Critically evaluate the third book of Gulliver’s Travels as a satire on Science.
Why does Swift satirize science in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels? Illustrate with textual  reference.
How far is the Flying Island significant in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels?
Comment on Swift’s attitude towards science as enumerated in Gulliver’s Travels.
What does Swift satirize in the third part of Gulliver’s Travels? Answer with illustrations.

Gulliver’s Travels is Jonathan Swift’s most comprehensive and brilliantly worked out satire on man and civilization. The book is a satire on four aspects of man: the physical, the political, the intellectual, and the moral.

The book III which is titled as ‘A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan’ is a bitter satire on the impractical scientific enterprises undertaken in Swift’s time. In this book, especially through his voyage to Laputa and Balnibarbi, Swifts cynically exposes how sometimes man crosses his intellectual limits pursuing worthless theorizations and how sometimes practical knowledge can be misused doing impractical scientific experiments.

As we see, after his ship is attacked by pirates, Gulliver is marooned close to a desolate rocky island, near India. Fortunately he is rescued by a flying island called Laputa. Now, this Laputa is a peculiar island and more peculiar are its king and inhabitants.

The island is exactly circular and consists of 10,000 acres of land. At the center, there is a cave containing a lodestone six yards long which moves the island with its magnetic force. Interestingly, the King and his court of this flying island are devoted entirely to two subjects, music and mathematics, the most abstract sciences. They are all philosophers.  The minds of these people are so occupied with intense speculations that they can neither speak nor attend to the discourse of others, unless their attention is attracted by a flapper. Swift most poignantly criticizes the absurdities of the Laputans, when he describes the dinner, “there was a shoulder of mutton, cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboid, and a pudding into a cycloid”.  Not only that, when these people want to praise the beauty of a woman or any other animal, they describe it by geometrical terms such as circles and parallelograms, or by musical terms.

Now, all these descriptions, though comic have a tough satiric purpose behind them. The Laputan king and inhabitants are devoid of human feelings and it is only abstract theory which dominates all aspects of their life. They disdain practical geometry and consequently have failed to develop any purposeful projects. The result is that the king is oblivious to the real concerns of the people who live below in Balnibarbi. Thus Swift here uses science as a metaphor to show the ruling class’ incapacity to think and work constructively for the people ruled.

However, Swift’s satire on science does not end here. Things get worse, when we see Gulliver visiting the Lagado academy in Balnibarbi. The academy in Lagado is a direct satire on the kind of works which the Royal Society in England was engaged upon in those days. We can visualize Swift’s contempt for the contemporary scientific experiments, when the different projects of the Lagado academy are described.

As Gulliver visits the academy, he meets a man engaged in a project to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. He also meets a scientist trying to turn excrement back into food. Another is attempting to turn ice into gunpowder and is writing a treatise about the malleability of fire, hoping to have it published. An architect is designing a way to build houses from the roof down, and a blind master is teaching his blind apprentices to mix colors for painters according to smell and touch. An agronomist is designing a method of plowing fields with hogs by first burying food in the ground and then letting the hogs loose to dig it out. A doctor in another room tries to cure patients by blowing air through them.
Not only that, on the other side of the academy, people are engaged in speculative learning. One professor has a class full of boys working from a machine that produces random sets of words. A linguist in another room is attempting to remove all the elements of language except nouns. Another professor tries to teach mathematics by having his students eat wafers that have mathematical proofs written on them.
Now the descriptions of these comic projects may lead to the conclusion that Swift as a writer bears a deep apathy for science. However, the real implication is not like that.  Swift only ridicules those parts of science which are impractical and which instead of benefiting people cause them suffer. It can be mentioned in this connection that much of Swift’s inspiration for the scientists in this voyage came from the Royal Society of London, a scientific society founded in 1660. Interestingly, most of the experiments parodied by Swift had actually been proposed or carried out by British scientists at the time of his writing. Besides, Swift also sincerely exposes the damaging effects of these impractical experiments. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge and as a result, the Laputans suffer from the ruin of agriculture, architecture and the impoverishment of the population.
Thus, it is seen that Swift’s satire on science has deep humanitarian motives behind it. Through his satire, Swift allegorically expresses his views that the goals of science should be embedded in the real world. The aim of science should be purposeful, pragmatic and people friendly.

