Interview with Anya Krugovoy Silver

In the Fall semester of 2016, I asked Jessica Wilson, the administrator for the Georgia Writers Association, if she could recommend a handful of new poetry books. Her kind and generous response included I watched you disappear, by Anya Krugovoy Silver, which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award (GAYA) in 2015. I soon began reading Silver�s 2016 publication, From Nothing and found myself suspended between the worlds of late 19^th and early 20^th century art and, at times, unfamiliar fairy tales. I suspect that what will keep me picking this book up again and again is that I�ve found a bit of my own true north in the poet�s reluctance to romanticize childhood in favor of celebrating the weft and twill of adulthood.

Speaking briefly of her journey, Dr.  Krugovoy Silver relates, �I was born in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania to a Russian/Ukrainian father and Swiss/German mother.  My father was a Russian professor and I learned my love of language from the multilingual and multicultural environment in which I was raised.  I grew up in a home that valued learning, creativity, and questions over material success. Literature and church were the two sacred poles of my childhood.  I started scribbling stories early, but as an adult, I�ve published three books of poetry, The Ninety-Third Name of God, I Watched You Disappear, and From Nothing. I have always wanted to be a teacher, and currently teach English literature at Mercer University.  I live in downtown Macon with my husband, who also teaches at Mercer, and my son.  I have been living with inflammatory breast cancer since 2004.�

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: At its core, this collection of poems is a quiet rebellion against the myth that innocence alone is able to shoulder and shrug off malevolence. These poems take the stance that naivet� (projected or clung to) has no place in womanhood with a capital �W.� Was this a deliberate message? 

Anya Krugovoy Silver: It wasn�t a conscious theme as I wrote individual poems, but I noticed the focus on sensuality, and a refusal to conflate innocence with goodness, appearing and reappearing as I put the manuscript together. That�s especially true in a poem like �St. Paul�s Letter to the Ephesians, Lent.�  I have long resisted the Platonic binary between body and soul, and in that particular poem, I reject the neo-Platonist Paul�s assumption that sensual desire is sinful or opposed to holiness: �Not to live in the passions of the flesh--/how grim and arid the light we�re promised.� I like to call this collection of poems my �red book� because there are so many red images throughout it.  The color, for me, signifies vitality and energy, blood and life.  Although there are many poems about mortality in the book, I also wanted to make room for the fullness and lusciousness of lived, bodily experience.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Your newest collection, From Nothing, also includes several ekphrastic pieces based on art by early 20^th century painters such as Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Chagall, Klimt, and Toulouse-Lautrec which reflect this �bodily experience.� The paintings and corresponding poems explore our sensual natures.  How did these works of art come to serve as a springboard into the conversation about sensuality and what is your personal connection to this time period?

Anya Krugovoy Silver:  Expressionist painting and art from the turn of the last century in general happen to be among my favorite art.  I particularly like German painters like Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, K�llwitz, Werefkin.  Each of these painters, and the others you mentioned, sought to paint the human body in a non-romanticized way.  With the possible exception of Klimt, they painted ordinary people with ordinary bodies, and sometimes erotically (Chagall and Toulouse-Lautrec, especially).  Modersohn-Becker painted German farmers without turning them into symbols of �the land� or �good, honest people.�  She simply painted them as she saw them, including what she perceived to be their individual spirits.  I love Kollwitz�s famous quote that �The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.� One of my goals in this book was to write about the body�the ill body, the sexual body�honestly, without making the body either grotesque or precious.  I wanted to always respect the body�s, even the dead body�s, integrity and dignity.  The Expressionists whom I admire the most do that, so they were models to me, in a way. They painted human beings neither heroically or fastidiously.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: These same long strokes and subtle countenances that favor insight rather than minutiae are inherent in your own work. For example, several impressions of your father appear in �The Christmas Hat,� �Wake,� �In the Sanatorium,� and �Partings.�  He is, at once, a beloved parent seeking refuge from his demons, a man who cannot articulate his own suffering, and one who only found peace in death.  Do you feel that this is more kinship or craft in regard to the Expressionist painters?  

