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The Jaguar

 

by Ted Hughes

 

 

   The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.

The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut

Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.

Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

 

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil

Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or

Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.

It might be painted on a nursery wall.

 

But who runs like the rest past these arrives

At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,

As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged

Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

 

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—

The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,

By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—

He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

 

More than to the visionary his cell:

His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.

 

 

 

 

 

The gorilla lay on his back,

One  hand cupped under his head,  

Like a man.

 

Like a labouring man tired with work,

A strong man with his strength burnt away

In the toil of earning a living.

 

Only of course he was not tired out with work,

Merely with boredom; his terrible strength

All burnt away by prodigal idleness.

 

A thousand days, and then a thousand days,

Idleness licked away his beautiful strength.

He having no need to earn a living.

 

It was all laid on, free of charge.

We maintained him, not for doing anything,

But for being what he was.

 

And so that Sunday morning he lay on his back,

Like a man, like a worn-out man,

One hand cupped under his terrible hard head.

 

Like a man, like a man,

One of those we maintain, not for doing anything,

But for being what they are.

 

A thousand days, and then a thousand days,

With everything laid on, free of charge,

They cup their heads in prodigal idleness.

 

Au Jardin des Plantes 

by John Wain

 

 

 

     
Here are some more texts, both poems and prose, for comparison
 
5     Compare the ways these two poems present animals in zoos.

 

 

 

 

A Comparison of  Au Jardin des Plantes  (John Wain) with  The Jaguar (Ted Hughes)

 

Both poems, about viewing animals in zoos, seem to suggest a condemnation of the practice of locking animals up. “His terrible strength All burnt away by prodigal idleness” and “a jaguar hurrying enraged Through prison darkness” describe both animals in the two poems as living a sort of hell. Both poems, too, compare their subjects in human terms - the gorilla is like a “labouring man” and the jaguar at one moment is compared to a “visionary in his cell”. The similarities of the poems, however, are outweighed by their differences, particularly in terms of the main ideas associated with each animal.

 

The most obvious difference, perhaps, is that whereas the gorilla is worn out with “prodigal idleness”, the jaguar is “On a short fierce fuse”, and it is the suppressed energy and dynamism of this particular animal which inspires Ted Hughes. Another big difference relates to the language in each poem. What we notice particularly about the first poem is the amount of repetition. Almost every phrase in the first poem, from  "lay on his back" onward, is repeated elsewhere. The effect is to reinforce the dull, repetitive nature of the gorilla's life. The comparison to a "working man" is cumulative ("like a man" is repeated in different forms five times), until by the end we suspect that the real focus of the poem is less the gorilla, than "those we maintain…..free of charge." The shift from singular gorilla to plural men ("They cup their heads") suggests criticism of a social or political system. There is even a hint of religious disapproval in the reference to Sunday morning and the repeated reference to "prodigal idleness", invoking the parable of the Prodigal Son, perhaps.

 

The language of this first poem contrasts with the second in being dryer and more pedestrian. There is a certain rhetorical extravagance in "A thousand days, and then a thousand days," with its almost Biblical rhythms, but there is also a bare simplicity about "One hand cupped under his terrible hard head." The organisation of the stanzas appears fairly random – there is no rhyme and there is no regular metre; instead the rhythmical force of the poem is built up with repetitions. It is almost an elegy ("We maintained him….. for being what he was."). By contrast, the Hughes poem is more traditionally organised with near-rhymes and lines based on iambic pentameters. The language is more extravagant and poetic ("the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear") and we are constantly given sharp comparisons and images ("Like cheap tarts…", "Is a fossil", "As a child at a dream").

           

The Jaguar starts with descriptions of other animals, who all lead bored and immobile lives, "Fatigued with idleness". This is similar to the world inhabited by the gorilla, but instead of pausing there to condemn or to draw a moral like the first writer, Hughes actively searches (we notice the personal involvement in this poem of the poet himself, hinted at in "Who runs") for the jaguar, whose inner dynamism and vitality so inspires him. "His stride is wildernesses of freedom…." and  "Over the cage floor the horizons come" give an indication of the animal's power and energy, which cannot be contained by the cage. There is a sense of excited identification and recognition here, which interests this writer. In the end, "the bang of blood in the brain…." refers to the poet himself, as witness; he is the "visionary" in his poetic "cell" ultimately, and we also, as readers, are involved, as he tries to stimulate our "deaf … ear" by his evocation.

