the poetry is not decoration on top of the drama. On a bare stage it is the lighting, the set and the weather.

Verse, prose, and who gets which

Open any page of the play and you can see the difference before you read a word. Verse is set in lines that stop before the right margin, usually five beats of iambic pentameter. Prose runs to the edge of the page like ordinary writing.

That third row is a rule you can use immediately. When a scene ends in a rhyme, the rhyme is a curtain: in a theatre with no curtain, the couplet tells the audience to watch for who walks off. And the second row carries the play's cruellest stroke. Lady Macbeth speaks some of the most controlled verse in the language in Act 1. In Act 5 she walks in her sleep, rubbing her hands, and she speaks in prose: "To bed, to bed. There's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done cannot be undone." A queen has fallen out of poetry.

A play written for the man in the best seat

Elizabeth I died in 1603 without a child, and the crown went to her cousin's son, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. Three things about him shape this play.

First, he was Scottish, and here is a Scottish play with a Scottish king murdered in his bed. Second, he believed in witchcraft seriously enough to have written a book about it, Daemonologie, published in 1597, and had personally taken part in witch trials. Third, he was a Stuart, and the Stuarts in 1606 were believed to descend from Banquo. In Shakespeare's source, the chronicler Holinshed, Banquo helps Macbeth kill the king. In the play, Banquo is innocent, and the witches promise him a line of kings. You do not write your patron's ancestor as an accomplice to regicide.

And then the Porter. On 5 November 1605 a group of Catholic conspirators was caught with barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords. In the trials that followed, a Jesuit priest named Henry Garnet was convicted, partly over a doctrine called equivocation: the idea that one may answer truthfully in a misleading way under threat. He was executed in May 1606. Now read the Porter, drunk, imagining himself the gatekeeper of hell: "here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven". That is a topical joke about a man executed months earlier, dropped into a tragedy, in prose, by a porter. It is also the play's theme in one word, because the witches equivocate from beginning to end.

Act 1, from thunder to a decision

The first scene is twelve lines long. Three witches agree to meet Macbeth and leave with a line that sets the terms of everything after it: "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." In scene 3 they meet him on a heath, and the greeting arrives in three hammer blows:

All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!
All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!
All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter!

He is Thane of Glamis already. Within minutes a messenger arrives to say the king has made him Thane of Cawdor. One prophecy was old news, one has just come true, and the third is now sitting in his head. Note what the witches never say: not a word about murder. Banquo, standing beside him, gets the same news and does nothing with it.

Macbeth writes to his wife. Her reaction is not a plan, it is a prayer: "Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty". She is asking to be emptied of something she thinks will stop her. That is not the speech of a woman without a conscience; it is the speech of one who has already met hers.

Twelve lines that argue the wrong way

Scene 7. Duncan is at dinner in his house. Macbeth walks out of the room and starts talking to himself:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly. If th' assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all

Count the times he says "done" and "it" and never once says "kill" or "Duncan". A man who cannot name the act is not yet ready to do it. Trammel up means to net, to tie in a bundle: he wants the consequences bagged and carried off. Then he answers himself:

But in these cases
We still have judgement here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught, return
To plague th' inventor.

Notice what that is not. It is not "murder is wrong". It is "murder comes back on you", an argument about consequences in this life, not about sin. Only then does he reach the real objections, and they are social: Duncan is his kinsman, his king and his guest, and a host is meant to shut the door against a murderer, "Not bear the knife myself".

He finishes by admitting he has no reason left at all, "no spur To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself". He has argued himself out of it. Then his wife walks in, calls him a coward, describes dashing out the brains of a nursing child, and he changes his mind in about forty lines. The scene is not about a man being persuaded that murder is right. It is about a man who cares more about being thought unmanly than about being a murderer.

The core of it: Act 1 gives Macbeth every reason to stop and no reason to proceed, and he proceeds. The play is interested in that gap.

Common misconceptions

• Shakespeare wrote in Old English. He wrote early modern English, the language of the King James Bible of 1611. Old English is Beowulf, six hundred years earlier, and is unreadable without training. What makes Shakespeare hard is compressed syntax and dead vocabulary, not a different language.
• The witches make Macbeth kill Duncan. They tell him he will be king. They never mention murder, and Banquo hears a prophecy too and does nothing criminal about it.
• Audiences sat in respectful silence. They stood, ate, drank and answered back, in daylight, packed around three sides of the stage. The plays were written to hold that crowd.
• Lady Macbeth has no conscience. Her first speech asks to have her conscience removed, which is an odd request for someone without one, and Act 5 shows what it cost her.

Where this leaves us

• An open-air playhouse with no lights and no scenery made the poetry do the work of the set.
• Verse marks stature and control; prose marks servants, jokes, letters and minds that are breaking.
• Rhymed couplets end scenes and belong to the witches, because rhyme sounds like a spell.
• The play flatters and unnerves a Scottish king who believed in witches and thought Banquo was his ancestor.
• Macbeth's great soliloquy argues against the murder on grounds of consequence and hospitality, then collapses under a taunt.
• Remember: in this play nobody is ever forced. Every disaster follows a choice made in a room with the door open.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (1623). The Tragedie of Macbeth. In Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Folger Shakespeare Library. (n.d.). Macbeth. folger.edu.
3. Globe Theatre. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Macbeth. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. B). W. W. Norton.

A man asks a question about an object that is not there

It is the middle of the afternoon at the Globe. An actor is alone on a bare stage in daylight, with three thousand people around him, and he says:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?

There is no dagger. There is no prop, no lighting effect, no music cue. The audience sees a man looking at nothing and asking a question about it. Everything the scene does is done by the words, and this lesson is about how to take those words apart without guessing.

Six steps, in order

Use the same procedure every time and you will stop producing sentences that begin "this quote shows".

1. Who is speaking, and to whom? A soliloquy has no listener on stage, so the audience becomes the confidant. That is already an argument: the play makes you the only witness to a murder plan.
2. What literally happens? Say it in plain prose before you interpret anything.
3. Which verbs carry it? Verbs tell you who is acting and who is being acted on.
4. Where does the metre break? Five beats is the expectation; a short line or an extra syllable is a stage direction in disguise.
5. What are the images made of? Group them. A speech built on blood is doing something different from one built on clothing or on accounting.
6. Where does it turn, and how does it end? Then, and only then, write the claim.

The dagger, worked

Here is more of it:

Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

Step 2, literally: he sees a dagger, tries to grab it, fails, still sees it, and asks whether it is real or a hallucination produced by a fevered mind.

Step 3, the verbs: see, clutch, have, see again. He is reaching and failing. Later in the speech the dagger acts on him: it "marshall'st me the way that I was going". The weapon is now the guide and the man is the follower, which is exactly the lie he wants to believe.

Step 4, the metre: "I have thee not, and yet I see thee still" is a perfectly regular ten-syllable line, and it is the most disturbing line in the passage, because the calm of the metre sits against the panic of the content. Then "As this which now I draw" runs only six syllables. The line stops early because he has stopped to pull out a real knife and compare the two.

Step 5, the images: sight against touch, all the way through. He can see and cannot feel. Then he says his eyes are "made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest", which is a man arguing both sides of his own sanity in one sentence.

Step 6, the turn: the speech ends with blood appearing on the imaginary blade. He watches the hallucination get worse and keeps walking toward the bedroom.

Now the claim you could defend in an essay: the dagger speech shows Macbeth trying to relocate the decision outside himself. The vision points the way, the vision carries the blood, and he follows. He has already admitted in 1.7 that he has no reason but ambition, so the hallucination arrives to supply the motive he could not find.

What matters here: close reading is not finding hidden meanings. It is noticing what the words are doing and saying it exactly.

The murder you do not see

Duncan dies offstage. You get instead a husband and wife whispering, and then this:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Incarnadine means to turn flesh-coloured or blood-red. The scale is absurd and deliberate: rather than the sea washing his hand, the hand will stain the sea. And listen to the vocabulary. "Multitudinous" and "incarnadine" are enormous Latin words; "Making the green one red" is five short English ones. The line falls out of Latin into monosyllables, and the second version is the one that frightens you.

Lady Macbeth answers: "A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it then!" Remember that sentence. The play will bring it back.

The same woman, four acts later

Act 5 opens with a doctor and a waiting-gentlewoman watching the queen walk in her sleep. She is rubbing her hands. She says, in prose:

Out, damned spot! out, I say! One; two. Why, then 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

Put that beside "A little water clears us of this deed". The same character, the same subject, the opposite conclusion, and no verse left. "One; two" is the clock striking the signal on the murder night. "Hell is murky" is three words of pure terror from a woman who told her husband to stop being childish about a painted devil. The play has not punished her from outside. It has let her keep thinking.

Tomorrow, and the difference four acts make

Near the end, word reaches Macbeth that his wife is dead. He says:

She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Run the six steps again and notice what has changed. The dagger speech was full of questions; this one asks nothing. It is built on time, not on sight: tomorrow repeated three times, day to day, yesterdays, the last syllable. The images come from a theatre, a candle, a bad actor, a story told by a fool, which means a man standing on a stage is telling three thousand people that a man standing on a stage means nothing.

And the metre: "Signifying nothing" is two feet, not five. The speech stops in the middle of a line. The play about a man who wanted the future has ended his language early.

He then learns that Birnam Wood is moving toward Dunsinane, because an army is carrying branches, and that Macduff was not born but cut from his mother. Both prophecies were true and neither meant what he heard. That is the Porter's word again: equivocation. The witches never lied to him once.

The upshot: the man who saw a dagger that was not there ends by seeing nothing at all, and the play measures his ruin in what his language can still do.

Common misconceptions

• The play is about fate. Prophecy never compels anything in it. Macbeth murders because he chooses to, and Banquo, who hears the same voices, does not.
• The dagger is a ghost or a spell. Macbeth himself names it a dagger of the mind, a false creation, and the play lets the diagnosis stand.
• Lady Macbeth is a monster who feels nothing. She says washing removes the deed in Act 2 and spends Act 5 unable to wash her hands. That is not a monster; that is a person who was wrong.
• The witches lied. Every prophecy comes true exactly as spoken and not at all as understood. That is the difference between a lie and an equivocation.

Write the period essay

Prompt: How does Shakespeare use one recurring image in Macbeth to track a character's decline? Argue from two moments, one early and one late. One paragraph, about 190 words, quoting exactly.

Model paragraph: Shakespeare tracks Lady Macbeth's collapse through the single image of water. Immediately after the murder she treats guilt as dirt and dirt as a practical problem: "A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it then!" The couplet is brisk, the verse is regular, and the confidence is total, because she has defined a moral fact as a housekeeping one. Four acts later the same character is asleep, in prose, still washing: "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" Nothing external has punished her. What has changed is that the original claim has been tested and has failed, and the play shows the failure by removing her verse. The imperative verbs are the same in both passages, clear and command, but early they describe an action she can complete, and late they are aimed at a stain only she can see. Water, the most ordinary thing in the play, becomes the measure of how much of her is left, and by the time the doctor says her disease is beyond his practice the audience has watched the proof for four acts.

What to remember

• Close read in a fixed order: speaker, literal sense, verbs, metre, images, turn.
• The dagger acts on Macbeth and he follows it, which is how he relocates a decision he has already made.
• Latin words for horror, monosyllables for the truth: the sea will be stained by the hand.
• Lady Macbeth's two water speeches, in verse and then in prose, are the same claim tested to destruction.
• The Tomorrow speech ends mid-line, and the theatre becomes its own image of futility.
• Bottom line: the prophecies are all true and all misheard, which is why the play blames nobody but the man.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (1623). The Tragedie of Macbeth. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Folger Shakespeare Library. (n.d.). Macbeth, with modern-spelling text and scene summaries. folger.edu.
3. Macbeth. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. B). W. W. Norton.

1660: a blind man with two books in the fire

In the summer of 1660 the House of Commons ordered that two books by John Milton be burned by the common hangman. Milton went into hiding in a friend's house in Bartholomew Close. He was arrested that autumn, held for a few weeks, and released after friends intervened, one of them the poet Andrew Marvell, who had worked as his deputy. He was fifty-one years old. He had been completely blind since 1652. He had spent eleven years writing, in Latin, for a government that no longer existed, defending in print the execution of a king whose son was now on the throne.

Seven years after that, a London printer published a poem of more than ten thousand lines in ten books, written by a man who could not see the page and had never held the manuscript. It was called Paradise Lost. This lesson is about how a political catastrophe turned into the most ambitious poem in the language, and about the two things you need in order to read its first page: a sense of how the sentence works, and a willingness to be uncomfortable about Satan.