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Wow�that�s very insightful. I had never thought of a biographical reason for my love of expressionist art, but I think you�re right.  My father and I loved each other very much, and he was very proud of my poetry.  At the same time, in hindsight I would say that he experienced PTSD from the murder of his father during the Stalinist purges and from other experiences in the Soviet Union and in exile during and after the Second World War  He would begin to tell me stories and then explode in rage at the memories of what he�d seen.  When I look at expressionist art, and its focus on the turbulence of the inner life, and about how much can�t be articulated or understood by others, I definitely see my father�s face.  There is a loneliness in the figures of that art that I think resides in many people.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Fairy tales are woven through From Nothing. One might think that they are close relatives, but in this case the speakers of these poems seem to admonish the mythological �happily ever after� while conveying childhood memories that do not mollify young skepticism. In fact, the speaker in Snow White cautions against romanticizing death and recognizes her own early folly. What inspired you to use fairy tales to promote the conversation addressing innocence in this collection?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Fairy tales were the first form of literature that I encountered in my life.  My parents had a big blue book of the Grimms� fairy tales that they read to me as a child.  I�ve continued to be obsessed with fairy tales, as so many writers are, because beneath a seemingly obvious and predictable narrative, they can be analyzed in countless ways.  I believe that reading and thinking about fairy tales can help humans find their values and vocations, to reach into their own minds, and I read many of them allegorically.  For example, I read the story of Cinderella as a tale about how one can survive grief; the romance is incidental to the real purpose of the story. It�s true that fairy tales posit a generally benign universe; things almost always end up happily for the protagonists.  I want readers to question those happy endings.  Specifically, serious trauma can�t simply be overcome by meeting a prince with a castle.  Pain stays in one�s memory, in some form or another, forever. 

I was consciously writing against the dominant cultural mood that one should �get over� grief and �move on� from pain.  I can�t stand that superficial notion of healing, and it�s often used to bully people who have gone through cancer or some other kind of violence.  As someone who has lived with cancer, I reject pink ribbon �survivor� culture.  My fairy tale poems, like �Nettle Shirts,� �Maid Maleen� and �Snow White� each argues that the concept of �getting past� cancer is absurd and puts a huge burden on a sick person.  I think that idea could be applied to anyone who has suffered abuse, assault, or violence.

And finally, I see in some popular culture, especially music and social media, a glorification of dying �young and beautiful.�  That�s always prettier in songs than in real life.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Is your answer to a more genuine healing process found in the poem, �Four Prayers for Forgiveness�? Because it is here that the origins of wounds are pursued while shifting perspectives still allow pain its rightful place.

Anya Krugovoy Silver: �Four Prayers for Forgiveness� grew out of my Sufi meditation classes. I�m trying to forgive a lot in the poem:  cancer, my body, myself, God.  For me, life with chronic illness is best lived when one is able to find peace and joy in the present.  I realize that�s a clich�, and easier said than done, but for me, happiness is an active practice and choice.  It�s definitely not the emotion that comes most easily in the face of suffering; happiness is difficult.  So the forgiveness that I describe in the poem is a forgiveness of my cancer cells, which are only doing what they�re biologically programmed to do, and a forgiveness of my body for endangering me.  I attempt to look beyond illness, and I refuse to let cancer define my life.  I choose to be fully alive. The last lines �I am absorbed like a drop of water/into a bottle of perfume without a bottom./I open my eyes and all is golden� express how I want to live completely immersed in life.  That�s also one reason that I included several love poems in the book.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Before we close, I�d like to discuss the book�s title poem, �from nothing� which is preceded by the lines, �I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.� from Donne�s �A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy�s Day.� 

FROM NOTHING

                                    Again and again, from nothingness I�m born.

                                    Each death I witness makes me more my own.