How has Keats established the supremacy of art over life in his Ode on a Grecian Urn?

The Odes of John Keats basically deal with some of the conflicts that troubled Keats. As it is seen, one very peculiar feature of the Odes is the contrast between the permanence of Art and the transitoriness of human joy; and this feeling for the eternity of art finds it’s most complete expression in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. To Keats, it is Art which confers eternity on human passions; passions which otherwise cloy and leave behind, ‘a burning forehead and parching tongue’.

The poem Ode on a Grecian Urn deals with a metaphor namely the urn which has survived through many centuries and which therefore represents the immortality of Art. The ode opens with an invocation-

                                        ‘thou still unravished bride of quietness

                                         thou foster child of silence and slow time’

 These opening two lines strike the key note of the poem. In a very noisy and changing world, the urn is something beyond sound and beyond change. We are at once taken into an order of things remote from our daily existence. Then follows a string of questions, questions which are at the same time pictures,-

                                         ‘What men or god are these? What maidens loth?

                                           What mad pursuit? What struggle to scape?

As the poem develops with Keats answering the questions, we gradually come across the basic theme of the poem, which eventually certifies the permanence of art.

On the urn are carved numerous scenes like that of a Bacchanalian procession consisting of the flute players, the youth singing under the trees or the lovers about to kiss. These scenes make the poet think. To him this imagined life in the carved pictures appear to be more real than the human life of audible melody and physical embraces.

Human love and beauty are short lived. Even the fruition of human love never brings any real happiness. On the contrary, the love carved on the urn is happier, for he may not enjoy the fruition of love, but he would always love and his beloved would retain her beauty forever,

                       ‘She can not fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

                        For ever wilt thou love and she be fair’

Apart from the permanence of art and transitoriness of human life, the ode also suggests the superiority of the sculptor’s art over poetry. For example, the poet says-

                                    ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

                                     Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes play on

                                     Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared

                                     Pipe to the spirit deities of no tone.’

The above lines are one of those passages in which Keats rises from mere sensuous enjoyment to the enjoyment of the spiritual and the ideal. In fact, the lines touch the philosophy of art and the ethics of human life.

One of the pictures of the urn is that of a lowing heifer being led to the sacrificial alters. With this picture, Keats almost goes beyond the animated world and creates a whole landscape of river and sea-shore city in which the carven figures can live and move. With this scene on, the poet’s imagination passes from the finite to the infinite. Human life is temporary and finite, while art is eternal and infinite.

                                                Thou silent form dost tease us ought of thought

                                                As doth eternity; cold pastoral!

Line like these suggest that works of art like the urn seduce us from the ordinary life of thought into the extraordinary life of the imagination. It is imagination alone that can enable us to see into the life of things. The works of art, like the urn, awakens our imagination and thus seduce us from thought. They are as remote and eternal as eternity itself. They lie outside the scope of ordinary thought as well as outside ordinary emotions. Hence the urn is spoken of as ‘cold pastoral’.

However, towards the end of the poem, we have two controversial lines which constitute the final message of Keats.

                                          ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,- that is all

                                           Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’

According to C.M. Bowra, here truth means reality, and he explains that there is nothing real but the beautiful and nothing beautiful but the real. A work of art is beautiful because it is an expression of the truth within the soul of the artist. The Grecian urn is a beautiful piece of art and therefore it represents a higher kind of reality. The lives and the rapture carved on the urn are eternal because they have been presented through beautiful works of art. In fact, this is the very message the urn leaves for human beings and it is this massage that Keats recommends his fellowmen to follow.

                                  

                  

      

Comment on the philosophy of life as revealed in the play Phaedra by Seneca.

Seneca is a stoic philosopher, so the philosophy he puts into practice in Phaedra is stoic philosophy. The basic sayings of stoicism are that destructive emotions result from errors in judgment; that self control is essential to overcome such emotions; that human beings should be sincere to duty and guided by rational principles; and finally that only virtue itself is sufficient for happiness. Besides, later stoicism shows a preference for philosophical suicide to represent honorable release from intolerable situations.