The war that made the poem

The short version of a long fight. From 1642 the English king, Charles I, and his Parliament went to war over taxation, religion and who could command an army. Parliament won. On 30 January 1649, on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, Charles I was beheaded in front of a crowd, which was something no English court had ever done to a reigning monarch.

Two weeks later Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, arguing that a people may lawfully depose and punish a tyrant. In March 1649 the new republic gave him a job: Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State, which meant writing the government's Latin correspondence with the rest of Europe and defending the regicide against foreign attack. He did it in print, under his own name, in books that were read across the continent.

He also went blind doing it. By 1652 he had lost his sight entirely, probably to retinal detachment or glaucoma, and his deputies took over the paperwork. Oliver Cromwell governed as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. His son could not hold the thing together. In May 1660 Charles II rode into London to church bells and bonfires, and the great republican experiment was over.

Hold on to one earlier piece of that career, because it is the part of Milton that people still quote in court. In 1644 Parliament, his own side, had introduced licensing: no book could be printed until a censor approved it. Milton published a pamphlet against them called Areopagitica, and near its end he wrote: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Why this matters: the poem you are about to read was written by a man who had argued in public that authority can be resisted, and had then watched the resistance collapse. He is not a neutral observer of a rebellion against a king.

The verse, and the fight he picked with rhyme

Paradise Lost is written in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, the same line Shakespeare used on stage. In 1667 that was a shocking choice for a printed poem. Printed poetry rhymed. Readers expected it, and the publisher evidently got complaints, because a note appeared in the front of the next issue, titled simply The Verse. It opens like this:

THE measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter.

That is a writer picking a fight in his own front matter. Rhyme, he says, is a medieval invention for hiding bad material. What real verse consists in, he goes on, is "apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings."

The phrase to keep is "the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another." That is a definition of enjambment: the sentence refuses to stop where the line stops. In a rhymed couplet the unit of thought is two lines long and you can hear the box close. Milton wants the unit of thought to be as long as he needs, running over line ends, so that the reader is carried forward and only lands at a full stop many lines later. Once you know that, the first page stops being an obstacle.

One sentence, sixteen lines

Here is the opening of the poem, complete, to the first full stop:

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

Sixteen lines, one sentence, one full stop. Most readers meeting this for the first time decide within four lines that they cannot read Milton. They can. There is a trick, and it is this: find the verb.

The verb is Sing, and it does not arrive until line six. Everything before it is what the Muse is being asked to sing about. Rearrange it into ordinary English word order and the fog lifts at once: Heavenly Muse, sing of man's first disobedience, and of the fruit of that forbidden tree whose deadly taste brought death into the world, until one greater Man restores us. That is the whole of lines 1 to 6. Milton has simply moved the object to the front, the way Latin and Greek epic does, so that the poem's subject hits you before you know who is being addressed.

Now look at what the delay buys him. The word "disobedience" is the first noun in the poem, before God, before Satan, before Eden. And the sentence does not stop to explain itself; it keeps offering alternatives ("or, if Sion hill Delight thee more"), keeps widening, and finally makes a boast that would be embarrassing if the poet had not gone on to earn it: this song pursues "Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Nobody has tried this before.

Ten lines later he states the aim of the whole poem in three lines:

That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

Justify there means something closer to "show to be just" than to "make excuses for." Milton is proposing to explain, in verse, why a good God permitted the fall. That is the project. Whether the poem succeeds is one of the oldest arguments in English criticism, and the argument starts with Satan.

Why Satan gets the good lines

The poem does not open in Eden. It opens in Hell, nine days after the rebel angels have been thrown out of Heaven, with Satan face down on a lake of fire. He wakes, looks around at the worst place in the universe, and welcomes it:

Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world!

Then, a few lines later, comes the sentence people remember for the rest of their lives:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

And then the line that has been quoted by every defiant character in English since:

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

He rouses his broken army with a shout that a sergeant could use: "Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!" They get up. Book 2 gives him a parliament in the palace of Pandaemonium, full of speeches, where he wins the vote.

A hundred and twenty years later William Blake wrote the sentence that has hung over the poem ever since. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he says that Milton "wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

Blake has a point, and you should feel it before you answer it. The speeches in Hell are better theatre than the speeches in Heaven. But notice what Blake actually claims: that the poem's energy goes to Satan, not that the poem endorses him. And Milton has a long answer, which he delivers by waiting.

In Book 4 Satan arrives in sight of Eden, alone, with nobody to impress. No army, no parliament, no audience. He says this:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

Put that beside "The mind is its own place." It is the same doctrine, tested, and it has turned into a sentence of horror. The mind is indeed its own place; that is exactly the problem, because he has to live in it. Everything Satan said on the burning lake was performance for an audience of devils, and the poem waits two books before letting him be alone.

After that he goes down. He enters Eden as a cormorant, then a toad at Eve's ear, then a serpent. In Book 10 he returns to Hell expecting applause and the whole hall hisses, because the fallen angels have been turned into snakes. The rhetoric was real, and so was the shrinking.

The core of it: Milton gives Satan the best speeches in the poem and then spends ten books showing what those speeches are worth. Both halves of that sentence are the reading.

Common misconceptions

• Milton went blind from writing the poem. He was completely blind by 1652, fifteen years before Paradise Lost was published and before he had written a line of it. He composed at night, held the lines in his head, and dictated in the morning to whoever was in the house.
• The poem is the Book of Genesis put into verse. Genesis gives the fall about twenty-five verses. Milton gives it over ten thousand lines, and most of what you remember, the burning lake, the parliament in Pandaemonium, the war in Heaven, the figures of Sin and Death, is not in Genesis at all.
• Blank verse means the poet is not counting. Blank verse counts strictly: five beats a line, every line. What it drops is rhyme. The form with no counting at all is free verse, and it arrives two centuries later.
• Blake proved Satan is the hero. Blake said Milton wrote with more freedom about Hell than about Heaven. That is a claim about energy, not a verdict on who wins, and Book 4 is Milton's reply to it.

Putting it together

• Milton wrote for the republic, went blind in its service, and was hiding from the hangman in 1660; the epic comes after the defeat, not before it.
• Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, and Milton defends it in print as a rejection of rhyme, "the Invention of a barbarous Age."
• Enjambment lets one sentence run sixteen lines; find the main verb first and the syntax stops being frightening.
• The poem states its own aim: to assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men.
• Satan's magnificence in Books 1 and 2 is spoken to an audience; his Book 4 soliloquy is spoken to nobody, and it is the one that tells the truth.
• Worth holding on to: a poem can give its villain the best lines on purpose, because the lines are the evidence in the case against him.

Sources

1. Milton, J. (1667/1674). Paradise Lost. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Milton, J. (1674). The Verse. In Paradise Lost (1674 ed.). Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
3. Milton, J. (1644). Areopagitica. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
4. Blake, W. (c. 1790). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. B). W. W. Norton.

A sentence you cannot read calmly

Here is a sentence published in Dublin in 1729, in a pamphlet that sold for a few pence:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.

That sentence appears in every serious anthology of English prose. It is studied by people who have no interest at all in eighteenth-century Ireland. Nobody who reads it thinks its author wanted anyone to eat a child. So the question this lesson has to answer is a technical one: how does a piece of writing say the opposite of what its words say, and how does the reader know?

Dublin in 1729, which is the part usually skipped

Jonathan Swift was Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, appointed in 1713. He was Irish-born, of English descent, Anglican, and had spent years in London politics before being sent back to a city he regarded as exile.

Ireland at that date was governed from London. Under the Penal Laws the Catholic majority, roughly three quarters of the population, could not sit in the Irish parliament, hold commissions, or buy land freely. The Declaratory Act of 1720 confirmed that the Westminster parliament could legislate for Ireland and that the Irish House of Lords could not hear appeals. Much of the land was owned by absentee landlords who drew rents and spent them in England. Then the harvests failed, three years running, in the late 1720s, and people starved.

Swift had already written about this without any irony at all. In 1720 he urged the Irish to burn everything English except English coal, and in 1724 the Drapier's Letters helped stop a debased copper coinage from being forced on the country. He had also, in 1726, published Gulliver's Travels, which readers took for a children's adventure and which is not one. So by 1729 he had spent a decade making sensible proposals to people who ignored them.

There was also a genre waiting for him. The 1720s presses were full of what were called projects: pamphlets by improvers with schemes for national wealth, thick with population estimates and costings. Swift wrote one.

The mask, and what it is made of

The most important sentence you can learn about this text is that the speaker is not Swift. Swift invents a narrator, a public-spirited projector with a head for figures, and then never once steps out of him.

Watch how carefully the mask is fitted. The pamphlet opens with genuine feeling: "It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags." For three paragraphs a reader in 1729 would take this for what it looks like, a concerned gentleman describing what he has seen. The observation is accurate and the sympathy is real.

Then the arithmetic starts, and it never stops. There are a hundred and twenty thousand children to be disposed of. Twenty thousand should be reserved for breed, "whereof only one fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine". A child weighs twelve pounds at birth and twenty-eight at a year. Rearing a beggar's child costs about two shillings a year, rags included, and a gentleman would pay ten shillings for the carcass. The horror is not in any of the nouns. It is in the fact that the sums are done correctly and the tone never changes.

And then one word gives the whole game away:

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.

Devoured. That is the metaphor English speakers were already using about Irish landlords, and Swift simply refuses to treat it as a metaphor. The proposal is nothing but that refusal, carried out at length. If the system consumes people, then let the accounts be kept honestly.

The point: irony here is not a tone of voice you can hear. It is a gap between what the speaker says and what the text lets you know, and the reader has to do the work of noticing it.

Two places where Swift lets you see him

Near the end the projector brushes aside the alternatives, and the list runs like this:

Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients: Of taxing our absentees at five shillings a pound: Of using neither clothes, nor houshold furniture, except what is of our own growth and manufacture: ... Of quitting our animosities and factions ... Of teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants.

Every item on that list is a proposal Swift had made in earnest, in his own name, in earlier pamphlets. The projector dismisses them as hopeless. That is the argument of the entire piece, delivered in the one paragraph where the speaker's contempt and the author's coincide: the reasonable remedies exist, they have been refused for ten years, and this is what is left.

The second slip is the last sentence in the pamphlet. The projector assures us he has no personal interest, "having no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing." Swift was a clergyman who never married and had no children. The sentence that is supposed to prove the speaker's honesty is also the proof that he does not exist.

Two settings of the same instrument

Satire attacks a vice or a folly by making it ridiculous or intolerable. Critics have long sorted it by temperature, using the names of two Roman poets.

Pope, and the two-line machine

Alexander Pope was born in 1688, the year a Dutch prince landed at Torbay and the Catholic James II fled, an upheaval England later named the Glorious Revolution. Pope's family was Catholic, which meant he could not attend a university, hold office, or legally live within ten miles of London. Tuberculosis of the spine in childhood left him about four feet six inches tall and in pain for most of his life. He became the first English writer to make a fortune from readers rather than from patrons, by selling a verse translation of Homer to subscribers.

His instrument is the heroic couplet: two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter, usually closed at the end, usually with a pause called a caesura near the middle of each line. That gives four half-lines per couplet, and Pope treats them like pans on a balance.

A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

Line one states a danger. Line two supplies the remedy, and the remedy is split across the caesura into two opposed instructions: drink deep, or do not drink at all. The rhyme locks thing to spring so that the reader cannot separate the problem from the cure.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.

Same shape, different job: claim, then proof by comparison. Notice "art, not chance" sitting on either side of a comma, which is the whole argument compressed into four words. And Pope will tell you he is doing it on purpose:

'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an Echo to the sense.

How the joke gets into the couplet

Now watch the same machine used for comedy. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope reaches Hampton Court:

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.

Queen Anne rules England, Scotland and Ireland. The first line is genuine grandeur. Then the second line puts two nouns in the same grammatical slot, counsel and tea, as if they were the same order of business, and the rhyme forces obey to answer tea. Nothing is asserted. The grammar does it.

Pope does it again with a list, as Belinda's dressing table is laid out like an altar: "Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux." Five items, and a Bible is fourth, between the beauty patches and the love letters. No comment is offered, and none is needed; the position in the list is the comment.

The poem itself began as a favour. Lord Petre cut a lock of hair from the head of Arabella Fermor, the two Catholic families fell out, and a friend asked Pope to write something that would laugh them back together. Pope gave the incident the full apparatus of epic: an invocation, supernatural guardians, a hero arming for battle, a descent to a cave, and a lost object that ends up as a star. That is what mock-epic means: not mocking epic, but dressing a trivial event in epic clothes until the reader sees the size of the fuss.

In short: Swift makes you finish an argument he refuses to state; Pope makes you hear a judgement in the arrangement of two lines. Both leave the verdict to you, which is why satire survives its occasion.