                                                I imagine each excess line of mine erased,

                                                each muscle shredded, each bone sheared.

                                                   One day, my spine�s long spar will snap,

                                    ribs tumbling loose; my face will droop and drop.

                                    Then I�ll be re-begot � the air will shimmer

                                    and my molecules will vault, emerging free.

                                    From darkening days, the light will surge and flee.

The poem itself is absolutely void of sentiment or affect, thus setting the tone for the rest of the collection, while the slant rhyme and final true rhyme imply a belief in a sense of order. How has your own belief in �the order of things� transformed since your cancer diagnosis, and is this poem most reflective of that sense?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: When one�s life feels out of control because of illness or trauma, it�s helpful, in a therapeutic sense, to wrest order from circumstance.  Some people do that through religion; others conceptualize their lives as journeys, with illness as part of the meaning and self-actualization of their time on earth.  In my case, poetry enables me to take a chaotic experience and fix it on the page, to give it line lengths, images, and sounds and to do what I want with it.  I reestablish a sense of control by giving experiences the meaning that I want them to have, no matter how inchoate that meaning is. 

In �From Nothing,� and in my poetry in general, I am more and more drawn to internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and sound effects such as assonance and consonance, to emphasize a sense of order.  For example, I used the slant rhyme of �snap and drop� and the alliteration of �droop and drop� consciously.  I like Edna St. Vincent Millay�s assertion that �I will put Chaos into fourteen lines/And keep him there.� Ultimately, if there is any underlying order in the world, I don�t think that human beings are privy to it.  I discern no order whatsoever in the deaths of my friends, or in the daily tragedies and disasters of the world.  All humans can do is create our own individual structures with which to deal with the unknown.  That�s why poetry and art will always be essential to the experience of being human.

Anya Silver has published three books of poetry with the Louisiana State University Press.  She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2016 (Scribner) and The Turning Aside:  The Kingdom Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry (Poiema Poetry).  Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser�s column American Life in Poetry, on Garrison Keillor�s The Writer�s Almanac, and as an Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.  She is currently completing her fourth poetry manuscript.  She has taught for eighteen years at Mercer University.  She is also a metastatic breast cancer thriver.

 

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.  She received her MFA in Creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Republic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.

The Poetic Style of Edward Thomas

Ted Hughes once described the poet Edward Thomas as ‘the father of us all’. Due to the overwhelming emphasis placed on the role of ‘modernism’ in twentieth century poetry, this claim may seem surprising. When we think of the most influential ‘modern’ texts we are perhaps more likely to think of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s Cantosthan of Thomas’s pastoral English lyrics. And yet, there really are few poets who have influenced contemporary poetry more than Thomas has – Auden, Larkin, Hughes and many others have admitted to his influence. In fact, he is so influential that various collections of poetry have been put together by poets wishing to celebrate Thomas’s impact on their verse. The aspect of Thomas’s poetry that these writers refer to most frequently is his conversational style and loose rhythm, both of which were relatively innovative in the early twentieth century but are commonplace now. The meditative colloquialism of Thomas’s verse lends itself to the exploration of uncertainties and ambiguities, a recurring theme in his poems and indeed in modern literature in general. But this colloquial style does not hamper the musical cadences of Thomas’s verse, often overlooked by critics stressing his speech-like intonations. It is perhaps in this sense that Thomas is most influential: in combining a conversational and meditative style with a richly rhythmical musicality.