 

There seems in the second poem, therefore, a more active and interested response to animals and their surroundings than in the first. The first line, with its ironic oxymoron of apes "adoring their fleas", is startling and engaging. The first poem might be interesting as a moralising reflection on society, but the second has a more intense sympathy with its subject – the poet has to "run" to find the cage, with its occupant, who appears to have a time-bomb in his brain, "hurrying… On a short fuse". 

            

 

 

 

 

6         Now let us look at two passages of prose. Unlike poems, extracts of prose will not be so unified. The ending of the extract (and sometimes also the beginning) may be arbitrary. The writing may tend not to seem as well shaped as poetry.

 

Nevertheless, there is a lot we can say about the quality of the writing, the narrative style, the imagery and symbolism, the syntax, the choice of words, the formation of paragraphs and sentences, the rhythms created by the patterning of words, repetitions of sounds or images, and the relationship between the narrator and the reader or the characters (or both).  

 

Consider these two passages and think about the rubric of the assignment based on them.

 

 

Compare these two openings of novels set in India, considering particularly how each writer describes the landscape to set the scene.

 

 

 

The End of the World 

 

Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting

A match between his great and second toe

And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

Pointed , and Teeny was about to cough

In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb –

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

 

And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over

Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,

There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,

There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,

There in the sudden blackness the black pall

Of nothing, nothing, nothing – nothing at all.

 

 

by Archibald McLeish

End of the World

 

The world’s end came as a small dot

           at the end of a sentence. Everyone died

without ado, and nobody cried

           enough to show the measure of it.

 

God said: “I do not love you”, quite

           quietly, but with a final note;

it seemed the words caught in his throat,

           or else he stifled a yawn as the trite

 

phrase escaped his dust-enlivening lips.

           At least, there was no argument,

no softening tact, no lover’s cant,

           but sudden vacuum, total eclipse

 

of sense and meaning. The world had gone

           And everything on it, except the lives

all of us had to live: the wives,

           children, clocks which ticked on,

 

unpaid bills, enormous power-blocks

           chock-full of arms demanding peace,

and the prayerful in a state of grace

           pouncing on bread and wine like hawks.

 

by Tony Connots

 

 

7 B    COMPARING TEXTS  Continued...

 

 

‘On The Sea’ by John Keats

 

It keeps eternal whisperings around

Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell

Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell

Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.

Often ’tis in such gentle temper found,

That scarcely will the very smallest shell

Be moved for days from where it sometime fell,

When last the winds of heaven were unbound.

O ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,

Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;

O ye! whose ears are dinn’d with uproar rude,

Or fed too much with cloying melody,

Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth, and brood

Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!

 

1817

 

Write a critical comparison of these TWO poems, paying attention to style and form as well as ideas and feelings.

 

Comparison of  The End of the World and End of the World

 

Both poems share a similar title and both poems have an unexpectedly jokey, ironic way of viewing the end of the world. The first builds up to a climax, which is defeated by the final words of “nothing…nothing at all”, whereas the second presents us paradoxically with an ending where life seems to go on as usual. Both poems use irony to explore the idea of apocalypse for a modern world. Not least of the ironies, of course, is that though written in the past tense, the end of the world still has not arrived. Or has it?

 

The first poem seems to be set in a “circus” and the absurdity of the acts is highlighted in the first part of what is a very traditional and carefully crafted sonnet. An “armless ambidextrian” is a total nonsense, as is the idea of coughing in “waltz-time”. The “top” here is the circus “top” or tent, but it becomes a symbol of human life – a parading, absurd entertainment, which mixes danger and fun. “Ralph the lion” sounds friendly and harmless, but is “biting the neck of Madame Sossman” supposed to be serious or funny?

 

In the sestet which follows, the audience is given a more serious view (now that there is no “top”) of life and the universe. “The starless dark” already hints at the later “nothing”. Why are there no stars? Perhaps it plays on the idea of stardom in the entertainment world. Paradoxically a religious note creeps in with the “vast wings” and the “hover”, which hint at an angelic presence. The word “poise” also is very positive and suggests balance. All of these “positives”, however, are wiped out by the repeated word “nothing”, which might have started as a joke, but which ends on a grimmer note.

 

The poem suggests that beyond the false jollity and gaiety of life as “circus” excitement, the universe is cold, dark and contains “nothing” (unless the “wings” really are something”). The bleakness of this message is offset somewhat by the formal crafting of the poem, for the poem itself is not “nothing”. Nevertheless, it cannot be said to present a message of hope to the “white faces, those dazed eyes”, who seem so powerless to react. The jokey tone is ultimately grim and suggests that life is a pointless façade, a show to stop us from thinking about our real place in the universe.