Common misconceptions

• Swift had lost his mind, or meant it. He had published serious remedies for Irish poverty for a decade, and the pamphlet lists those very remedies as things nobody will adopt. The design is visible on the page.
• Satire is just comedy. Comedy wants a laugh. Satire has a target and wants something changed, and A Modest Proposal is not funny for a single line.
• The rigid couplet must have limited Pope. A fixed frame makes small departures audible: one extra pause, one misplaced word, and the reader hears it. Pope gets his effects from a form strict enough to be broken deliberately.
• The title of Pope's poem is about sexual assault. In 1712 the word rape still carried its Latin sense of seizing and carrying off. The theft is of a lock of hair.

The short version

• Swift writes as an invented projector and never breaks character; the irony lives in the gap between the speaker's calm and what he is counting.
• The Ireland of 1729 was governed from London, farmed by absentee landlords, and three years into failed harvests.
• Landlords have "devoured most of the parents" is the hinge: a dead metaphor taken literally.
• The rejected expedients are Swift's own earlier proposals, which is where the mask and the man say the same thing.
• Juvenalian satire is angry, Horatian satire is amused, and the same period produced world-class examples of each.
• The heroic couplet gives Pope four half-lines to balance, so a judgement can be delivered by word order alone.
• Worth holding on to: in both writers the strongest statement is the one the text never makes, and leaves you to make instead.

Sources

1. Swift, J. (1729). A Modest Proposal. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Pope, A. (1714/1711). The Rape of the Lock, and Other Poems (includes An Essay on Criticism). Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. A Modest Proposal. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Alexander Pope. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century). W. W. Norton.

A title page that lies on purpose

On 25 April 1719 the London bookseller William Taylor published a book with a title that runs for most of a page: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America. It ends with three words: Written by Himself.

Daniel Defoe's name does not appear anywhere on it. Readers were meant to take the book for a true memoir by a real sailor, and plenty of them did. That is not a small detail. English prose fiction arrives in the eighteenth century pretending to be something else: a memoir, a bundle of letters, a criminal's confession, a journal of the plague year. It is a form that begins by denying it is a form.

This lesson sets two books side by side, published twenty-one years apart, to show what the new kind of writing could do and what it argued about with itself from the start.

What was actually new

Prose stories were not new. England had romances, which were long, aristocratic and improbable, often translated out of French. It had allegory: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress of 1678 sold in enormous numbers, but its hero is called Christian and its towns are called Vanity Fair, because the people and places are arguments. It had criminal lives sold at executions, and scandalous court gossip printed as secret history.

Here is how the first sentence of Robinson Crusoe differs from all of that:

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.

A year. A city. A father with a trade and a foreign birthplace, and a family name that has been worn down by English pronunciation from Kreutznaer to Crusoe. Nothing there stands for anything. It is all particular, and the particularity is the point. The critic Ian Watt gave this quality a name in 1957: formal realism, the novel's habit of treating individual experience as if it happened to a specific person at a specific date in a specific place, and reporting it in that much detail.

Why then? Several things arrived together. Printing got cheaper and freer after the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695, so no censor had to approve a book before it was set. Literacy was rising, fastest in the trading towns. There was a middle class with money, leisure and a taste for reading about people like itself rather than about kings. And booksellers had learned that a cheap book selling ten thousand copies beats a fine book selling two hundred.

Key idea: the novel does not begin with a new subject. It begins with a new level of detail applied to ordinary people, and a reading public large enough to pay for it.

Defoe, and terror kept in a ledger

Defoe came to fiction late and sideways. He was a hosiery merchant who went bankrupt, a pamphleteer, a government agent, and a journalist who wrote most of a periodical single-handed. In 1703 he stood in the pillory because a satirical pamphlet of his, arguing in the voice of a fanatic that Dissenters should be hanged, had been read as sincere by both the people it mocked and the people it flattered. Keep that in mind: the man who wrote Robinson Crusoe already knew exactly what happens when readers take an invented voice for a real one.

Crusoe's island is run like a business. He salvages the wreck and lists the contents. He counts his gunpowder, dates his journal, builds a fence and measures it, and at one point rules two columns headed Evil and Good and enters his situation on both sides, like a merchant balancing an account. Then this happens:

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand. I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition. I listened, I looked round me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground to look farther; I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one.

Look at how little of that is description. There is one comparison, thunderstruck, and it is a dead one. Everything else is a man doing things in sequence: listened, looked, went up, went down, could see no other impression. The prose is a list of actions and it is far more frightening than an adjective would be, because the reader is made to do the search with him and find nothing each time. Then the paragraph ends with the detail that gives the whole thing away: he walks home "mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man."

One more thing about this book, which older school editions used to leave out. Crusoe is shipwrecked on a voyage from Brazil to the coast of Africa, undertaken to buy enslaved people for the plantations. He is in the slave trade when the storm takes him. Later he names the man he rescues after the day of the week and teaches him to say Master. The first great English novel of self-reliance is also, all the way through, a book about owning things and people, and the honest way to read it is to notice both.

Richardson, and the letter written while it is still happening

Samuel Richardson was a successful London printer who had never written a book. In his fifties he was commissioned to produce a volume of model letters for people who could not compose their own. While drafting a sequence about a servant girl writing home for advice, he stopped, and wrote a novel instead. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded appeared in 1740, entirely in letters. It begins:

DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER, I have great trouble, and some comfort, to acquaint you with. The trouble is, that my good lady died of the illness I mentioned to you, and left us all much grieved for the loss of her.

Pamela Andrews is fifteen, a servant, and her employer has just died, leaving her in the house of the dead woman's son, who begins to pursue her. She writes to her parents almost daily, and the crucial fact about the book is when she writes: not afterwards, from safety, but that evening, in the house, with the outcome unknown. Richardson called this writing to the moment, and it is a genuinely new machine. The reader is inside a mind that cannot see the next page.

Set the two books against each other and the trade-offs are exact.

That last row started the first great literary quarrel of the English novel. Henry Fielding, a magistrate and playwright, published an anonymous parody in 1741 called Shamela, in which the heroine is a calculating young woman keeping a record in order to manoeuvre her master into marriage, and every pious sentence is a move in the game. Fielding's objection is a reader's objection: if you can write it down that calmly, how frightened were you? Richardson answered by doing it again at enormous length and in earnest. Clarissa, published in 1748, runs to about a million words, four letter-writers, and no rescue, and is still one of the longest novels in the language.

What matters here: the argument between the two books is not about morals. It is about what a narrator's position in time does to everything the narrator says.

Common misconceptions

• Defoe invented the novel. The claim is disputed and probably unanswerable. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko appeared in 1688, Bunyan in 1678, and French and Spanish prose fiction came earlier still. What Defoe supplied was the particularity: dates, sums, inventories, a named town.
• Novels in letters are a quaint dead form. The device is the found document, and it never went away. Frankenstein is a bundle of letters, Dracula is diaries and telegrams, and the modern equivalent is a screenshot of a message thread.
• Pamela is a simple moral tale about a good girl. It caused a public argument, spawned parodies, sequels and merchandise within a year, and is still read as a book that cannot decide whether it is about virtue or about a promotion.
• Only the rich read novels. Books were expensive to buy and cheap to borrow. Circulating libraries lent them by subscription, servants read their employers' copies, and families read aloud in the evening, so one purchased volume could reach a dozen readers.

Write the period essay

Prompt: Choose one writer from this module, Milton, Swift, Defoe or Richardson, and show how the form they chose does work that no other form could do. Argue from two short quotations. One paragraph, about 190 words, quoting exactly.

Model paragraph: Defoe makes an accountant's prose carry terror, which no more decorated style could manage. His narrator's habit is to count and record, so that the island is described in gunpowder, goats and fence posts, and the reader learns to trust him the way you trust a receipt. That trust is what the footprint scene spends. Crusoe does not tell us he is afraid; he tells us what he did: "I listened, I looked round me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground to look farther." Four actions, all failures, all reported in the same flat voice he used for the inventory, and the flatness is what makes the reader's hair rise, because the instrument we have relied on for two hundred pages has met something it cannot measure. The scene closes with the measuring instinct turned against him, "fancying every stump at a distance to be a man." A grander style would have described the fear. Defoe's ledger prose enacts it, by carrying on counting when counting has stopped working.

Looking back

• Robinson Crusoe was published as a genuine memoir, with no author's name and the words Written by Himself on the title page.
• What is new in the early novel is particularity: a date, a city, a price, a proper name, applied to people nobody would have written about before.
• Cheaper printing after 1695, rising town literacy and a buying middle class made the audience that paid for it.
• Defoe's narrator counts, and the counting is what makes the footprint frightening; the same book is also a slaving voyage and a story about ownership.
• Richardson's letters are written before the outcome is known, which buys immediacy and costs plausibility, and Fielding's Shamela went straight for the cost.
• So what?: when you ask where a narrator is standing in time, you can usually predict what the book will be good at and what it will have to fake.

Sources

1. Defoe, D. (1719). Robinson Crusoe. Full text at Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Richardson, S. (1740). Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Robinson Crusoe. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org.
4. Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. University of California Press.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century). W. W. Norton.

A small book with nobody's name on it

In September 1798 a Bristol printer put out a volume of twenty-three poems called Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. There was no author's name on the title page. Four of the poems were by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the rest by William Wordsworth, who were twenty-five and twenty-eight. It opened with a long poem in deliberately antique spelling about a sailor who shoots a seabird for no reason, and it ended with a poem written above a ruined abbey on the River Wye.

The two men had spent the previous year in Somerset walking the Quantock hills, sometimes at night, talking loudly, taking notes. Their neighbours thought this was suspicious enough to report, and the Home Office sent an agent down to find out whether they were French spies. He decided they were not.

That is a comic story with something serious inside it. To understand why two poets walking at night in 1797 looked like a security problem, you have to know what had happened nine years earlier.

The revolution standing behind the book

On 14 July 1789 a Paris crowd took the Bastille. For young, educated, liberal English people this was the most exciting news of their lives: an old order overturned, and by argument as much as by force. Wordsworth went to France in 1791, stayed most of a year, fell in love with a Frenchwoman named Annette Vallon, and had a daughter, Caroline, born in December 1792. Years later, in the long autobiographical poem published after his death, he described the feeling of those months in a line everyone knows: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!"

Then it went wrong. The Terror of 1793 and 1794 sent thousands to the guillotine. In February 1793 Britain and France went to war, and the war ran, with two short breaks, until 1815. Wordsworth was cut off from his daughter for ten years. At home the government treated sympathy for France as sedition: habeas corpus was suspended in 1794, leading radicals were tried for treason, and the Two Acts of 1795 restricted public meetings and political speech.

Meanwhile the countryside these poets wrote about was being taken apart. Parliamentary enclosure turned open fields and commons into fenced private farms, which raised yields and destroyed the smallholder's living. Spinning and weaving moved from cottages into mills. People walked to Manchester and Leeds and went down into a working day set by a machine.

Remember: Romantic poetry is not an escape from politics into scenery. It is written by people who watched a revolution turn and a government at home start arresting its critics.

Blake: two books that need each other

William Blake was an engraver in Lambeth who made his books himself: etched the words and pictures onto copper, printed them, coloured them by hand, and sold a handful of copies. In 1789 he issued Songs of Innocence. In 1794 he bound it together with a second set under one title, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Contrary is the key word. The two halves are not good poems and sad poems. They are the same subject seen twice, and the second reading will not let you keep the first.

Here is the beginning of The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Innocence:

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep.
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

Read the third line slowly. The boy is trying to shout the sweep's street cry, and he is too small to say it. He is perhaps four or five. Climbing boys were sent up flues as narrow as nine inches, sometimes with a fire lit under them to make them climb; they got cancers from the soot and died young. An Act of 1788 set a minimum age of eight and was almost never enforced. The poem ends with the boy comforted by a dream of an angel and this last line: "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm."

Now the whole of The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Experience:

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil'd among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
And because I am happy & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

Same child, same cry. What changes is that somebody is now asking him a question, and his answer names the three institutions that profit from him: God, Priest, and King, who "make up a heaven of our misery". Read the innocent poem's comforting last line again, after that, and it curdles. Doing your duty is precisely the lesson that keeps a five year old in a chimney.

Blake does the same trick with animals. The Lamb asks a child's question: "Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee" and answers it in eight lines. The Tyger asks the identical question and never answers it: "Tyger Tyger. burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye. / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Twelve questions in twenty-four lines, and not one reply. The maker of the lamb and the maker of the tiger are the same maker, and that is the problem the pair exists to raise.

Tintern Abbey, which is not about an abbey

The last poem in the 1798 volume carries a title like a label on a specimen: Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798. It opens:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a sweet inland murmur.