Seneca wrote most of his plays specially Phaedra to bring these philosophical teachings into practice. For example, his central character Phaedra is obsessed with lust for Hippolytus. This obsession makes her neglect duty and commit errors of judgment which finally wrecks destruction for herself and others.   

To examine the issue more elaborately we may say that in the opening scenes, Seneca draws Phaedra as an essentially good woman who expresses her preference for being a faithful wife. But may it be for her hereditary curse or her husband’s philandering; Phaedra gradually gives into caustic passions and thereby declines to the point of destruction. As she gets poisoned by the passion of lust for her stepson, Phaedra begins to demonstrate nervousness and loses her rational stability. Seneca beautifully presents this instability of Phaedra by listing a series of household chores that she fails to accomplish due to her nervousness. The list begins with weaving, as Phaedra deplores: “The loom of Athena is empty / and the wool slips between my very hands”. The rest of the list covers such wifely activities as adorning temples and participating in Athenian dances or in the secret rites of Demeter. All these indicate that Phaedra is deviating from the natural courses of life and getting neglectful of her duties by losing rational control.

In her next development towards deterioration, Phaedra totally detaches herself from the touch of reason and loses her sense of good and bad. She becomes clouded with passion and in her way to errors of judgment, she rejects with unrealistic arguments all the Nurse’s sensible advice to abjure her love. ‘Love is uncontrollable’, she says and she needs not fear Theseus’ vengeance, because she believes, he will never return from the Otherworld.

From the second act, passion rather turns Phaedra a bad woman. In the notorious ‘mad seen’, she gets devoid of all rationality and let her hair down to flow loose on her shoulders. Having removed her royal robes, she thinks of running disheveled into the woods and literally throws herself at Hippolytus’ feet. Her fluctuation from virtue reaches its climax when we see her urging to Hippolytus to take her as a slave: “Mother – that name is too proud and high; a humbler name better suits my feelings. Call me sister, Hippolytus, or slave – yes, slave is better; I will endure servitude.”

However Phaedra’s decline does not end here. In stoicism good means extreme good and bad means extreme bad and Phaedra also has to complete her full cycle of viciousness. Therefore, when she is rebuffed by Hippolytus, Phaedra drives the last nail to her bad reputation by treacherously accusing Hippolytus of having raped her. Phaedra thus stands out as a classic example of human potential ruined by passion.

Finally, with Phaedra, Seneca also touches upon the stoic philosophical concept of committing suicide. For example, as Phaedra sees the grisly remains of Hippolytus’ dead body, things become intolerable for her and she commits suicide to release her from all sorrows.

For the rest, it can be said that besides Phaedra, unchecked emotion also spell doom for the other characters of the play as well. For example, Theseus does not stop to question his wife’s accusations, but readily calls for the death of his own son, so great is his rage. Even Hippolytus draws a sword on his own stepmother, merely because of her love for him. He then plunges into the forest, without considering the consequences of his hasty departure, and without thinking how his flight may be used against him to cover up Phaedra’s guilt.

Thus the world of Phaedra is a world where emotions loom large and reason is absent. According to Seneca a world devoid of reason means a world devoid of virtue which piles up nothing but horror after horror. A cool rationalist as he is, Seneca writes Phaedra to exercise his stoic philosophical teachings. He lets his characters poisoned with passions and then keeping himself in ironic distance, observes how passion leads man to bestiality which is an inherent human nature in general.

Justify that Phaedra (Seneca) is a tragic heroine.

Even though on moral grounds, Phaedra as a character deserves punishment for her incestuous dark desires, she can not de denied a tragic status for certain reasons. No doubt, the root cause of Phaedra’s tragedy is that she is a victim of unrequited love. However, a close inspection reveals that there are several other factors which drive Phaedra to indulge in sexual perversity which resultantly incurs her inescapable doom.

Firstly, Phaedra owns a hereditary curse upon herself. From mythology and from the play itself we know that Venus has loaded the whole race of Phoebus with ‘shame unspeakable’ as Apollo once exposed the love between Venus and Mars. As a result, Phaedra’s mother Pasiphae was doomed to fall in love with a bull and Phaedra with her stepson Hippolytus. As the play opens, we find that Phaedra has an anguished moral awareness about her bestial desires and she alludes to her bestial ancestry: “I recognize the deadly evil [that afflicted] my unhappy mother”.  Then when the nurse advises her to smother her incestuous passion, Phaedra declares, “I know, dear Nurse, that what you say is true; but passion forces me to take the worse path”.  She further complains, (“What can reason do? Passion has won and rules supreme, and a mighty god has control over all my soul”.  Thus it can be said that Phaedra is a victim of some independent fatal forces upon which she has no control.

