Term
| The Lake Isle of Innisfree |
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Definition
William Butler Yeats
Irish
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1892)
Genre & Form: pastoral
Characters: 1st person narrator
Summary: Longs to go to this island, be alone, and experience harmony with nature; from the perspective in the city, "pavements grey"
Themes: Nature is healing, happy, harmonious vs. City
Relevance: Earliest poem on the list, most optimistic; His work moves from individual, personal, perspective to broader, universal, scope and pessimism |
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William Butler Yeats
Adam's Curse (1903)
Genre & Form: heroic couplets
Characters: (male) speaker, love/wife, her friend
Summary: speaker talks about how much hard work it takes to write good poetry, but most don't appreciate it; friend comments that women understand working hard to be beautiful; speaker contemplates his work at loving his wife (in a courtly love way) but it failed; moon described as weary
Themes: Adam's curse to labor; Achieving beauty (poetry, physical, love) requires labor; labor/beauty; humanity is tired from the labor |
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William Butler Yeats
The Second Coming (1919)
Genre & Form:
Characters: 1st person narrator, "rough beast" "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born" (lion body, man head)
Summary: "the widening gyre", "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold"
Themes: modernity, decline, fragmentation, failure of religion and God (not the 2nd coming of Christ but a terrible beast) |
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William Butler Yeats
Sailing to Byzantium (1926)
Genre & Form: traditional, old form, iambic pentameter
Characters: 1st person narrator
Summary: "that is no country for old men" (the world of the young); aging narrator seeks to shed his dying body and move his soul on to eternal life in Byzantium
Themes: commemorating the soul in art; art can bear witness to the past; aging; art, immortality, and the human spirit
Relevance: statement on the agony of old age, and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is “fastened to a dying animal” (the body) |
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William Butler Yeats
Leda and the Swan (1924)
Genre & Form: sonnet
Characters: Leda, Swan (Zeus in disguise)
Summary: Description of rape; Foreshadowing of murder of Agamemnon by her daughter Clytemnestra; Question: Did she gain any knowledge or power from this?
Themes: Passing on of evil, historical patterns (esp. w/ classical allusion)
Relevance: Classically this story isn't a rape, but a seduction; Could be a beginning to the Second Coming, rape and birth leads onto birth of the beast |
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William Butler Yeats
Easter, 1916 (1916)
Genre & Form: elegy, lyric poem
Characters: 1st person narrator, dead revolutionaries
Summary: "Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart"; "Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."
Themes: Immortalizing the dead in art; Power of art to bring attention to political issue; physical brutality of the uprising vs. statements made in art
Connections: Easter Rising was Irish uprising against British rule |
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William Butler Yeats
Purgatory (1939)
Genre & Form: blank verse, tragedy
Characters: A boy, an old man, (in imagination) man's father and mother
Summary: Setting: a ruined house and a bare tree; Old man tells story of family's past: wealthy mother marries lowly groom, dies in childbirth, drunk father squanders the fortune, family declines, son murders him; Old man raises boy poorly, murders him to end the blood line and stop the reliving of transgressions in purgatory
Themes: cycles of history, sin/evil passed down, pessimism |
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Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
Soldier during WWI
They
Genre & Form: anti-war poem
Characters: the Bishop, they (the soldiers, "boys"),
Summary: 1st stanza Bishop propagandizing the positive change the soldiers will go through from attacking "anti-Christ", 2nd stanza soldiers explain change is horrible, detailed physical injury
Themes: Harsh realities of war, failure of religion, failure of God?