The abbey never appears. The ruins are not described, and neither are the beggars who were living in them, although the Wye was a well-known tourist route in 1798 with its own guidebooks. What the poem describes is a difference: the man standing there now against the man who ran about these hills five years ago, when nature was something he chased, and "The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion."

That is the Romantic move in its purest form, and it is worth naming exactly. The subject of the poem is not the landscape. It is the mind of the person looking at the landscape, and the change in that mind over time. Wordsworth loses the boy's appetite and gains something slower: "a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused". At the end he turns to his sister Dorothy, who is standing beside him, and hears in her voice the person he used to be, which lets him keep both.

What the Preface claimed, in Wordsworth's own words

For the second edition in 1800 Wordsworth added a Preface, and it is still the most-argued manifesto in English poetry. Three claims matter.

On subject: "Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language."

On what poetry is: "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings".

And then, much later in the same essay, a correction of that famous line which almost nobody quotes: poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced".

Put those two together, because they are usually pulled apart. A poem is not the overflow at the moment of feeling. It is the feeling deliberately brought back later, in calm, until it starts up again, and the writing happens then. Tintern Abbey is that theory in action: a poem about a place, written four or five days after leaving it, about remembering an earlier visit.

Coleridge's poem, and why it is in a different key

The volume opened with The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, 625 lines in ballad stanza, the four-beat and three-beat pattern of street songs and hymns, which Coleridge spelled as though it were four hundred years old. A ship is blown south into the ice, an albatross follows and the ice splits, and then, with no motive offered at all, the mariner shoots it:

"God save thee, ancyent Marinere!
"From the fiends that plague thee thus,
"Why look'st thou so?" with my cross bow
I shot the Albatross.

The crew turn on him, then approve when the fog lifts, which makes them accomplices. Then the wind dies:

Water, water, every where
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Ne any drop to drink.

Two hundred sailors die; he lives, and has to tell the story to strangers for the rest of his life. Readers have been trying to supply the missing motive ever since, and the poem's refusal to give one is the whole of its power: guilt arrives before explanation, and nothing afterwards is proportionate to the act.

Coleridge later explained the division of labour between the two friends in his book Biographia Literaria of 1817. He would take supernatural subjects and make a reader accept them; Wordsworth would take utterly ordinary ones and make a reader see them as if for the first time. Both halves aim at the same target from opposite ends.

Bottom line: the 1798 volume sold poorly and changed English poetry anyway, because it moved the centre of a poem from the object to the person perceiving it.

Common misconceptions

• Romantic means romantic love. The word comes from romance, the old tale of adventure. The movement is about imagination, memory, the natural world, the self, and politics, and many Romantic poems contain no love story at all.
• Wordsworth wrote plainly because he was a simple countryman. He was Cambridge-educated and defended plain diction in a long, closely argued Preface. The plainness is a policy.
• Blake's Songs of Innocence are sweet poems for children. They were printed to look like children's books, and the Experience half was designed to be read against them. Neither half is complete on its own.
• The Ancient Mariner has a clear moral. The line about loving all creatures arrives near the end, and generations of readers have found it far too small for what happened. The mismatch is deliberate.

What to carry forward

• 1789 to 1815: revolution, Terror, twenty-two years of war, repression at home, enclosure and the first factory towns.
• Blake's paired Songs put the same subject in two lights; the Experience poems name who profits from the innocent ones.
• Tintern Abbey contains no abbey; its subject is the difference between two visits by one mind.
• The Preface argues for ordinary subjects, plainer language, and feeling recovered in calm rather than transcribed on the spot.
• Coleridge supplies the supernatural half of the programme, and withholds the mariner's motive on purpose.
• What matters here: after 1798 an English poem can be about the act of perceiving, and the poet's own mind becomes a legitimate subject.

Sources

1. Wordsworth, W., & Coleridge, S. T. (1798). Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Wordsworth, W. (1800). Preface. In Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (2nd ed., Vol. 1). Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
3. Blake, W. (1794). Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
4. Coleridge, S. T. (1817). Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions (Vol. 2, ch. 14). Rest Fenner.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. D: The Romantic Period). W. W. Norton.

Two claims from one household

In 1821 Percy Bysshe Shelley finished an essay whose last sentence is the boldest thing any English poet has said about the job: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Three years earlier, a novel published anonymously in London had put a different sentence into the mouth of a manufactured man speaking to the scientist who made him and walked away: "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." The author was Mary Shelley, who married the man who wrote the first sentence.

Put them side by side and you have the argument this lesson is built on. The second generation of Romantic writers believed, seriously and in detail, that the imagination could remake the world. One of them wrote a book about what the world might say back.

The country they were arguing about

The Napoleonic wars ended at Waterloo in June 1815 and the peace was terrible. Demobilised soldiers came home to no work. The Corn Laws of 1815 blocked cheap imported grain to protect landowners, which kept bread expensive on purpose. The eruption of a volcano in Indonesia in 1815 threw enough ash into the atmosphere to wreck the European harvest of 1816, the year people called the year without a summer.

On 16 August 1819, about sixty thousand people gathered at St Peter's Field in Manchester to demand the vote. Barely one adult man in ten had it, and the new industrial towns had almost no representation at all. Cavalry rode into the crowd. Eighteen people were killed and somewhere between four and seven hundred injured, and the day was named Peterloo, after Waterloo, as a bitter joke. Parliament responded that December with the Six Acts, restricting meetings and the press. Shelley, living in Italy, read about it and wrote a furious poem called The Mask of Anarchy, which no publisher would touch; it appeared in 1832, ten years after he had drowned.

All three of the younger poets died young and none of them died at home. John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome in February 1821, aged twenty-five. Shelley drowned in a squall off the Italian coast in July 1822, aged twenty-nine. Byron died of fever at Missolonghi in 1824, having gone to fight for Greek independence, aged thirty-six.

Keats, and the discipline of not knowing

Keats trained as a surgeon and qualified as an apothecary in 1816 before choosing poetry, which is worth remembering when people call him dreamy. In December 1818 he nursed his brother Tom through the last stage of tuberculosis and watched him die of the disease that would kill him too. In the twelve months after that he wrote the odes.

A year earlier he had described, in a letter to his brothers, the quality he thought a great writer needed:

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Hold that phrase, irritable reaching after fact and reason, because the odes are built on the refusal to reach.

Ode on a Grecian Urn begins by talking to an object that cannot answer:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.

Then the argument starts, and it is a genuine argument, not a mood. The figures painted on the urn are caught mid-action for ever. The piper will never stop playing. The lover leaning in will never arrive:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal, yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love; and she be fair!

Read that as good news and it is: the kiss is permanently about to happen, and she will never grow old. Read it as bad news and it is that too: nothing on the urn can ever happen at all. Keats does not choose. Two stanzas later he calls the urn a "Cold Pastoral", which is not a compliment, and then lets the urn deliver a line the poet never confirms:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Notice the quotation marks in the 1820 printing. The urn says it. The poem hands it to you and does not sign it. That is negative capability in practice.

Ode to a Nightingale does the same job in reverse. The speaker wants out of a world "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies", and the bird's song offers a way. He almost gets there on the strength of language alone, and then one word wrecks it:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

A word he himself has just used breaks the spell he built with words. The poem ends without deciding: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?"

Key idea: the odes are not about beauty being comforting. They test whether art can hold anything still, and refuse to announce the verdict.

Shelley's case for the prosecution of the world

Shelley is the opposite temperament: certain, political, and in a hurry. He was expelled from Oxford at eighteen for a pamphlet on atheism, and he wrote poems intended to do work.

In January 1818 The Examiner, a radical London weekly, printed a sonnet by a contributor calling himself Glirastes:

I met a Traveller from an antique land,
Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.

And then the pedestal: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!" followed by the desert, "Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Work the machine. The tyrant's boast survives, but only because somebody carved it, and the only thing still doing what it was made to do is the sculptor's reading of a face. Power is gone; the work of the artist who despised him is still legible. Shelley printed that in a radical newspaper in a year when Englishmen were being prosecuted for criticising the government, and he did not have to name a living king for his readers to supply one.

The essay written three years later, A Defence of Poetry, states the theory. Shelley argues that the instrument of moral good is the imagination, because you cannot treat another person justly until you can imagine being them. Poetry exercises that faculty the way running exercises a leg. From there the last sentence follows: poets legislate without anybody voting for them, because they change what people are able to imagine.

The book that sends the bill

In the wet summer of 1816, beside Lake Geneva, Byron proposed that his houseguests each write a ghost story. Mary Godwin was eighteen. What she began became Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in three volumes in 1818, dedicated to her father the philosopher William Godwin. On the title page, instead of an author's name, stood three lines from Paradise Lost:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

That is Adam, in Milton's Book 10, asking God whether he ever agreed to exist. A nineteen-year-old put it on the front of a novel about a student who builds a person, and in doing so told her readers exactly what kind of book it was.

Victor Frankenstein is a Romantic hero in every particular. He works alone, at night, in secret, obsessed, ruining his health, pursuing a vision nobody else can see. This is the same figure the poets celebrate. Mary Shelley simply lets him succeed:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.

And then he looks at what he has made, and runs out of the room. Everything terrible in the book follows from that, not from the science. The creature is born with nothing against him. He learns language by listening at the wall of a cottage, teaches himself to read from three books including Paradise Lost, and is beaten or fled from by everyone he approaches. When he finally corners his maker on a glacier he does not threaten first; he argues, in better English than Victor uses:

Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

The novel is built as a set of boxes: Walton's letters home contain Victor's confession, which contains the creature's account, which nobody else can verify. The most sympathetic voice in the book is the one buried deepest and least able to be checked, which is an argument in itself about who gets believed.

Where the dispute actually lands

It would be tidy to say that Percy Shelley was for imagination and Mary Shelley against it. That is not the disagreement. Both books assume that a single mind can bring something new and irreversible into the world. They differ about what the maker owes afterwards.

Shelley's poet legislates for people who never asked him to. Victor makes a person who never asked to be made. Read in that order, the creature's question on the glacier is the bill for the Defence of Poetry, and it arrived three years before the invoice was written.

Keats occupies a third position, which is why he is worth keeping in the room. He will not claim that art legislates, and he will not claim that it fails. He puts the consoling sentence in quotation marks and hands it over.

The upshot: ask of any Romantic work what it thinks a maker owes to the thing made, and you will usually find the poem's real argument.

Common misconceptions

• Frankenstein is the monster. Frankenstein is the student who builds him. The creature is never given a name at all, which is part of the point.
• The creature is a speechless brute. He is the most articulate character in the novel, self-taught, and his central speech is a moral argument that Victor cannot answer.
• Keats was killed by hostile reviews. Byron made that joke and it stuck. He died of tuberculosis, which had already killed his mother and his brother Tom.
• Beauty is truth is Keats's own conclusion. It is printed inside quotation marks and spoken by the urn. What the poet thinks of it is left open, deliberately.

Write the period essay

Prompt: Choose one made thing from this module, Keats's urn, Shelley's statue, or Mary Shelley's creature, and show how the work uses it to ask what making is for. Argue from two short quotations, one early and one late. One paragraph, about 190 words, quoting exactly.

Model paragraph: Mary Shelley uses the creature to turn the Romantic hero's greatest moment into his worst. Victor's account of the night of the experiment still carries the language of achievement: "It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils." The noun is accomplishment, the possessive is my, and every value in the sentence belongs to the maker. Nothing in it considers the thing on the table as anything but a result. The novel then spends three hundred pages making that omission expensive. When the creature finally speaks for himself on the glacier, he uses the vocabulary of obligation instead: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed." Creature, Adam, ought: he is not asking to be unmade, he is asking to be owed something. The two sentences are the whole argument of the book laid end to end, and the second is written in the better English, which is Shelley's quietest way of saying who is right.

Summing up

• 1815 to 1819: peace, slump, expensive bread, a volcanic summer, and cavalry riding into a reform meeting at Peterloo.
• Negative capability is Keats's name for staying in uncertainty rather than grabbing at an answer, and the odes practise it.
• The urn freezes its figures for ever, which is both the gift and the loss, and the poem declines to choose.
• Ozymandias leaves the sculptor's art standing in a desert where the tyrant's power has gone.
• Shelley's Defence argues that imagination is the organ of moral life, so poets legislate without being elected.
• Frankenstein takes the same solitary visionary, lets him succeed, and gives the made thing a voice and a grievance.
• Worth holding on to: the epigraph of Frankenstein is Adam's question to God, which makes the novel an argument with Milton rather than a horror story with a laboratory in it.

