Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- Where and when does this poem seem to be set? 3. What does John Waterhouse’s painting tell us about how he has interpreted the
poem? 4. How important is visual imagery in this poem? 5. Comment on the power of repetition—of sounds, words, and stanzas. How does repetition create what some critics have called the “hypnotic power of this poem”? The setting dominates the poem. The vegetation is “withered,” “the harvest’s done,” and therefore it is cold and wintry. The first three stanzas are spoken by a narrator to the knight, who is “haggard and woe-begone.” The narrator asks, “What can ail thee?” which tells us that the knight is not just sad but possibly ill. Keats wrote this poem sick with tuberculosis and knew he had very little time to live. He loved Fanny Brawne but could not marry her because of his illness. The imagery in the poem is solemn and threatening even to a knight. The fairy woman conquers him easily because he has no defenses. Is she a symbol of death? If so, why is she so appealing, so beautiful, so irresistible? The knight, discovered by the narrator, is in shock. He has had an experience with “the other world” of fairy, a world that suggests the Middle Ages, when this poem seems to take place. In the early nineteenth century, the age of Romanticism, the idea of knights and otherworldly spirits was attractive to artists and poets alike. Images like the “lily on thy brow,” a symbol of funerals and death, were common. The roman- tic notion of “making love with death” was also common in 1819 when this poem was written because people often died young. The “lady in the meads” is a femme fatalle, dangerous and desirable. The knight can- not resist her and makes love with her. Medieval lore always warned against connubial affection with a woman of the spirit world. Usually it resulted in death. But in this poem the knight survives to tell his story because, ironically, the fairy takes pity on him after showing him in a dream “pale kings, and princes too, Pale warriors, death pale were they all.” His vision was of the underworld, and the knight’s own counte- nance is a mirror of that world in the second line of the poem when he is “alone and palely loitering.” “Loitering” is a strange word to describe a knight, who is usually on a quest. John Waterhouse’s Pre-Raphaelite painting interprets the poem but includes tiny flowers and a lush spring landscape. The fairy is a lovely young woman luring the knight, in full armor, by winding her “long” hair around his neck. He is clearly as cap- tured in the painting as in the poem. Emily Dickinson lived in her family house for most of her life, never married, and kept most of her personal romantic interests to herself, so that biographers can only speculate on the kind of delight and joy that she seems to be describing in “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,” which was originally published in Poems (1890), edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Her method is to be indirect and not to specify the issues at the heart of her lyric. She uses metaphors, such as “Inebriate of air am I,” which is both specific and yet completely abstract and untrans- latable. We have no idea what precise intoxication she is talking about—perhaps the 182 jac16871_ch07_163-195.indd 182 12/11/17 11:53 AM 183
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joy of finding love, or perhaps the mere joy of loving life itself. She talks about the headiness of inebriation without having resorted to any liquor known to man. She shares the same kind of intoxication that is experienced by the “drunken bee” and the butterfly among flowers. Even when they cease at the end of summer, she will con- tinue to experience delight. She will continue to feel the delight of life until the angels (“seraphs”) and the saints come to see her at the end of life. XX. I taste a liquor never brewed, From tankards scooped in pearl; Not all the vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol! Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. When landlords turn the drunken bee Out of the foxglove’s door, When butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, And saints to windows run, To see the little tippler Leaning against the sun! PERCEPTION KEY “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed” 1. Read the poem aloud. To what extent do the open vowels and the rich rhymes give a “musical” quality to your reading? 2. Listen to someone else read the poem and ask the same question: How musical is this poem? 3. Set the poem to music. If you are a musician, sing the poem aloud and decide what kind of emotional quality the poem has when set to music. 4. The imagery and language seem designed to describe an emotional state in the poet’s or the reader’s experience. Describe as best you can the emotional content of the poem.