Relevance: movement into Modernism |
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Siegfried Sassoon
Everyone Sang
Genre & Form:
Characters: speaker, "everyone"
Summary: Everyone "burst out singing", "I was filled with such delight as prisoner birds must find in freedom", "beauty came like the setting sun", "horror drifted away", singing as bird song, nature and bird imagery
Themes: closeness of life to death, the need for hope
Relevance: possible reading of the last moments of a dying soldier |
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George Bernard Shaw (dates)
Pertinent Biography
Bio
Heartbreak House (performed 1920, New York)
Genre & Form: satiric, mix of farce and tragedy, lampoons British society
Characters: Shaw narrator in intro, Ellie, Mazzini (dad), Mangan (fiance); Hesione, Captain Shotover (father), Hector (husband), Lady Utterword (sister), Randal (bro-in-law); Robber, Nurse Guinness (maid, robber's wife)
Summary: Intro: Heartbreak House (upper class of art and pleasure, ineffectual in world), Horseback Hall (upper class, stupid, brutish, wields power), Describes climate before and during war: Citizens sheep to propaganda, Anti-war: soldiers are slaughtered children, Religion is unhelpful and insincere, War destroys Art; Play: Eve of WWI, intricate relationships shifting with love, bombs welcomed at the end
Themes: House symbolic of British society, characters diff. part of society; Can't trust to Providence alone, must have personal responsibility; Appearances are deceiving |
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| The Playboy of the Western World |
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Definition
John Millington Synge (dates)
Irish
The Playboy of the Western World (performed 1907, Dublin)
Genre & Form: Comedy with satiric and tragic elements (of working class)
Characters: Christy, Old Mahon, Pageen, Shawn, Widow Quin, Father Riley, girls
Summary: Pageen engaged to Shawn but thinks him cowardly (always concerned w/how Riley will judge him), Christy arrives and wows everyone with story of killed father, Christy wins all games at festival, P and C in love, Mahon shows up alive, everyone hates C for lying, C beats father, everyone turns on C for their involvement in murder, Mahon alive (but crazy) and will go with C to travel and live off their tale, P crushed
Themes: Escapism, Need for excitement, Amorality, No happy ending
Relevance: The Playboy Riots at 1st performance, Irish Nationalism at a fever |
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Joseph Conrad (dates)
Pertinent Biography
Bio
***Heart of Darkness (1899)
Genre & Form: frame narrative, adventure tale, colonial, Romance structure?
Characters: Charles Marlow, Kurtz, chief accountant, general manager, killed black man, Kurtz's black mistress, Russian (worships Kurtz), Kurtz's fiancé
Summary: Unknown sailor hears M tell tale on ship as sun sets; 1st station: accountant superficial fool, blacks mistreated and murdered for ivory, hears rumors of legendary K; 2nd station: manager feels his power threatened by K's, wants K dead, likely sinks ship, M repairs ship, travels up river to K; attacked from shore, sympathetic death of black ship worker, black heads on pikes at K's station; K sick and dying, learn that he is god/king among natives; "the horror, the horror"; M can't tell truth to fiancé
Themes: Imperialism, greed, madness, darkness of European treatment of natives, darkness in all humans for acts of evil |
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Term
| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |
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Definition
James Joyce (1882-1940)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915, serialized)
Genre & Form: kunstlerroman (artist's coming of age story), autobiographical, intellectual, religious/spiritual, philosophical awakening; realism; 3rd person
Characters: Stephen Dedalus (up to age 20), Simon (dad, Irish patriot, sentimental about the past), Mary (mom, religious), Emma Clery (his idealized love figure)
Summary: S sickly, picked on, normal troubles of adolescence, also pressures of religion and nation, extreme pious phase, extreme sex phase, sees girl and birds on beach, embraces beauty and decides to become artist, plans to leave Ireland for Paris
Themes: Irishness, Catholicism, physiological realism, identity, transformation, youth, dissatisfaction, home; young man, would-be saint, would-be sinner, would-be artist
Relevance: Experimental in stream of consciousness, perspective of very young child |
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James Joyce
The Dead (1904-1907) Dubliners
Genre & Form: realist fiction, urban literature, 3rd person
Characters: Gabriel Conroy (Will he change and embrace life?), Greta (wife), Lily (housemaid), Miss Ivors (fellow university teacher), Kate and Julia (aunts), Mary Jane (cousin), Freddy (drunk), Michael