Sources

1. Keats, J. (1820). Ode on a Grecian Urn; Ode to a Nightingale. In Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
2. Keats, J. (1817, December 28). Letter to George and Thomas Keats. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
3. Shelley, P. B. (1818, January 11). Ozymandias. The Examiner. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
4. Shelley, M. (1818). Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1st ed., 3 vols.). Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
5. Shelley, P. B. (1840). A Defence of Poetry. In The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Vol. 2). Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.

Two sentences, published forty years apart

Here is the first sentence of a novel published in January 1813:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

And here is the opening of a novel that began appearing in monthly parts in March 1852:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Most readers register the first as funny and the second as atmospheric and move on. This lesson is a procedure for not moving on. Four questions, asked in order, on any opening you meet.

1. Who is saying this, and do they believe it? The narrator is not automatically the author, and a narrator can report an opinion without holding it.
2. What are the nouns and verbs actually doing? Not the mood of the sentence: the work of its words.
3. What shape is it? Balance, list, repetition, or the absence of a main verb.
4. What does it commit the book to? An opening is a promise. Check at the end whether it was kept.

Austen, worked

Jane Austen drafted this book in the 1790s and published it in 1813 without her name on it; the title page said only "By the Author of Sense and Sensibility". Her name did not appear on a title page until after her death in 1817.

Step 1, who is speaking. Not a character: no one has spoken yet. Not quite the author either. A universal truth of this kind would have to be argued, and nobody argues it. What we are hearing is the settled opinion of a country neighbourhood, delivered in the grammar of a law of nature. Austen confirms it in the next sentence, where the single man "is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

Step 2, nouns and verbs. Possession and want. A man is in possession of a fortune; he must be in want of a wife. Those two phrases belong to the language of property and of need, and the sentence quietly places a marriage inside the same frame as an estate.

Step 3, shape. Perfect balance, with the comma as the hinge, exactly like a heroic couplet turned into prose.

Step 4, the promise. This book will treat marriage as an economic arrangement and will find that funny without pretending it is not serious. Check it at the end: when Jane asks Elizabeth when she began to love Darcy, Elizabeth answers that it was from her first seeing the grounds of Pemberley. It is a joke, and it is not only a joke.

Now the technique that makes Austen hard to catch. In the third chapter, Darcy walks into a ball:

He was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased ... His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world.

Ask step 1 again. Who discovered him to be proud? Not the narrator: there is no evidence in the scene. The room did. Austen has written the room's verdict in the narrator's grammar, with no quotation marks and no "they thought". This is called free indirect style, and it is the most important device in the nineteenth-century novel. "His character was decided" is a five-word masterpiece: decided by whom, on what evidence, and in how long? Half an evening. The remaining three hundred pages are the appeal.

Why this matters: once you can hear free indirect style you stop confusing a narrator's sentence with a fact, and most misreadings of Austen die on the spot.

The economics behind the joke are real. Longbourn is entailed, meaning it must pass to a male heir, so Mr Collins will inherit and five daughters will be homeless when their father dies. A gentleman's daughter without a fortune could marry, become a governess or a companion, or be kept by relatives. That is the list. The comedy is written on top of it.

Dickens, worked

Step 1, who is speaking. A voice with no body and no name, in the present tense, looking at a city. It is closer to a camera than to a person, and it keeps this up for two pages before any character arrives.

Step 2, nouns and verbs. Count the verbs. "London." has none. "Implacable November weather." has none. The first finite verb of any weight is a long way down. Dickens has written a paragraph of pure noun: things existing, nothing happening, which is precisely the condition of a lawsuit that has been running for generations.

Step 3, shape. A list built by repetition: "Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping ... Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights." The repeated word spreads geographically outward, upstream and downstream, east and south, until the weather has covered everyone in the book.

Step 4, the promise. Dickens keeps it within a page: the densest fog of all is in the Court of Chancery, and the novel is about a case, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, that has consumed a family and will eventually consume the entire estate in legal costs. The weather is the argument.

One detail rewards a date check. The Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill is not a random monster. The word had been coined in 1824, and by 1852 newspaper readers had been following the new science of extinct giant reptiles for a generation. Dickens drops a fresh scientific fact into a London street to say that the greatest city on earth has sunk back into primeval mud.

The machine that printed them

Bleak House did not appear as a book. It came out in twenty monthly parts between March 1852 and September 1853, each part thirty-two pages with two illustrations, priced at one shilling, with the last two numbers issued together. That format explains a great deal about Victorian novels:

Behind the format sat a reading public that had no earlier equal. Britain's population moved into towns: at the census of 1851 about half the people of England and Wales were living in urban places, the first time that had been true. London grew from roughly one million in 1801 to over six million by 1901. Railways carried newspapers and cheap reprints; stamp duty on newspapers was abolished in 1855; Mudie's Circulating Library lent novels by subscription from 1842, and what Mudie would stock could decide whether a novel made money.

Charlotte Bronte, and a voice that refuses to be small

In May 1846 three sisters from a Yorkshire parsonage paid to publish a volume of poems under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, keeping their initials and hiding their sex. It sold two copies.

Eighteen months later Currer Bell published Jane Eyre, and the book was everywhere. It is told in the first person by a plain, poor, orphaned governess who addresses the reader directly and never once apologises for existing. When Rochester tries to calm her by calling her a frantic bird, she answers:

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

And the last chapter opens with four words that a hundred and eighty years of readers have remembered: "Reader, I married him." Not he married me. The grammar puts her in the subject position of her own life, which is the whole argument of the novel in one clause.

The law she was writing inside is worth stating plainly. Until the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, what a woman owned became her husband's on marriage. Before 1857, divorce required a private Act of Parliament. A governess in 1847 was educated, unmarried, paid roughly what a skilled servant was paid, and belonged to neither the family nor the staff.

The novel also has a cost that later readers have refused to let go of. Rochester's first wife, Bertha Mason, brought from Jamaica and locked in the attic, is described as barely human, and her money built his comfort. In 1966 Jean Rhys wrote a whole novel from Bertha's side, Wide Sargasso Sea, which is still in copyright and worth borrowing from a library. Read the two together and Jane Eyre does not get smaller; it gets more complicated, which is a better result.

The core of it: a Victorian opening is a contract. Work the four steps, then hold the book to what its first page promised.

Common misconceptions

• Austen wrote romances. Every match in her novels is priced. Entails, annual incomes and settlements are stated in figures, and the comedy depends on the reader knowing what the figures mean.
• Dickens was paid by the word, so he padded. He was paid by the instalment, and each instalment was a fixed thirty-two pages. The pressure was to fill exactly that space and end it on a hook.
• Victorian novels are long because their readers had more patience. They are long because they were sold in monthly parts and lent in three volumes. Change the format and the length changes with it.
• Jane Eyre appeared under a woman's name. It appeared as by Currer Bell, and reviewers spent months arguing about whether the author was a man or a woman.

Pulling it together

• Four steps on any opening: who speaks, what the words do, what shape it is, what it promises.
• Austen's first sentence is a neighbourhood's opinion dressed as a universal law, and it puts marriage in the vocabulary of property.
• Free indirect style lets a narrator carry someone else's judgement without quotation marks, which is why "his character was decided" is a trap.
• Dickens opens with verbless noun phrases and a spreading repetition, and then tells you the fog is the Court of Chancery.
• Monthly parts, a shilling each, and three-volume library editions made novels long, crowded and full of cliffhangers.
• The point: Jane Eyre's power comes from grammar as much as from plot, because a poor governess is placed in the subject position and left there.

Sources

1. Austen, J. (1813). Pride and Prejudice. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Dickens, C. (1853). Bleak House. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Bronte, C. (1847). Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (published as by Currer Bell). Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
4. Bleak House. (n.d.). In Wikipedia (serial publication schedule). en.wikipedia.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. E: The Victorian Age). W. W. Norton.

A sensible wrong answer

In 1842 Robert Browning published a fifty-six line poem in a cheap pamphlet series called Bells and Pomegranates. It had no title of its own; it appeared under the single heading ITALY. The title we use, My Last Duchess, and the name Ferrara at the top, were added in later printings.

Here is a sentence about that poem which a hard-working student might write, and which sounds entirely reasonable:

In My Last Duchess, Browning tells us that he had his wife killed because she smiled at other men.

Three separate things in that sentence are wrong, and following each one to the place where it fails will teach you the form, which is why this lesson is built backwards from an error instead of forwards from a definition.

Failure one: Browning is not the one talking

Read the first four lines:

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive; I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Somebody owns a palace, employs painters, and has had at least one previous wife. That is not a Victorian poet from Camberwell. It is a Renaissance Italian duke, and Browning built him on a real one: Alfonso II d'Este of Ferrara, whose first wife, Lucrezia de' Medici, died in 1561 at seventeen amid rumours of poison, after which he opened negotiations for a second marriage.

This is the dramatic monologue, and it has four parts. One speaker who is not the poet. One silent listener who is present and can be located in the text. One particular moment, usually with something at stake. And a speaker who tells the reader more than he means to.

Find the listener. Around line fifty the Duke mentions "The Count your master's known munificence" and a dowry. The man being spoken to is a marriage broker, an envoy sent to negotiate the Duke's next wife. So a man is showing the portrait of his dead wife to the agent of his future one, and explaining what displeased him about the last one. Once you have located that listener, every line changes temperature.

So what?: the first question to ask of any poem in a voice is not what does this mean but who is speaking, to whom, and why now.

Failure two: he never says he had her killed

Here is the whole of the confession:

This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive.

Look at the grammar. He gives commands, and then smiles stop. Nobody kills anybody. There is no victim in the sentence, no method, no agent for the stopping, and the smiles are the grammatical subject, as if they had decided to cease on their own. He does not even use her name.

You have met this before in this course. Macbeth, planning the murder of Duncan, says "done" and "it" eleven times and never once says kill. A man who cannot name an act is telling you something about his relation to it, and the two cases differ instructively: Macbeth is evading his own conscience, and the Duke is simply too grand to descend to the word.

Failure three: smiling at other men is not the charge

What actually annoyed him is stated plainly, and it is stranger than jealousy:

she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere ...
She thanked men, good; but thanked
Somehow, I know not how, as if she ranked
My gift of a nine hundred years old name
With anybody's gift.

The offence is a failure of ranking. A sunset, a bough of cherries broken for her by a servant, a white mule, and a nine hundred year old title all produced the same pleasure, and to a man whose entire worth is his position in a hierarchy, being placed level with a bowl of fruit is annihilation. He is not describing a flirt. He is describing a woman who was happy, and who did not grade her happiness by rank.

Then the best stroke in the poem. He explains that he could not have corrected her because that would have meant lowering himself: "Even had you skill In speech, which I have not, could make your will Quite clear to such an one". A man claiming he has no skill in speech, in the middle of fifty-six lines of fluent, controlled, rhyming verse. Browning has him refute himself in the act of boasting.

Notice the form while you are there. The poem is written in rhymed couplets, and almost nobody hears the rhyme, because the sentences keep running past the line ends. The Duke sounds like a man talking casually in a corridor, and he is in fact locked inside a strict metrical machine he did not build. That is the poem's judgement on him, delivered without a single word of comment.

And the last two lines, tossed over the shoulder as they head downstairs: "Notice Neptune, tho', Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me." Another artwork. Another creature being mastered by a god. Cast to order, for him. He has shown you his collection twice and told you what he collects.

Tennyson, in public and in private

Alfred Tennyson became Poet Laureate in 1850 and held the post for forty-two years, which made him the official voice of the age. In 1854 he read a newspaper account of a cavalry charge at Balaclava in which a British brigade attacked the wrong guns because of a garbled order, and within weeks he produced The Charge of the Light Brigade, a poem whose gallop most people can still hear.

In the same year he was already famous for something entirely different. In 1833 his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, had died suddenly in Vienna at twenty-two. Tennyson wrote short elegiac lyrics about it, on and off, for seventeen years, and published them in 1850 as In Memoriam A.H.H. It became the most widely read poem of the century, and it is a record of doubt. Section 54 reaches for consolation and cannot hold it:

Behold! we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last, far off, at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Two sections later the pressure has a name. Geology had already established, in the decades before Darwin, that the earth was unimaginably old and that whole species had been wiped out. Tennyson turns that against the comfortable belief that love is creation's final law:

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.

Published in 1850, nine years before On the Origin of Species. The Victorian crisis of faith did not begin with Darwin; it was well advanced when he arrived, and the Poet Laureate had already written it down.

Tennyson also wrote dramatic monologues, and one of them is routinely misread. Ulysses ends "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," which is carved on memorials and quoted in speeches. In the poem those words are spoken by an old king who has just described his own subjects as a savage race, dismissed his wife in half a line, handed the kingdom to his son, and announced that he is sailing away. Ask who is speaking, and the most inspiring line in Victorian poetry becomes an act of desertion.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who outsold him

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was more famous than her husband during her lifetime and was seriously discussed as a candidate for the laureateship in 1850. After reading a parliamentary commission's report on children working in mines and factories, she wrote The Cry of the Children:

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.