 

To some extent, the second poem similarly shares this jokey, darkly ironic tone. There is the same surprise element, though it comes earlier and is even more paradoxical. Compared with the “top” blowing off, here the end is quieter, almost insignificant and entirely natural: “a small dot at the end of a sentence”. The reason for the sombre tone that follows, however, comes with the phrase: “God said ‘I do not love you’”. Since the whole predication of a Christian God is that He does love us totally, whatever we have done, there is something very disturbing here. What has happened to cause “God” to go back on his very being? The poem refuses to say, as if it were obvious enough. “God” was bored (‘”stifled a yawn”) and so “Everyone died”. However, they don’t die (and neither, strangely, does the audience seem to die in the first poem either) because “the lives all of us had to live” continue (and the poet presumably includes himself or herself in this “us”). There is something deeply negative about the aspects of this “life”, reflecting as it does our materialistic, divisive and selfish lives.

 

There is terrible irony, finally, in the “power-blocks chock-full of arms demanding peace”. How can peace be “demanded” with weapons? The last phrase of the poem shows us the apparent hypocrisy of those who think they have found a meaning of life in traditional religion. The irony is that those “in a state of grace” are “pouncing…like hawks” on the symbols of religion. The poem is therefore not just directed at modern atheism and materialism (“unpaid bills”), but also at organised religion. All of our lives run counter to the idea of “God”, with which the poem starts.

 

Compared to the first poem, it is a more telling and harder hitting poem, blaming our world for its lack of real “life”. “We” the people, are dead but we still live on. The one positive element perhaps is that the poet has chosen a traditional, rhymed and ordered ballad form to arrange these ideas. If the first poem describes an ambiguously pointless universe, the second poem shows us a world which might have had a point once, but for which we are to blame for having lost. Neither poem, however, seems to suggest that religion really offers a way out of this impasse.

 

8          Now we shall consider two poems about the sea. 

 

To The Sea    by Philip Larkin

 

To step over the low wall that divides

Road from concrete walk above the shore

Brings sharply back something known long before--

The miniature gaiety of seasides.

Everything crowds under the low horizon:

Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps,

The small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse

Up the warm yellow sand, and further off

A white steamer stuck in the afternoon--

 

Still going on, all of it, still going on!

To lie, eat, sleep in hearing of the surf

(Ears to transistors, that sound tame enough

Under the sky), or gently up and down

Lead the uncertain children, frilled in white

And grasping at enormous air, or wheel

The rigid old along for them to feel

A final summer, plainly still occurs

As half an annual pleasure, half a rite,

 

As when, happy at being on my own,

I searched the sand for Famous Cricketers,

Or, farther back, my parents, listeners

To the same seaside quack, first became known.

Strange to it now, I watch the cloudless scene:

The same clear water over smoothed pebbles,

The distant bathers' weak protesting trebles

Down at its edge, and then the cheap cigars,

The chocolate-papers, tea-leaves, and, between

 

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first

Few families start the trek back to the cars.

The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass

The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst

Of flawless weather is our falling short,

It may be that through habit these do best,

Coming to the water clumsily undressed

Yearly; teaching their children by a sort

Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought. (1969)

A

Extract from the novel  Waterland by Graham Swift

 

The guillotines are hissing in the Place de la Revolution. They have been hissing now for months and will go on hissing for some months yet. Who can stop them hissing? Who can curb their unappeasable appetite? And who can stop the hunger in the faces of the crowd who watch, wet their lips and cheer. Yes, children, this is the fact that every schoolboy knows about the French Revolution. That it was all to do with guillotines. This is what makes even the most bored and insouciant pupil find History just a little bit engrossing. That hiss-hiss of the descending blades. And yes, old gap-toothed crones really did sit and do their knitting beneath the scaffold; and, yes, there were several recorded instances of corpses that wriggled, kicked – rolled their eyes, moved their lips, screamed – after the head was severed from the body.

 

Shall we watch, children? Not just once to see what it's like, but over and over again, for months on end? Shall we watch the crop of heads mounting in the baskets? Or are you beginning to feel sick already? Are you beginning to feel that History is all made nonsense by that sensation in the pit of your stomach, that tingling in your finger-tips and that swimming feeling in your head and knees? It's called terror, children. The feeling that all is nothing. There is your subject, your lesson for today.

 

Or would you prefer to turn your back and walk away? Shall we leave the guillotines to go on working by themselves, shall we leave History to its own devices, and would you prefer, after all, a fairy-tale instead?