Secondly and importantly in the Senecan version of the play, Phaedra’s husband Theseus is much to blame for creating scope of Phaedra’s illicit passion. At the outset of the play, Phaedra expresses her preference for being a faithful wife but fails because of her frustration about Theseus. She directly refers to Theseus’ sexual exploits and her accusations get strong proof when we learn that currently Theseus with his friend Peirithous has gone underworld in order to kidnap and rape Persephone. When Phaedra deplores, “Shame does not hold him back––in the depths of Acheron he seeks fornication and unlawful bed,”- we actually hear the voice of a neglected wife affronted by her husband’s constant philandering.  It can be argued that had Theseus been a more faithful husband, much of Phaedra’s perversity would have been averted.

Thus hereditary curse and Theseus’ unfaithfulness poison Phaedra with the passion of lust and thereby she commits a series of errors of judgment, the basic requirement of a classic tragedy. Phaedra’s first error is that she misinterprets her relationship with Hippolytus by laying more importance on biology than domestic and social codes. She being not the biological mother of Hyppolytus considers her position as a role playing mother. Therefore, she asks Hippolytus to take his father’s place. Then when Hippolytus calls her mother, she replies, “Mother – that name is too proud and high; a humbler name better suits my feelings. Call me sister, Hippolytus, or slave – yes, slave is better; I will endure servitude.” All these indicate that   Phaedra’s tragedy lies precisely in her lust driven role playing which transgresses the long drawn social establishments.

Phaedra’s next error is that she makes wrong response to the counsels of the Nurse. She refuses her counsels when she should accept and accepts them when she should refuse. Thus up to the point of revealing her desires to Hippolytus, she never gives a positive ear to the Nurse’s counsels, but when she is rebuffed by Hippolytus, she follows the nurse’s advice word for word: “Crime must be concealed by crime”. Resultantly, Phaedra treacherously accuses Hippolytus of having raped her and wrecks destruction both for her and others.

For the rest, Phaedra earns her tragic grandeur because she struggles with herself and changes in the course of the play. Even being so overcome by lustful passion, when she hears the fearful death of Hippolytus, her viciousness turns into remorse. She now faces up to her actions by taking responsibility for Hippolytus’ death, admitting her illicit love and deception to her wronged husband, and finally taking her own life as an act of self punishment. Besides, throughout her confession, she scrupulously avoids any mention of the Nurse’s role in her deception and false accusation so that no harms may befall on her. Seneca thus presents Phaedra as a courageous woman, who, though still driven by her passion, returns to her essential goodness and morality.

Thus it can be said that lust is the engine that drives the tragedy of Phaedra. However, like Euripides, Seneca does not present Phaedra as a lustful woman. By nature a good woman, Seneca’s Phaedra declines because she is a victim of unrequited love whose origins already been mentioned above. In the character of Phaedra, Seneca, the stoic, beautifully dramatizes how passion can lead man towards bestiality and throw him into the pit of hateful damnation.  

Examine ‘The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ as a modernist poem.

T.S. Eliot’s ‘The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ published in 1915 is an interior monologue which examines the tortured psyche of a prototypical modern man called Prufrock. The poem is a landmark work in the history of English literature because it starts off a new trend popularly known as the modernist poetry. Both technically and thematically, the poem marks a complete break away from the Victorian poetry and relics of Romanticism that can be witnessed in the early poems of W.B. Yeats.

It was the views of T.S. Eliot the modern poetry should be complex in nature and Eliot imparts this complexity to ‘The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by building up the entire poem on the basis of antithesis. As a result, the poem produces an effect where levity and seriousness mix with each other. To achieve this end, Eliot uses a number of technical devices like urban imagery, symbols, sharp irony, anticlimax and both secular and religious allusions and references.