Summary: Annual aunts' dinner party; G gives L generous tip, he is awkward; dances with Ivors (proponent of Irish culture) accuses G of disinterest in Ireland, G upset; G speech of let go of past and dead and celebrate life; Gretta hears old song, reminded of past love Michael, becomes distracted; G desires Gretta as in their past courtship, wants to control her, thinks of snow and the dead
Themes: Epiphany, Life is short, Michael/Gabriel: short life of passion/long without passion; "Snow was general all over Ireland", past/present, control, Past/dead haunts present/living, but can't be divided, but we can break control/routine, live with passion |
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James Joyce
Eveline (1904-1907) Dubliners
Genre & Form: realist fiction, urban literature, 3rd person
Characters: Eveline Hill, Frank (sailor, fiancé), father, brother Harry, mother
Summary: E recalls her childhood, lives with sometimes abusive father, shop worker that scrapes by to survive; F and E will elope to Buenos Aires, father disapproves of F; promise to dying mom to care for family, mom a sad unfulfilled life, decides to escape to a new life abroad; at ship, trapped in indecision, repetitive prayer, "helpless animal"
Themes: conflict past/future, domestic/abroad, family and commitments/individuality and freedom; Epiphany: she is trapped in indecision, routine (loss of will and choice); things are imposed on her |
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Definition
E.M. Forster (1879-1970)
Pertinent Biography
Bio
Howard's End (1910)
Genre & Form: "condition of England" novel (similar to James's Realism)
Characters: Schelgel family (Margaret, Helen, Tibby) wealthy through inheritance, intellectual, Aunt Juley; Wilcox family, Henry and Ruth, Charles (wife Dolly), Paul, Evie, wealthy through industriousness, pragmatic; Leonard Bast, wife Jacky
Summary: Helen and Paul brief, scandalous affair; Schelgel's move across the street in London; Meg and Ruth friends, R dies leaves HE to Meg; Meg and H married; L poor, Henry gives bad work advice, L loses job, Helen tries to make Henry help L, affair with L, pregnant, escapes to Germany; Helen return to HE; L attacked by Charles, dies heart attack, C in prison; Helen, baby, Meg, Henry live happily at HE
Themes: "Only connect!" Fear that humans don't love each enough anymore, and challenge to try to love others and ourselves more; combating modernist fragmentation; city/country; classism; change; identity; money
Connections: Heartbreak House; Portrait of a Lady |
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D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Interest in physical intimacy, restore emphasis on the body, re-balance body/mind
Sons and Lovers (1913)
Genre & Form: kunstlerroman, semi-autobiographical, realistic fiction
Characters: Gertrude Morel, Walter, Paul, William, Annie, Arthur, Miriam (saintly), Clara (suffragette, separated from husband), Dawes
Summary: Problems in Morels' marriage; mom invested fully in William; Paul sensitive and artistic; love with Miriam, sex with M "sacrificing herself"; love with Clara; William engaged, dies, mom transfers love to P; sex with Clara "baptism of fire in passion"; mom slowly dying, P and Annie give her overdose; Miriam proposes marriage again; P considers suicide, will continue b/c mom can live on in him
Themes: Working class life in mining community; Study of family, class, sexuality; Oedipal; Mind and soul/body; Feminine/masculine |
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D.H. Lawrence
Odour of Chrysanthemums (1909)
Genre & Form: realistic fiction, short story
Characters: Elizabeth Bates, Walter (dead body), mother-in-law, kids Annie and John
Summary: Coal miners' community; E pregnant preparing meal, complains about W being a monstrous drunk, W never shows, E angry, E looks for W, suffocated in cave-in; Kids sent to bed; W carried in, E and mom wash body, E epiphany: body makes W more human, immediate, sympathetic to her, it takes two to sustain a relationship
Themes: Darkness, shadow; isolation of the soul; love; suffocation; chrysanthemums; life (immediate master), death (ultimate master) |
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| The Horse Dealer's Daughter |
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Definition
D.H. Lawrence
The Horse Dealer's Daughter (1922)
Genre & Form: realistic fiction, short story
Characters: Pervin family (3 bros), Mabel, Dr. Jack Fergusson
Summary: Over breakfast 3 bros cruel to M; parents dead, bros lost all family money and home, M has been servant in house, best bet to move with sister, won't say what she will do; J visits bro friend; M walks into bog to die, to maintain control over her life; J sees her, saves, undresses her clinically; She asks if he loves her, he suddenly realizes that he does, asks marriage; "his heart's painful kiss"; her horror that he loves her almost as strong as her horror that he doesn't
Themes: Love is wonder-full, terrifying, strange; Love means change and relinquishing control to another, sacrifice; mind/body, madonna/whore |
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