 

 

 

B

 

Outside History

 

There are outsiders, always. These stars –

these iron inklings of an iron January,

whose light happened

 

thousands of years before

pain did: they are, they have always been

outside history.

 

They keep their distance. Under them remains

a place where you found

you were human,

 

and a landscape in which you know you are mortal.

And a time to choose between them:

I have chosen:

 

out of myth I move to be

part of that ordeal

whose darkness is

 

only now reaching me from those fields,

those rivers, those roads clotted as

firmaments with the dead.

 

How slowly they die

as we kneel beside them, whisper in their ear.

And we are too late. We are always too late.

 

Seamus Heaney

2) Anyone who has never before visited Krishnapur, and who approaches from the east, is likely to think he has reached the end of his journey a few miles sooner than he expected. While still some distance from Krishnapur he begins to ascend a shallow ridge. From here he will see what appears to be a town in the heat distorted distance. He will see the white glitter of walls and roofs and a handsome grove of trees, perhaps even the dome of what might be a temple. Round about there will be an unending plain still, exactly as it has been for many miles back, a dreary ocean of bald earth, in the immensity of which an occasional field of sugar cane or mustard is utterly lost.

 

The surprising thing is that this plain is not quite deserted, as one might expect. As he crosses it towards the white walls in the distance the traveller may notice an occasional figure way out somewhere between the road and the horizon, a man walking with a burden on his head in one direction or another… even though, at least to the eye of a stranger, within the limit of the horizon, there does not appear to be anywhere worth walking to, unless perhaps to that distant town he has spotted; one part looks quite as good as another. But if you look closely and shield your eyes from the glare you will make out tiny villages here and there, difficult to see because they are made of the same mud as the plain they came from; and no doubt they melt back into it again during the rainy season, for there is no lime in these parts, no clay or shale that you can burn into bricks, no substance hard enough to resist the seasons over the years.

 

Sometimes the village crouches in a grove of bamboo and possesses a frightful pond with a water buffalo or two; more often there is just a well to be worked from dawn to dusk by the same two men and two bullock every single day in their lives. But whether there is a pond or not hardly matters to a traveller; in either case there is no comfort here, nothing that a European might recognize as civilization. All the more reason for him to press on, therefore, towards those distant white walls which are clearly made of bricks. Bricks are undoubtedly an essential ingredient of civilization; one gets nowhere at all without them.

 

(The Siege of Krishnapur   J.G. Farrell 1973)

1) Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off —the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

 

 

 

(A Passage to India   E.M. Forster 1924)

Two openings of novels

Here are my notes:

 

Passage 1

Mystery of the opening sentence (playing a game?).

The Caves are “extraordinary”,  so why start with the banality of the city?

The opening sentence establishes a tone of objective “guide book” information. However, this tone, becomes SO negative and discrediting, that it becomes almost funny – there is a strongly ironic tone, at any rate. (How can the Ganges “happen not to be holy here”?? What does it mean for a temple to be “ineffective”??? Why would you invite a guest to view a fine house if it was in such a filthy area???  There are glimpses of beauty and potential majesty, but it is the filth and degradation which dominates. (Is this, perhaps, a parody of the “British” view of India generally?).

Look at the way the negatives build up.The passage gives us a bit of history – obviously there was a time in the 18th c when it lay on a “business” route, and had prospered.

There is a poetic rhythm to the sentences (“So abased, so monotonous…) leading to the climax of the paragraph, where the city takes on a life of its own, persistent, horrible, but ALIVE at least.The language starts as “objective”, but soon value-judgements creep in – “monotonous”, “abased”, “excrescence” etc. The lives are NOT aided by art in the form of “decoration”. City life is seen as subsistence and survival. (Again, how ironic should we take “nor was it ever democratic”? Art is only for the rich...?)

 

Passage 2

The text, similarly starts with what seems to be “objective reporting”. However, we quickly notice that the text uses the idea of “seeming”. (Words like “likely”, “appears to be”, “perhaps”, “may” etc.)Although we would like to know what the city of Krishnapur is like (particularly since the title is “The Siege of K” and we can therefore expect a battle or else some huge threat to the city) – this information is withheld and we are instead given a picture of the monotony and the lack of vitality of the surrounding plain before we get there.

The writer establishes a rapport with his reader early on. “We” are the traveller and we are later addressed as “you” (“if you look closely...”)

There is a rhythm of negativity in this passage with “no lime....no shale.....no substance....”