The theme of the poem is what its style is. For example, the title of the poem suggests that it is a love song. But the poem, from its beginning to the end, successfully flouts and betrays all our expectations of love. On the contrary, the poem gives rise to certain broader issues like complexity of modern life, isolation, aging or psychological paralysis. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis”. But Prufrock knows too much of life to “dare” an approach to the woman. The poem is, therefore, ultimately a psychological drama where Prufrock is unable to ask his “overwhelming question” and concludes his dramatic monologue by observing the kind of creature he should have been-

‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’

Thus even being a love piece, the protagonist of the poem appears to be timid, weak, neurotic, effete intellectual, and a baffled anti-heroic. Prufrock whose name even makes him sound like a wimp is at best a hopeless romantic hero who only halts thinking-

‘And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,’

Now to present this antithetical theme, Eliot uses all his technical devices from an ironic angle. May it be the imagery, reference or allusion of the poem, each creates an antithesis leading to the point of anticlimax. The basic method Eliot uses is that he transports an issue from a serious context to a much lighter or comic one. Secondly, his use of symbols or imagery betrays our expectations of traditional meaning.

For example, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" begins with an epigraph, which sets the tone for the poem to follow. The epigraph is from Dante's Inferno. Dante, while journeying through hell, encounters Guido da Montefeltro, who is wrapped in flame and who confesses his sins on the assumption that Dante, a fellow prisoner of hell, cannot return to earth with the damning information he is hearing and besmirch Guido's reputation.

Now, Eliot uses this serious context of Dante's Inferno to represent Prufrock’s condition. Like Guido, Prufrock also seems to be in hell and speaks only because he thinks, no one will pay attention to him or he won’t be heard. But the entire thing turns a comedy when we know that what Prufrock wants to confess is how and why he fails to make his love proposal.

Inside the poem, Prufrock’s hesitation and his rise and fall in attempts to make a proposal have been conveyed in a number of allusions and references which work like metaphysical conceits. For example, Prufrock says,-

‘Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;’

Now this is an allusion to a Biblical story. The prophet John the Baptist was beheaded and his head was brought into the court of King Herod by the dancing girl Salome. Prufrock says that he too has met the fate which the prophet John met. He too is a martyr; but he is no religious martyr, no prophet. He is a martyr to his own sense of inferiority. He is a victim of his own inadequacy.

Thus the allusion reveals the antithesis of a heroic ideal that Prufrock strives to gain for so trivial a cause.

Then again in lines 94and 95, Prufrock cries-

“I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

The implication is again antithetical. Prufrock compares his trivial task of offering love to the mammoth job undertaken by Lazarus who rises from the dead. He is so timid that proposing a women to him, requires the courage and strength of the legendary figure of Lazarus.

In a comic vein, Prufrock also negatively compares his indecisions to that of Prince Hamlet. However, in the same line, finding himself low, he equates his character to Polonius. In a self mocking tone, Prufrock says that he is old like Polonius and is always near the action but never a part of it.

There is a similarly ironic allusion to Andrew Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress’. By opening the fourth stanza with: "And indeed there will be time," Eliot echoes the memorable line: "Had we but world enough and time' from Andrew Marvell's seductive poem, "To His Coy Mistress." But ironically, Prufrock does not feel compelled to seize the day like Marvell.

As for imagery, Eliot again uses it to represent Prufrock’s psychological paralysis. The poem is loaded with surprisingly unromantic images. In this regard, Eliot is strongly influenced the symbolist movement as led by the French Symbolists, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire. For example, the urban imagery of the opening lines invokes an ambience of sickness and paralysis which is nothing but the inner psyche of Prufrock-

‘LET us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;’

Finally, ‘The Love Song of Prufrock’ sets the trend of modernism by being a veiled commentary on the contemporary society. In fact, his self-consciousness is produced by the society around him which brutalizes him from within. When Prufrock says, -

"With a bald spot in the middle of my hair

(they will say: 'how his hair is growing thin!')"

-he is actually filled with painful insecurity. He has been "formulated, sprawling on a pin" by the people around him. His internal catastrophe thus describes the isolating and lonely nature of modern existence.

Thus juxtaposing levity with seriousness and exposing the contemporary social menace, ‘The Love Song of Prufrock’, sets an example which strongly directs the future course of poetry to be written after it.