The poem sets bleating lambs and chirping birds against children who cannot cry properly, and it was published while Parliament was debating factory hours. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850, carry a title invented to make intensely personal love poems look like translations, and her Aurora Leigh of 1856 is a full-length novel in blank verse about a woman who insists on being a poet.

Hopkins, who did not sound like any of them

Gerard Manley Hopkins became a Jesuit priest, burned his early poems when he entered the order, wrote in private for the rest of his life, and published almost nothing. He died in 1889. His friend Robert Bridges kept the manuscripts and finally brought them out in 1918, twenty-nine years later, which is why a Victorian clergyman arrived in print looking like a modernist.

Glory be to God for dappled things,
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.

And the opening of The Windhover, about a kestrel hanging in the wind:

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air.

He splits the word kingdom across a line break. He piles stress on stress. His name for the technique was sprung rhythm: count the strong beats and let the weak syllables fall where they will, so a foot may be one hammered syllable or one followed by three light ones. If that sounds familiar, it should. It is the principle of the Old English line you met in the first lesson of this course, recovered by a Victorian who had read the medieval poets closely.

Key idea: every poem in this lesson gains its force from a gap, between what the speaker says and what he reveals, between an official voice and a private one, or between a strict form and the speech straining inside it.

Common misconceptions

• The speaker of a poem is the poet. Sometimes, but never assume it. Ask who is talking and to whom before you ask what the poem means.
• The Duke is angry about flirting. He is angry about ranking. His complaint is that a nine hundred year old name was valued the same as a gift of cherries.
• The Victorians were confidently religious. The bestselling poem of the century is a seventeen-year record of grief and doubt, and it appeared before Darwin published.
• Hopkins was a modernist poet. He was born in 1844 and died in 1889. He sounds modern because his work was withheld until 1918 and arrived among poets who had no idea he was Victorian.

What you now know

• A dramatic monologue has a speaker who is not the poet, a silent listener you can locate, one loaded moment, and self-betrayal.
• The Duke never names the killing, never names his wife, and claims to have no skill in speech in fifty-six lines of fluent verse.
• His real objection is to a woman who would not rank his title above a bowl of cherries.
• Tennyson holds an official public voice and a doubting private one at the same time, and In Memoriam predates Darwin by nine years.
• Barrett Browning wrote protest poetry from a parliamentary report, and a verse novel about a woman refusing to stop writing.
• Hopkins counted stresses instead of syllables and waited until 1918, in a coffin, to be published.
• The upshot: ask who is speaking, and half the poems in this module turn out to be doing the opposite of what they appear to say.

Sources

1. Browning, R. (1842). Italy [later titled My Last Duchess]. In Bells and Pomegranates, First Series. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
2. Tennyson, A. (1850). In Memoriam A.H.H. (sections 54 and 56 in the usual numbering). Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
3. Barrett Browning, E. (1844). The Cry of the Children. In Poems. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
4. Hopkins, G. M. (1918). Pied Beauty; The Windhover. In R. Bridges (Ed.), Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. E: The Victorian Age). W. W. Norton.

Easter Sunday, 1915, in St Paul's Cathedral

On Easter Sunday 1915 the Dean of St Paul's read a sonnet from the pulpit, and The Times reported it. The poem was by a twenty-seven year old named Rupert Brooke, and it begins:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.

Three weeks later Brooke was dead. Not in action: he developed septicaemia from an infected mosquito bite on a troopship in the Aegean and died on 23 April 1915 in a French hospital ship moored off the Greek island of Skyros, on his way to the Gallipoli landings. He was buried that night in an olive grove. He had seen one brief engagement at Antwerp and never fought in the trenches at all.

Three years later a different soldier wrote this, and it was published only after he too was dead:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The Latin means: it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Wilfred Owen calls it a lie and capitalises the word.

Nearly every school in Britain teaches this as a simple progression: naive poems at the start, truthful poems at the end. That version is tidy, and it is not quite honest. This lesson sets the two sides out properly, with what each one actually knew and when.

What the war did, in figures

Britain declared war on 4 August 1914. The armies dug in along a line from the Channel to Switzerland by that Christmas and barely moved for three and a half years. Machine guns, barbed wire and artillery meant that attacking infantry crossed open ground against weapons that fired hundreds of rounds a minute.

On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British Army took 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,240 were killed. One day. It remains the worst day in the history of the British Army. The battle went on until November and moved the line about ten kilometres.

Conscription arrived in 1916, since volunteering could not replace losses on that scale. By the Armistice on 11 November 1918, roughly three quarters of a million men from Britain had been killed, out of a population of about forty-five million.

The case for Brooke, made properly

It is easy to sneer at The Soldier from a hundred years away, and doing so costs you the ability to read it. So take the case seriously.

First, the date. Brooke wrote the 1914 sonnets in the final months of that year, before the Somme, before gas was used on the Western Front, before conscription, when the war was expected to be short and when the men volunteering were volunteers. He was not lying about a war he had seen; he was writing about one that had not happened yet.

Second, look at what the poem actually does. It is not about killing, and nobody wins anything in it. It is about burial. The whole sonnet is an attempt to make a foreign grave bearable to the people at home, and its argument is that what England put into a man (its flowers, its rivers, its air, its friendships) is not cancelled by where he is buried. For a family that will never see a grave, that is not propaganda. It is comfort, offered in advance.

Third, notice the technical care. The sestet turns inward, from earth to mind: "this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind". The final phrase, "under an English heaven", is either the most beautiful or the most complacent line in the sequence, and it is doing exactly what the sonnet form is built for, resolving a problem in the last breath.

Why this matters: a poem is written at a date, by someone with particular knowledge. Judging 1914 by what was learned in 1917 is not criticism, it is hindsight.

The case against, made by men who were there

Siegfried Sassoon was decorated for bravery, nicknamed Mad Jack by his men, and by 1917 had decided the war was being prolonged deliberately. In July that year he wrote a public statement, Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration, refusing further service, declaring that a war of defence had become a war of aggression. It was read aloud in the House of Commons. Instead of court-martialling a decorated officer, the army sent him to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, which classified the protest as a symptom.

There he met Owen, who was recovering from shell shock, and spent the autumn reading his drafts. Owen was killed on 4 November 1918, crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal, one week before the Armistice. His parents received the telegram while the church bells were ringing for the peace. He had published five poems in his lifetime. Sassoon edited the rest into a book in 1920.

Owen's technique is worth taking apart, because the poems are not just reports of horror. Look at the opening of Dulce et Decorum Est:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Every comparison in that stanza ages the soldiers: beggars, hags. These are young men described as if they were the oldest and least dignified people in a town, before a single shell lands. Then the gas attack:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

The word ecstasy, used for panic. The gas mask's eyepieces turned into "misty panes", so the reader watches a man die through a window. And the drowning image: chlorine gas killed by flooding the lungs, so the metaphor is also a clinical fact. Owen then shifts tense: "In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning." The past tense becomes the present, because it has not stopped happening.

Then the whole poem turns into an argument aimed at one person, addressed as "My friend". It was drafted with a particular recruiting poet in mind. Owen withholds the Latin tag until the last two lines, so the poem is built as a long, physical refutation of a sentence the reader has not yet been shown.

Sassoon, who used a smaller knife

Sassoon works by compression. Here is The General, entire:

"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Six lines of cheerful chatter and one line that kills everybody in the poem. The rhyme scheme even sets it up: the first six lines pair off neatly, and the seventh arrives as an extra, unbalanced, with no partner. Harry and Jack are given the plainest possible names, and their last recorded words are a compliment to the man who killed them.

Base Details does the same work from the other end, imagining the speaker as one of the staff officers: "If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line to death." The poem's cruelty is in its last word: "And when the war is done and youth stone dead, I'd toddle safely home and die, in bed."

And Owen, at his quietest, in Anthem for Doomed Youth, takes the entire furniture of an English funeral and substitutes the front line for each item: no passing-bells but "the monstrous anger of the guns", no choirs but "the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells", no candles but the light in the eyes of the boys who carry the body. The last line goes home to England and finds the ritual there: "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."

The words the war left behind

The trenches pushed vocabulary into ordinary English and it never left. No man's land, an old term, became universal. Shell shock was named in a medical paper in 1915 for a condition the army first suspected of being cowardice. Over the top, washed out, in the pipeline, over by Christmas, lousy, dud, a cushy job, a blighty one, meaning a wound bad enough to send you home: the last two came into English through soldiers who had served in India, where words for pleasant and for foreign travelled back with the army.

Owen wrote a preface for the book he did not live to publish, found unfinished among his papers:

This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, dominion or power, except War. Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

The core of it: the dispute is not naivety against truth. It is a poem written before the event against poems written inside it, and the later poets won because they had the evidence.

Common misconceptions

• Brooke wrote as a liar or a fool. He wrote in late 1914, before the Somme, before gas and before conscription, and he died without seeing trench warfare. His sonnet is about burial and comfort, not about victory.
• Owen's poems were famous during the war. Five appeared in his lifetime. The book that made him the voice of the war was assembled by Sassoon and published in 1920, two years after his death.
• Sassoon was punished for his declaration. The army chose to treat a decorated officer's protest as illness and sent him to a hospital, which removed its force more effectively than a trial would have done.
• The war poets were pacifists who refused to fight. Sassoon returned to the front after Craiglockhart, and Owen went back voluntarily and won the Military Cross. Both thought their place was with their men.

Write the period essay

Prompt: Choose two poems from this module that treat the same subject from opposite positions, and show how each poem's form serves its argument. Argue from exact quotation. One paragraph, about 190 words.

Model paragraph: Brooke and Owen both write about a soldier's body, and their forms decide what each body is allowed to be. Brooke uses a sonnet, a form whose whole business is resolution, and his dead man becomes soil: "there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England." The line is smooth, the vowels are long, and the grammar quietly converts a corpse into territory, which is exactly the consolation a family without a grave needs. Owen refuses the resolution. Dulce et Decorum Est runs in ragged stanzas of unequal length and holds its title back until the final two lines, so that the reader meets the body first and the slogan afterwards: "His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin." The comparison is to something already damned and already tired of itself, which allows no upward turn at all. Brooke's form promises that the ending will make sense of what came before. Owen's form is built so that nothing can, and the Latin motto, when it finally arrives, has already been buried under four stanzas of evidence.

The takeaway

• Brooke wrote in 1914, died of sepsis before reaching a battlefield, and his sonnet is about a grave, not a victory.
• 1 July 1916 cost the British Army 57,470 casualties in a day, and no poetry written afterwards could sound like 1914.
• Owen ages his soldiers with his first comparisons, shows the death through a gas mask, and slips into the present tense because the dream has not ended.
• Sassoon compresses: six chatty lines and a seventh that has no rhyming partner and kills everyone in the poem.
• Anthem for Doomed Youth replaces each part of a funeral with the sound of the front, then returns to England for the blinds.
• Owen's preface refuses heroes and glory and names the subject as war and the pity of war.
• In short: a poem's date and the poet's position are evidence, and reading war poetry without them produces sentiment instead of judgement.

Sources

1. Brooke, R. (1915). The Soldier. In 1914 and Other Poems. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
2. Owen, W. (1920). Dulce et Decorum est; Anthem for Doomed Youth; Preface. In S. Sassoon (Ed.), Poems by Wilfred Owen. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
3. Sassoon, S. (1918). The General; Base Details. In Counter-Attack and Other Poems. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
4. Battle of the Somme. (n.d.). In Wikipedia (first-day casualty figures). en.wikipedia.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. F: The Twentieth Century and After). W. W. Norton.

One year, three books

On 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday, James Joyce was handed the first two printed copies of Ulysses in Paris, brought from the printer in Dijon on the morning train. In October the same year a poem of 434 lines called The Waste Land filled the opening issue of a new London quarterly. And in the same period Virginia Woolf was working up a short story about a woman walking down Bond Street to buy gloves, which would grow into a novel.

Within three years, the rules that had governed the English novel and the English poem for a century had been broken by three people who knew each other's work. This lesson is about what exactly was broken, and what replaced it.

Why the old contract stopped working

Some of the reasons are in the last lesson. Britain came out of the war with roughly three quarters of a million dead, and no nineteenth-century sentence about providence or progress survived that intact. In 1921 the Anglo-Irish Treaty took most of Ireland out of the United Kingdom, which mattered enormously to a novelist from Dublin. Women over thirty got the vote in 1918 and the rest got it in 1928.