The description is generalised. We could be looking here at any village on this plain, any well etc. (“Sometimes the village... more often there is just a well...”)

Clearly an ironic joke going on somewhere in the last sentence. Are “bricks” all that is needed for “civilisation”? Clearly they are essential, but what is being described here (and perhaps in the first passage implicitly too) is the idea that Indian culture at its lowest level will survive, just as “mud” survives. An idea that life can persist, even where it is most difficult for it to exist.

The reader is therefore left with this reflection (about the most basic level of Indian life) BEFORE we are allowed by the writer to “press on... towards those distant white walls” or in the first passage, before we are allowed to discover the “extraordinary” nature of the Marabar Caves.

 

Questions therefore to ponder:

How far is the reader being manipulated (and how?)? 

What sort of a "game" is each writer playing?

How ironic? How seriously should we take any of this?

How does it prepare the ground for later presentations of India/action/story etc??

There are interesting points of resemblance. What sort of differences are there (in terms of TONE OF VOICE, description, story-telling (no characters yet...)??

Why is the landscape felt to be so important...?

 

7    Now consider  and compare 2 poems about a rather surprising topic: the end of the world. 

When you have read them, consider carefully the rubric below.

A Comparison of Larkin's To the Sea with Keats' On the Sea

 

The language of each poem, right from the beginning, tells us quite a lot about the intentions in each case. "Eternal whisperings…desolate shores" summons up a romantic, mystical view of the sea, with its "mighty swell". "Low wall", "road", "concrete walk", in the second poem, all suggest a much more realistic, down-to-earth approach.

 

Keats adopts a very classical form, the sonnet, for his meditation about the sea. The first eight lines describes an idealised picture of "desolate shores" and caverns, with no human presence at all. He stresses the soothing effects of the sea with its "gentle temper", which hardly stirs "the smallest shell". In the final six lines, it is Keats himself, if anything, who disturbs the serenity of this picture with his repeated cry of "Oh ye!". Here he brings in the idea of other people, who like him, need this serenity, in contrast, apparently, with the "uproar rude" of busy city life.

 

In this idealised picture he paints, although there are details like the "smallest shell" and the "Cavern's mouth", we never have the impression that the poet is describing a real, localised place. The classical references to Hecate (for the moon) and "sea nymphs", make us feel more that this is like a Poussin painting of a classical scene, rather than a realistic description. The emotion in the poem, however, comes across very strongly. The first line, with its enjambment, emphasises the word "desolate" and later "gluts", which in itself is a powerful sounding onomatopoeia, giving a lovely idea of water noises. "Gluts", however, has to do with food, and it is interesting to note the food references: "Feast them" and "cloying melody". One has the impression that Keats almost sees this sea scene in terms of a feast for his starved appetite. The solitude and calm of the sea is felt as a relief from the stress of city life.

 

In the end, however, there is a paradox in the poet's position as he statically sits and broods, for on the one hand he has escaped from everyday reality, with its noise and stress, and he is avoiding human contact, but he nevertheless addresses his fellow human beings, exhorting them to come and do likewise. There is even a hope of titillating human company in the shape of bathing nymphs, striking quite a modern note!

 

By contrast, Larkin's poem describes a far more localised sea-scape. "Miniature gaiety" strikes a rather pejorative note, with everything crowding "under the low horizon". There are lots of people in this poem, but you feel that the poet, gloomily, could do without them. "Still going on, all of it, still going on!" Is this wonder or exasperation? One suspects that he is against the "transistors", even if they are "tame", yet the details are sharply observed – "red bathing caps", "warm yellow sand", "white steamer" – and almost lovingly related: "The small hushed waves repeated fresh collapse" (where the "s" and "sh" sounds give a very pleasant sound of the soft waves).

 

What is Larkin trying to say about the sea? His attitude is more complex than Keats'. Although he and his parents may have discovered happiness by the sea (searching for cigarette cards alone does not seem so happy, however) in the past, he is "Strange to it now" and he is aware of all the negative details like the "chocolate papers, tea-leaves… rusting soup tins". One senses that part of him despises this "half (an) annual pleasure, half (a) rite". And yet he also seems finally to approve of "teaching their children by a sort Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought". That word "ought" sounds very prim, as if this duty were a bore, but somehow necessary. The poem is on the whole grudgingly optimistic. The details of the sea and weather are beautiful ("cloudless scene", "sunlight has turned milky") but one feels that nature is spoilt by human presence. If the "white steamer" is a symbol of hope (what is it doing there "stuck in the afternoon"?), by the end of the poem it has gone. I