Keats’ Hellenism in his odes

Keats, as is well known, was not a classical scholar, yet he has been famous for his Hellenism, a term which may be defined as a love of Greek art, literature, culture and way of life. Keats had an inborn love for the Greek spirit,-their Religion of Joy and their religion of Beauty. He once wrote to one of his friends that he never ceased to wonder at ‘all that incarnate delight’ of the Greek way of life. In fact, he was driven to the world of Greek Beauty because he wanted to escape imaginatively from the harsh realities of his present. It should, however, be noted that ‘Keats was a Greek’ because he could enter lovingly and imaginatively into the world of the ancients, and not because his knowledge of it was accurate and scholarly. His presentation of Hallas is romantic and not realistic.

Keats’ mind was saturated with Greek literature and mythology. He habitually chooses Greek stories for his poetry. Endymion. Hyperion, Lamia, Grecian Urn, Psyche etc,- all have the themes borrowed from the Greeks. The Grecian Urn is a monument of the poet’s power of entering imaginatively into another world. We as readers feel that we have been transported entirely to the Hellenic world of beauty, love, festivity and ritual. It is permeated through and through with the Greek spirit. It may also be noted that the ‘Ode’ form, which he made particularly his own and in which he excels all other English poets, is typically a Greek verse form.

Moreover, there are countless allusions to Greek legends and stories in poems which are not directly based on Greek themes. He frequently refers at all places to Muses, Apollo, Pan, Narcissus, Endymion, Diana, and a number of other classical gods and goddesses. In Ode to Nightingale, we have references to Dryads (That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees), the goddess Flora (Tasting of Flora and the country green), and Bacchus and his pards (Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards). In Ode on Melancholy, references are made to the river Lethe, goddess Proserpine and Psyche. These allusions are not mere conventional personifications as with other poets; there is a tone of enjoyment in these allusions which shows that Greek mythology had really taken possession of his mind.

The Greek temper of Keats is also revealed particularly in his joy in the Beauty of nature and his zest for an out of door life lived in her midst. Like the Greeks, Keats also takes a sensuous, childlike pleasure in the forms, colours, scents and sounds of nature and sees a god or goddess behind every object and phenomenon of the external world. The following lines can be cited in this regard-

And haply the Queen –Moon is on her throne,

Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;

The Greeks had a zest for life in nature and loved the activities of such life; but they also loved the serenity and quiet of pastoral life. Both these aspects are combined vividly in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. For example, the scenario of the Bacchanalian procession consisting of the flute players, the youth singing under the tree, and the lover about to kiss represent the joy of youth and its energy. On the other hand, the picture of the lowing heifer being led to the sacrificial altar represents the charm of a serene and quiet life. In fact, in his worship of Beauty, Keats justifies the remark of Shelley that he was a Greek.

The Hellenic spirit was re-incarnated in Keats. Through his contact with Greek sculptures, he imbibed, as if by instinct, the classical discipline, simplicity and austerity. He was basically a romantic, and in the beginning his art is characterized by the romantic excess. But at times, he could achieve the clearness of outline, the directness and restraint and the austerity and finish of the classics. As Matthew Arnold points out, the last three lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn, ‘is as Greek as anything from Homer or Theocritus’. Similarly the stanza of this Ode beginning, ‘Who are those coming to the sacrifice’ has been described as having ‘the clear radiance of Greek style’.

In his description, Keats often achieves not only clarity, directness and simplicity, but also the happy combination of movement with repose which characterizes Greek art. For example, in the Ode on Melancholy we get;

‘Beauty that must die

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu’

Keats also has the passion for perfection of the Greeks. He has the epigrammatic terseness and brevity of the Greeks. Phrases like ‘drowsy numbness’, ‘leaden-eyed despair’, ‘leaf-fringed legends’, ‘cold pastoral, ‘wakeful anguish of the soul’ etc bear enough testimony to this. The opening two lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn have even been called by Rossetti as the ‘Pillars of Hercules of the human language’.