Ideas shifted too. In 1919 an eclipse expedition produced observations that matched Einstein's prediction rather than Newton's, and the newspapers announced that space was curved. Freud's argument that a mind contains a great deal it does not know about itself reached English readers steadily through the 1910s and 1920s; Woolf's own Hogarth Press became his English publisher. If the self is not transparent even to itself, a narrator who calmly explains a character's motives starts to look like a convention rather than a truth.

Set the two contracts side by side.

Remember: modernism is not a mood. It is a set of decisions about who narrates, how time runs, and what counts as something happening.

Joyce, and the moment that shows

Joyce left Ireland at twenty-two and spent the rest of his life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris writing about Dublin street by street. Dubliners, fifteen stories, took nine years to reach print because printers and publishers kept refusing it, partly over naming real shops and a dead king. It came out in 1914.

His method has a name he borrowed from theology: the epiphany, a showing-forth, in which an ordinary moment suddenly reveals what a life is like. Watch how little has to happen. In Araby a boy is in love with a friend's sister, promises to bring her something from a bazaar, is delayed by his uncle, arrives as the stalls are closing, and cannot afford anything anyway. The story ends:

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

No event. A boy stands in a dark hall having bought nothing, and the story's whole content is what he now understands about himself. That is the modernist bargain in miniature: plot shrinks, the inside expands.

The last story, The Dead, closes with a man watching snow through a hotel window after learning that his wife once loved a boy who died for her:

It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Read the last sentence aloud and listen to what it does. "Falling faintly" and then "faintly falling": the same two words reversed, which makes the sentence turn back on itself and slow down, exactly like snow settling. The vocabulary is plain and the syllables are long. And the camera pulls back in stages, from one grave, to the crosses, to the thorns, to the universe, to everybody who has ever lived. Ten years earlier an English novel would have told you what Gabriel decided to do next. This one just widens until it includes you.

Ulysses does the same thing at enormous scale. One day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin, following an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom, with each episode shadowing a stage of Homer's Odyssey. It was banned as obscene in the United States until a federal judge ruled in its favour in 1933, and in Britain for years after that.

Woolf, and the luminous halo

Woolf set out the case in an essay, Modern Fiction, collected in 1925. Her complaint about the novelists just before her is that they furnish a life without ever getting inside one:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

A gig lamp is the lamp on a light carriage: separate, regular, evenly spaced. That is a plot, one event neatly following another. A halo has no edges and no order. Her instruction follows: "Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall".

Here is the method working, from the 1923 story that became Mrs Dalloway. A woman steps into the street and the clock strikes:

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself. Big Ben was striking as she stepped out into the street. It was eleven o'clock and the unused hour was fresh as if issued to children on a beach ... A happy childhood, and it was not to his daughters only that Justin Parry had seemed a fine fellow (weak of course on the Bench); flowers at evening, smoke rising; the caw of rooks falling from ever so high, down down through the October air, there is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back; or a cup with a blue ring.

Track the movement. Street, clock, an image of a fresh hour, a beach, children, her own childhood, her father, an aside about his work as a magistrate, rooks in October, and then a leaf of mint and a cup with a blue ring, which are the two most concrete objects in the paragraph and belong to no scene we have been shown. Then the next sentence drops her back on the kerb with a horse nearly on top of her. Perhaps eight seconds of clock time; an entire life inside them.

The tool is one you met in Lesson 11: free indirect style, Austen's device for reporting a room's opinion in the narrator's grammar. Woolf takes the same technique and does not come out of it. Instead of dipping into a judgement for one sentence, she stays inside a head for pages, and the narrator's sentences become the shape of somebody's attention.

The novel that grew out of that story, Mrs Dalloway of 1925, covers one day in June. Clarissa Dalloway buys flowers and gives a party. In a parallel line that never touches hers, Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran who cannot stop seeing a friend killed in Italy, is sent to doctors who tell him he has nothing the matter with him, and kills himself. The news reaches Clarissa at her party, from a doctor making conversation. The war lesson you have just finished is standing in the room.

Woolf also ran a printing press with her husband Leonard, setting type by hand, and in 1929 published A Room of One's Own, which argues that a woman needs money and private space before she can write fiction, and invents a sister for Shakespeare, equally gifted, to show what would have become of her.

Eliot, and a poem made of pieces

Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American who came to London in 1914 and spent eight years working at Lloyds Bank. The Waste Land appeared in 1922, cut to roughly half its drafted length by Ezra Pound, whom Eliot thanked on the dedication page as the better craftsman. It opens:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Four lines and already an argument: spring hurts, because growth disturbs what had settled. Notice that three of the four lines end on a participle, breeding, mixing, stirring, so each line spills into the next and nothing is allowed to finish.

The rest of the poem does something English poetry had not done before. There is no single speaker and no continuous scene. It moves between a German aristocrat's holiday, a fortune teller's cards, a typist's bedsit, two women talking in a pub at closing time, the Thames, and fragments in German, French, Italian and Sanskrit, with the poet's own notes printed at the back. The method is collage: pieces of a broken culture set beside each other without a narrator to join them.

Eliot's later poems, including the long sequence he completed during the second war, are still in copyright, so this course names them rather than printing them. Borrow The Complete Poems and Plays from a library and read Journey of the Magi first, which is short and immediately comprehensible.

Key idea: Joyce, Woolf and Eliot all take the connecting tissue out. What remains is a mind, a moment or a fragment, and the reader has to do the joining that a Victorian narrator used to do for you.

Common misconceptions

• Stream of consciousness means writing without rules. These pages are heavily controlled. Woolf knows precisely when to drop you back onto the kerb, and Joyce's most famous sentences are rhythmically exact.
• Modernist writers made things difficult on purpose. The difficulty follows from a decision: if you refuse to step outside a character's mind, you cannot pause to explain who anyone is.
• Nothing happens in these books. A suicide, an adultery, a marriage and a death occur in Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses. They simply are not announced, and no narrator tells you what to feel about them.
• Modernism began in 1922. Dubliners is 1914 and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is 1916. What 1922 changed is that the movement stopped being ignorable.

Recap

• The modernist contract moves the narration inside one mind, compresses time to a day, and counts a thought as an event.
• Joyce's epiphany lets a boy standing in an empty bazaar carry an entire story.
• The end of The Dead slows itself by reversing two words and widens from one grave to everybody living and dead.
• Woolf's gig lamps against a luminous halo is a complaint about plot, and her Bond Street paragraph is the alternative in action.
• Free indirect style is an eighteenth and nineteenth-century tool used continuously instead of occasionally.
• The Waste Land works by collage, with no single speaker and no joining narrator, and Pound cut it to shape.
• What matters here: when a book refuses to explain, that refusal is the technique, and your job as a reader changes from following to assembling.

Sources

1. Joyce, J. (1914). Dubliners. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Woolf, V. (1925). Modern Fiction. In The Common Reader. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
3. Woolf, V. (1923). Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. The Dial, 75. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
4. Eliot, T. S. (1922). The Waste Land. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. F: The Twentieth Century and After). W. W. Norton.

June 1948, the landing stage at Tilbury

A converted German troopship, taken by Britain as a prize of war and renamed HMT Empire Windrush, tied up at Tilbury on the Thames in June 1948 carrying 1,027 passengers and two stowaways who had boarded in Trinidad, Jamaica, Mexico and Bermuda. Most were West Indian. A good number had served in the Royal Air Force during the war and were coming back to a country they had already defended.

They were not immigrants in law. The British Nationality Act, passed the same year, confirmed that people across the colonies and Commonwealth were citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies, with the right to live and work in Britain. They arrived to a country that was still rationing food, short of a million houses, and advertising in the Caribbean for workers to staff a health service it had founded that July.

Two ships had already brought West Indian passengers the previous year, so the Windrush was not first. It became the name for the whole generation anyway, and that generation rewrote English literature.

How an empire ends, in dates

At its greatest extent the British Empire governed something close to a quarter of the world's people. Within thirty years almost all of it was gone.

• 15 August 1947. India and Pakistan become independent and the subcontinent is partitioned. Up to twenty million people are displaced; the death toll is disputed and published estimates range from two hundred thousand to two million.
• 1956. Britain and France, with Israel, attack Egypt over the Suez Canal and are forced to withdraw under American and Soviet pressure. It is the moment Britain discovers it can no longer act alone.
• 1957 to 1963. Ghana, then Nigeria, then Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, then Kenya, become independent, along with much else.
• 3 February 1960. Harold Macmillan tells the South African parliament in Cape Town that "The wind of change is blowing through this continent", and that the growth of national consciousness is a political fact whether anyone likes it or not.

And then the reverse current. People invited to rebuild a damaged country, drive its buses and nurse in its hospitals found the welcome cooling within a decade. The Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968 narrowed the right the 1948 Act had given. Race Relations Acts in 1965, 1968 and 1976 made discrimination in housing and employment unlawful, in stages, because it was widespread. In 2018 it emerged that people who had arrived as children on those ships had been asked by the Home Office to document a status they had held by law since 1948; some lost jobs and homes, and some were deported.

The point: the movement of people into Britain after 1948 is the same history as the movement of British power outward before it. You cannot teach one half.

Larkin, and a deliberately smaller England

Philip Larkin worked as a university librarian in Hull and published three thin books of poems across thirty years. He belonged loosely to a group of 1950s writers called the Movement, whose programme was almost the reverse of the modernist one: plain speech, regular rhyme and metre, ordinary English subjects, and deep suspicion of anything that sounded like a grand gesture.

His poems are set in a railway carriage on a Saturday in summer, in a hospital, in an empty church, in front of an advertisement. The most quoted line he wrote is seven words long: "What will survive of us is love." It is carved on cards and read at funerals. Read the poem it comes from and you find that Larkin has spent the previous lines saying that the stone couple on the tomb have been misread by everyone who has looked at them, and that he flags the famous sentence in advance as an almost-instinct, almost true. He wrote the most consoling line in postwar English poetry and put two hedges in front of it.

His work is still in copyright, so borrow the Collected Poems from a library. Read The Whitsun Weddings first. And read it knowing that when Larkin's letters were published in 1992 they showed a private vocabulary of racism and misogyny, and that readers have been arguing ever since about what to do with a body of poems written by a man like that. You do not have to settle that argument to read the poems, but you should not be surprised by it.

Heaney, and a pen held like a spade

Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 on a farm in County Derry in Northern Ireland, the eldest of nine children, and published his first book in 1966. Two years later the conflict usually called the Troubles began in the place he came from, and he spent decades writing about violence without ever writing propaganda for either side. He won the Nobel Prize in 1995.

The first poem in his first book watches his father digging a flower bed and remembers his grandfather cutting turf on a bog, then turns at the end to what the poet has in his own hand instead of a spade. Its last line is four words: "I'll dig with it."

Heaney's vocabulary leans hard on short, consonant-heavy English words with Old English and Norse roots: squelch, slap, clot, curt. In 1999 he published a translation of Beowulf that became a bestseller, which means the circle of this course closes with a poet from a Derry farm putting the oldest poem in English back into circulation.

The argument about the language itself

In 1958, two years before Nigerian independence, Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, the story of Okonkwo, a wrestler and farmer in an Igbo community, and of what happens when missionaries and a British district commissioner arrive. The novel ends with the commissioner deciding that the whole life he has just destroyed will make a useful paragraph in the book he is writing.

The title comes from a poem written in 1919 by an Irishman watching Europe come apart after the war, and it is out of copyright, so here it is:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

A Nigerian novelist takes a line from W. B. Yeats about European collapse and points it at what Europe did in Africa. That is not a decoration. It is a claim about who owns the tradition.

Achebe pressed the claim further in 1977 in a lecture arguing that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, long taught as an anti-imperial novel, treats Africa as a backdrop and Africans as scenery. The argument has not settled, and you will meet it again if you study that book.

Underneath sits a harder question. Should a Nigerian, or a Kenyan, or a Jamaican write in the language of the people who ruled them? The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o eventually answered no and began publishing in Gikuyu. Achebe answered yes, on the condition that the English be altered to carry a weight it was not built for. Both answers are serious, and the books on both sides are worth reading.

The novel written back

The writers below are all in copyright, so this course names them, says what they do, and sends you to a library.

• Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956). Caribbean migrants in a cold, unwelcoming London. The decisive choice is technical: Selvon writes the narration itself, not only the dialogue, in a Caribbean English. The voice telling the story is not standard, which means the book does not hold its characters at arm's length.
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981). A narrator born at the exact stroke of Indian independence, with a thousand other children born in that hour, each with a strange gift. National history told as a noisy family saga with magic in it. It won the Booker and then won again in later votes for the best of the prize's winners.
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989). An English butler drives across the West Country in 1956 and, in the course of insisting that everything was for the best, reveals a wasted life and an employer who admired the wrong politics in the 1930s. If you remember the Duke of Ferrara, you already know how the machinery works. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in 2017.
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000). Written in her early twenties, set in north-west London, following two families across three generations, and very funny about the gap between what parents intend and what their children become.
• Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004), which tells the Windrush arrival from four points of view, and Derek Walcott, the St Lucian poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1992 and rewrote Homer as a Caribbean fishing village.