 

s the poem addressed "To the Sea" or is it about going "To" the sea, or both? The poet stays aloof, up on the concrete walk above the shore and deliberately crosses a barrier to join his fellow human beings. He, like Keats, is painting a scene, but it is far more detailed and realistic. However, he is not really part of it; he is a detached and rather sour commentator ("If the worst of Flawless weather is our falling short" as if we cannot hope to live up to Nature. Somewhat like Keats, nevertheless, he senses a certain magic about the sea and his picture of children "grasping at enormous air" vividly grasps how children might feel. Yet any pleasure in the sea, unlike Keats, is always counterbalanced by a dissatisfaction with other people.

 

Both are memorable poems, which explore the fascination we have for the sea, whether as a means of escape from other people or as a source of entertainment to be enjoyed with other people. The modern poem is far more uneasy in its attitudes – Larkin's poem, though conversational in its idiom "Still going on, all of it, still going on!", is very tightly controlled in its rhyme scheme, as if to counteract the sloppy scene before his eyes! If Keats' poem could be seen as an advertisement to attract XIX century tourists to the beach, then Larkins paints a gloomy picture of what happens nowadays when they get there. Yet he too, surely admits the soothing quality of the sea ("small hushed waves' repeated fresh collapse" – "fresh" sounds clean as well as repetitive) – and something has made him "step over the low wall" in the first place.

9   Finally, we shall consider two texts, one in prose, from a novel and one, a complete poem.

 

You are asked to compare them and discuss  how these texts consider the idea of History.

 

Text A and Text B

 

One way into these texts is to consider – maybe at quite a basic level – the positive or negative ideas which they generate as we read them. Look particularly at individual words or images, especially if they are insisted upon, either by their placing in a sentence or line of poetry, or else by repetitions.

 

Let's look at the first stanza of the poem (text B). The tone of the first sentence, which is short and simple, is perhaps rather resigned. “Outsiders” sounds slightly negative – we would surely rather be on the inside. We then learn that it is the stars which are “outsiders” (and taken with the title, which is repeated lower – outside history). Stars as symbols suggest guiding light. Something positive. Here, however, it is their cold, distant quality which is highlighted. “Iron inklings” sound hard and, although “inklings” suggests comprehension, the word “ink” already sounds dark and “inky”. They are contrasted with the more human aspect of “our pain”, which they predate and seem unconcerned by.

 

The tension in the poem, therefore, contrasts the cold, distant, inhuman aspect of those, who like the stars above, refuse their humanity and the need to be part of human history, and those who, like the poet, choose to become part of this “ordeal”, even though it is “always too late”. This is a serious poem, and the reference to Ireland should make us connect with the “Troubles”, the shootings, bombs and conflict the divided island has suffered.

 

Further development should look at the form of the poem, the tone (that last stanza perhaps suggests a priest kneeling beside a dying person trying to hear their confession). There is a sense of hopelessness (repetition of "too late" in the last line) but also a sense of conviction, on the part of the poetical voice, that the persona has found or chosen his place to be with those who are suffering or dying. There are no rhymes, the utterance is stark and unadorned. The enjambements tend to heighten the sense of immediacy and a real sense of personal commitment.

 

Now let's look at the prose (text A). The passage starts with an affirmation in the present continuous tense. We are invited to watch and listen to something very immediate. The repetition of “hissing”begins to create the sense that what we are witnessing (or being invited to witness) is not a simple scene, but one which is being orchestrated by the writer. The rhetorical nature oof the passage is very marked – we are being invited to respond, either with disgust or with fascination (thus becoming like the fascinated crowds referred to).

 

This is bad enough. But what is really disturbing is that we realise that the audience is not just us, as we thought, but a class of “children”. Their age is never determined, but when a “teacher” addresses a class as “children”, one would naturally assume them to be below secondary age. And this is where the real tension in the passage lies. What is a teacher doing, with a monologue, which becomes more and more inappropriate to small children?

 

We may well conclude that it is a piece of fiction and that we would need to know more about the circumstances of the lesson to judge, but already we can see that there is a black, ironic sense of humour being developed here which is very marked. The “voice” is persuasive, mocking, and in the end worrying. Who is this in charge of a class of children with such apparent power to disturb?

 

In our comparison, we can go on to compare imagery – the stars and the guillotines – the “voices”, the attention paid to “audience” (note in the poem the reference to “you” - is that the poet, or us? And in terms of ideas, do the passages share anything with each other in their attitude to history?

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