However, this Greek note in Keats’ poetry should not be exaggerated. He surely has the romantic melancholy, romantic exuberance and the love of colour and pageantry of the romantics. As a matter of fact, he got his knowledge of Greek mythology and literature through the study of the Elizabethans and in the process also imbibed their romanticism. In his poetry, we find a rare combination of classicism with romanticism. As Legoius and Cazamian put it, ‘ Keats affects the rare union of classical discipline, guided by the examples and precepts of the ancients, with the more intrinsically precious matter, which the artist finds in romanticism’. We may also add that he is not always content with the enjoyment merely of the beauty of form. He often tries to penetrate to the real significance and truth which may lie at the back of formal beauty.

A critical appreciation of George Herbert’s “The Collar”

‘The Collar’ is one of the finest poems written by George Herbert in the history of metaphysical lyrics. It can be said that all the leading metaphysical characteristics like dramatic opening, argumentative approach, colloquial tone or concrete imagery -epitomize in this single poem.

The title word of the poem "Collar" refers to the white band worn by the clergy, and it is the role of a priest that the poem alludes to. The word ‘collar’ in the title, therefore, symbolizes the priest's role as servant. Ironically written, ‘The Collar’ is, in fact, about the struggle to maintain faith in God, although the thirty-two of its thirty-six lines describe what the poem itself calls the ravings of a person who is rebellious against the restrictive pressures that surround him as a priest.

The poem shows that the poet is involved in a deep-rooted and desperate struggle with his own soul. He almost seems to doubt whether God exists at all and gives rebellious expression against the disciplines of his vocation of priesthood.

In the opening line Herbert writes,

“I struck the board, and cry'd, No more.”

Thus the opening goes abrupt and dramatic, evoking violent action, and is delivered in a personal and colloquial manner. Technically written in iambic meter with varied line lengths, the poem takes the form of arguments, using logic to make the reasoning convincing and persuasive. Herbert writes:

What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?

The opening stanza, thus, is a complaint voiced by a person embittered against the constraints that bind him. Impatient with his condition, he therefore, resolves to break free.

The second stanza takes on more personal notes and the poet questions whether he being a priest does not deserve any reward. Using the image of ‘harvest’, the poet laments that as a clergy, his only harvest has been a thorn that has made him bleed. His "sighs" and "tears" have made him ruin the fruits of his labors.

The lamentation continues in the third stanza as well. This time, the poet compares his won restrained life to the free life of other people who enjoy worldly pleasures. He argues that he also has the right to crown him with the beauty of life and enjoy flowers and garlands. Growing a little more furious, the poet hints at the future and expresses the hope that all is not lost:

‘Not so, my heart : but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.’

In the fourth stanza, the poet becomes almost aggressive and wishes to recover all that has been lost indulging himself in double pleasures. In fact, this is the most paradoxical stanza which offers the core meaning of the poem. Herbert cries-

“leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,”

In the above lines, the metaphors like ‘cage’ or ‘rope of sands’ through which Herbert explains his restrictions have double meanings. On the surface, as Herbert says that it is his ‘pettie thoughts’ which make the ‘cage’ or ‘rope of sands’ feel like a ‘good cable’ which draws him towards God. But looking from a deeper point of view, it can be said that what Herbert shouts boastfully from the beginning is itself the results of ‘pettie thoughts’. Thus, the phrase ‘pettie thoughts’ has a double edged function. If Herbert all out denies the existence of God, then the chain of restrictions he is challenging is a non-existent. But so far he admits that God exists, all his bombastic words signify nothing but ‘pettie thoughts’.

In stanza fifth, the poet crucially loses hold on his own arguments. Herbert now declares to quit his profession and thus overcome his fears altogether. Ironically he discloses his shortcomings by showing his own inability to shoulder the responsibility of his vocation:

“ He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.”

Declaring so, Herbert loses all grounds and proves that the problem is not with the profession of a priest, rather with the personality he is carrying inside.

Finally, the last stanza is a resultant anticlimax. This time, the poet is able to come out all of his ‘pettie thoughts’ and hears the voice of God calling- ‘Childe’ and to which he responds-‘My Lord’. Instantly, the distressed note in the poet is silenced and the discontent is passed. God does not need to answer the arguments raised by the poet. His mere presence exposes their hollowness. Therefore, hearing the voice of God, the poet recognizes his place and position and immediately surrenders himself to the authority of God. Thus, the final stanza very beautifully leads to a graceful conclusion making the readers realize the affectionate relationship between the Creator and the Creation.