Put these beside the earlier books in this course and the whole shelf changes. Crusoe is shipwrecked on a slaving voyage. Rochester's comfort in Jane Eyre is paid for by a Jamaican fortune and a Creole wife locked upstairs. The estate in Mansfield Park is supported by an Antiguan plantation. Empire was never in the background of English literature. It was paying for the house.

Worth holding on to: the writers who arrived after 1948 did not join English literature from outside. They were already inside it, and they said so in the language it was written in.

Common misconceptions

• Postcolonial writing is a separate subject from British literature. These novels were written in Britain, published in London, shortlisted for British prizes and taught in British schools. They are the main line, not an appendix.
• The Windrush passengers were foreigners arriving without permission. They were British subjects with a legal right of entry, and many were veterans of the Royal Air Force.
• Empire only becomes a literary subject after 1945. It is in Defoe in 1719, in Austen in 1814 and in Bronte in 1847. What changes after 1945 is who is holding the pen.
• Postwar British poetry simply continued modernism. The Movement poets of the 1950s deliberately went back to plain speech and regular rhyme, which is a reaction against Eliot rather than a continuation of him.

Where this leaves us

• The Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948 with 1,027 passengers, arriving as citizens under an Act passed that year.
• Partition in 1947 displaced up to twenty million people; Suez in 1956 ended Britain's ability to act alone; Macmillan announced the wind of change in 1960.
• The rights granted in 1948 were narrowed in 1962 and 1968, and the consequences were still producing deportations in 2018.
• Larkin writes plainly, rhymes strictly, and hedges his most famous consolation twice before offering it.
• Heaney turns a farm and a border into poems built from short, hard English words, and ends by translating Beowulf.
• Achebe takes his title from Yeats and his argument from inside an Igbo village, and raises the question of what language to write in at all.
• Key idea: English after 1948 is a language with many owners, and the books that matter most in the period were written by people the earlier books had described from outside.

Sources

1. Yeats, W. B. (1920). The Second Coming. In Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
2. HMT Empire Windrush. (n.d.). In Wikipedia (passenger numbers and 1948 voyage). en.wikipedia.org.
3. Partition of India. (n.d.). In Wikipedia (displacement and disputed death tolls). en.wikipedia.org.
4. Wind of Change (speech). (n.d.). In Wikipedia (Macmillan, Cape Town, 3 February 1960). en.wikipedia.org.
5. Greenblatt, S. (Ed.). (2018). The Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed., Vol. F: The Twentieth Century and After). W. W. Norton.

Eight lines, a thousand years

Here, in date order, is one thing said about death in each of the periods you have worked through.

• Around the year 1000, the last words of Beowulf, in Francis Gummere's translation: the Geats said of their dead king that "of all the kings of earth, of men he was mildest and most beloved, to his kin the kindest, keenest for praise."
• 1609, Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet: "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
• 1633, John Donne: "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die."
• 1751, Thomas Gray, on the graves of villagers: "The Paths of Glory lead but to the Grave."
• 1850, Tennyson, four stanzas into an attempt at comfort: "Behold! we know not anything."
• 1920, Wilfred Owen, on boys killed in France: "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds."

These are not six opinions about dying. They are six different jobs handed to a poem, and the difference between them is the most interesting thing on the page. This lesson turns that observation into an essay, step by step, and then prints the finished essay so you have something exact to measure your own against.

Step 1: cut the question down until it can be answered

Start with the question most students would write: How do British writers deal with death? That cannot be answered in eight hundred words, or eight hundred pages. It invites summary, and summary is where essays go to die.

Narrow it once: What does each poem say happens to the person who has died? Better, because now there is something to look for.

Narrow it again, into a question with an axis: Where does each poem put the dead, and who is responsible for keeping them there? That version does work for you. It sorts the evidence before you write a word, and it makes disagreement between the texts visible instead of leaving you to assert that they are all moving in some way.

Why this matters: a good comparative question is not a topic. It is an instrument that separates your texts from one another.

Step 2: choose texts that are genuinely comparable

Three or four is plenty for eight hundred words. Choose works that do the same job differently, rather than works that merely share a noun. Spread the dates so that the changes are visible. And choose texts you can quote exactly, from a copy you have open, not from memory.

For this essay the choice is Beowulf, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, Donne's tenth Holy Sonnet, Gray's Elegy and Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth: roughly one per period of this course, all public domain, all quotable to the word.

Step 3: read each one on its own terms before comparing anything

This is the step people skip, and skipping it produces essays made of adjectives. Work each text until you can say what it claims.

Beowulf. The poem's final sentence is not a prayer and not a prophecy. It is a report of what the dead king's followers said while standing round his barrow. The Christian poet has just spent three thousand lines on a pagan world, and the last thing he gives that world is reputation spoken aloud by survivors. Gummere's word "praise" translates the Old English lof, which means fame or renown, and lof is what the poem offers instead of an afterlife.

Sonnet 18. Shakespeare promises the young man will escape death, and then, unusually, names the mechanism. The last line contains the word "this" twice: "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." This is the poem. Not the soul, not heaven, not memory in general, but a printed object that strangers will read. The boast is testable, and four hundred years on it is still holding.

Donne, Holy Sonnet 10. A lawyer's poem. Donne puts death in the dock, denies its reputation ("thou art not so"), demotes it to a servant of other forces ("Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men"), points out that opium works better, and then executes it: "death, thou shalt die." Every move depends on one belief, stated in the line before: "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally." Take the resurrection away and the argument collapses. Donne is not braver than the Beowulf poet; he is borrowing a certainty the earlier poem did not have.

Gray's Elegy. Nobody in this poem has a name. The subject is a churchyard full of farm labourers, and the poem's interest is precisely that no one wrote about them: "Can storied Urn or animated Bust Back to its Mansion call the fleeting Breath?" The answer is no. Gray offers no heaven and no fame, and what he puts in their place is the poem's own attention to people who had none.

Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth. Every item of a funeral is named and refused: no passing-bells, no prayers, no candles, no pall. In their place Owen puts the sounds of the front and then, in the last line, a family in England closing the curtains at dusk. There is no doctrine anywhere in it. The only thing performed for the dead is a domestic gesture by people who are not there.

Step 4: line the evidence up on one axis

Look at the middle column and a shape appears that nobody planned: the guarantor moves outward from the warrior band, to God, to the reader, and finally to a family drawing a blind, which is the smallest and least official of all of them. That shape is your thesis. You did not invent it; the table found it.

Step 5: build paragraphs from ideas, not from authors

The commonest structural mistake is a paragraph per writer in date order. That produces a list with a conclusion bolted on. Organise instead by the stages of your argument, and let each paragraph carry two or three texts.

1. Claim: the question is not whether these poems console, but who they think is doing the consoling.
2. Paragraph on the earliest answer: survival by reputation, and who has to be alive for it to work (Beowulf, and then Shakespeare's variation on it).
3. Paragraph on the answer that needs no living witnesses at all (Donne), and what it costs when belief weakens (Tennyson).
4. Paragraph on what is left when neither fame nor doctrine is available (Gray, Owen).
5. Close on what changed and what did not.

Step 6: quote short, and comment on words

Three rules. Quote no more than you intend to discuss. Put the quotation inside a sentence of your own so the grammar runs through it. And comment on a particular word, not on the general feeling: "the word slave demotes death from a power to an employee" is criticism; "this quote shows death is not scary" is not.

The model essay

Question: Where does English poetry put the dead, and who is made responsible for keeping them there? Argue from at least three texts written at least a century apart.

English poems about death disagree less about what dying is than about who is left holding the responsibility afterwards, and following that question from the Old English period to the trenches shows the job passing steadily into smaller and less official hands.

The oldest answer in English is that the dead survive in other people's mouths. Beowulf ends not with a prayer but with a report of speech: the king's followers said that "of all the kings of earth, of men he was mildest and most beloved, to his kin the kindest, keenest for praise." The word translated as praise is the Old English lof, meaning renown, and the poem has spent three thousand lines showing why a warrior culture needs it: a man who has been generous in a hall is remembered by the men who ate there. The guarantee is entirely human and entirely fragile. It lasts as long as the survivors do, and the poem's long digressions about feuds and burned halls make clear how long that usually is.

Shakespeare keeps the same mechanism and replaces the witnesses. Sonnet 18 promises that "death brag thou wander'st in his shade" will not apply to the young man, and then does something the Beowulf poet could not: it names the device. "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." The pronoun this is the poem, printed and sold, and the survivors it relies on are readers who have not been born. That is a technological answer to mortality rather than a religious one, and it depends on an industry, a language and a reading public rather than on a hall full of retainers.

Donne removes the need for witnesses altogether. Holy Sonnet 10 is built like a case at law: death's reputation is denied, its status reduced to "slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men", and its one skill shown to be available more cheaply from "poppie, or charmes". The word slave is the hinge, because it demotes death from a power to an employee, and an employee can be dismissed. The dismissal comes in the couplet, "One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die", and it rests entirely on the resurrection. Donne sounds more confident than the Beowulf poet because he has borrowed a guarantor who cannot die. Two centuries later Tennyson shows what happens when the loan is called in: In Memoriam reaches for the same consolation, cannot hold it, and says so in four words, "Behold! we know not anything."

What remains when neither fame nor doctrine is available is attention, and it comes from people with no authority at all. Gray's churchyard contains nobody worth commemorating by the standards of the previous three poems, which is his subject: no urn or bust can "Back to its Mansion call the fleeting Breath", and the labourers under the yews were never famous and are not promised heaven. The poem itself is the only notice they receive. Owen finishes the movement. Anthem for Doomed Youth names every part of a funeral and refuses each one, replacing bells with guns and choirs with shells, and then leaves the whole weight of the matter to a household: "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds." A family closing a curtain at dusk is smaller than a warrior band, a printing press or a God, and it is the only mourner Owen will vouch for.

The direction of travel is unmistakable and it is not simply a decline of faith, since Donne in 1633 is far more certain than the Christian poet of Beowulf six centuries earlier. What changes is the size of the institution a poem is willing to trust. The guarantor shrinks from a nation's memory, to a church's doctrine, to an anonymous reader, to two people at a window in a house nobody will ever name, and English poetry keeps promising that the dead are held by somebody, while steadily lowering the rank of whoever is holding them.

The core of it: the essay above contains no sentence that could appear in an essay on a different subject, and every quotation is short enough to be discussed word by word.

Common misconceptions

• Comparing means finding similarities. Comparing means finding a question that makes the differences mean something. Similarity on its own is a coincidence.
• Long quotations prove you have read the text. They prove the opposite, because nothing in them is discussed. Quote the three words you intend to analyse.
• Religious confidence declines steadily over the centuries. Donne in 1633 is far more certain than Beowulf around 1000, and Larkin's Aubade in 1977 refuses every consolation in the list, including bravery. The line is not straight.
• An essay must avoid the word I. A clear claim in your own voice is not the problem. Unevidenced opinion is, and it reads the same in any grammatical person.

What to carry forward

• Narrow a topic into a question with an axis: not what do these say about X, but where do they put X and who is responsible.
• Read each text in its own terms before comparing, and write down what it actually claims.
• Lay the evidence out in a table; the pattern in the columns is usually your thesis.
• Build paragraphs around stages of an argument, never one author per paragraph in date order.
• Quote briefly, inside your own grammar, and comment on specific words.
• Fourteen centuries of English writing sit behind you now: a burned manuscript, a Southwark inn, a bare stage, a blind republican, a calm proposal about children, a ruined abbey, a fog in Chancery, a gas attack, a woman buying gloves, and a ship at Tilbury.
• Worth holding on to: every technique in this course exists because a writer had a problem that the available forms could not solve, and the solutions are still lying around for you to use.

Sources

1. Anonymous. (1910). Beowulf (F. B. Gummere, Trans.). In The Harvard Classics. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
2. Shakespeare, W. (1609). Sonnet 18. In The Sonnets. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org.
3. Donne, J. (1633). Holy Sonnet 10. In Holy Sonnets. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
4. Gray, T. (1751). An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
5. Tennyson, A. (1850). In Memoriam A.H.H. (section 54). Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.
6. Owen, W. (1920). Anthem for Doomed Youth. In Poems by Wilfred Owen. Wikisource, en.wikisource.org.