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spent about a year together over 1913-14. During that time, Frost encouraged Thomas to start writing his own verse and arguably influenced Thomas’s views on poetic style. Frost’s mantra that ‘a poet needs to capture the spoken word’ is clear not just in Thomas’s verse but also in his prose: he once said he wanted to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric’ and purge his prose writing of all mannerisms. In his famous poem ‘Adlestrop’, this colloquialism and ambition towards the ‘spoken word’ is clear. The poem opens with the words ‘Yes. I remember Adlestrop –’ as if Thomas is in the middle of a conversation or answering a question. In the poem, there are very few ‘poetic’ terms (apart from the word ‘whit’) and obscurities, reflecting Thomas’s Wordsworthian commitment to poetry for the common man. Similarly, the poem ‘But these things also’, opening as it does with a conjunction, suggests it is some sort of response to an unidentified interlocutor, again adding to the sense of a relaxed, conversational style which draws us into the poem. This poetic intimacy felt by the reader is enhanced by Thomas’s use of relatively loose metres – ‘Adlestop’ is written in iambic tetrameter, but the first line begins with a trochaic foot (‘Yes. I…’) and the third line has nine syllables. These are just two example of the numerous metrical variations in Thomas’s verse. His rhymes vary, too – in ‘Gone, Gone Again’ his rhyme scheme flits from ABCB to AABC to ABCA. Moreover, his rhymes are often, in the words of Walter De La Mare, the ‘faintest of echoes’ – in the aforementioned poem, he rhymes ‘dead’ with ‘interested’ and ‘sun’ with ‘one’. This loose formality not only shows how innovative Thomas was in his time, but it also augments the colloquial style of his verse, drawing the reader in with its speech-like appearance. As Edgell Rickword wrote in the Daily Herald, ‘To read him is like listening to a friend in the completest intimacy…’

Directly connected to this aspect of Thomas’s style is the reflective nature of his verse. ‘The Sun Used to Shine’ is a good example of this. Through the repeated use of enjambment (‘we two walked / Slowly’, ‘started / Again’, and ‘parted / Each night’), we get the sense of a fluidity of thought. It is as if Thomas is letting his thoughts run over the lines in speech-like cadences as he walks with his companion, his words reflecting what Newlyn calls ‘the momentary lulls that are part of companionable walking and talking.’ This may also be clear in Thomas’s use of repetition. In ‘Old Man’, for example, certain words are repeated, perhaps to suggest an intensifying rumination. Thomas writes:

the names

Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is:

At least, what that is clings not to the names

In spite of time. And yet I like the names.

The repetition of the word ‘names’ seems unnecessary here, possibly suggesting that Thomas is coming to terms with his own mind and organizing his thoughts. Perhaps, too, as J.P. Ward argues, these repeats imply the limitations of thought and of the human mind. Thomas also asks various questions in his verse, demonstrating the uncertainty of his contemplations. For example, in ‘The Unknown Bird’ Thomas asks ‘Was it but four years / Ago? or five?’ He goes on to say: ‘But I cannot tell / If truly never anything but fair / The days were when he sang, as now they seem.’ This questioning and sense of ambiguity clearly influenced Philip Larkin who, in his poem ‘Dockery and Son’, asks questions like ‘… did he get his son / At nineteen, twenty?’ In Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ a similar uncertainty manifests itself in the poem’s final words ‘I don’t know.’ Wells is right, then, when he suggests that Thomas has a ‘scrupulous inability… to conceal uncertainty.’ (65) It runs throughout his poetry, demonstrating how his verse stems ‘from contemplation rather than from sheer energy of insight.’ (De La Mare) So what effect does this colloquial and contemplative style have on our reading of Thomas’s verse? Well, to some extent it brings the poet down to our level – he is not preaching to us in aloof terms or handing us fully-formed theories on life or the mind. He draws us in with his lack of posturing. As Motion argues, through his ‘sympathetic quiet-speaking’ and his emphasis on uncertainty, he creates ‘poems which appear to think aloud rather than be a means of delivering finished thoughts’. We feel directly the personality of the poet – his questionings, his anxieties, the very movement of his thoughts.

But this relaxed and ‘quiet-speaking’ style does not necessarily mean that Thomas’s verse is somehow ‘unpoetic’. True, his poetry is very different from that of Tennyson, for example, but it is still beautifully lyrical and musical. As Newlyn argues, ‘Thomas had a natural, un-taught musicality, which came from his love of ballads, folk songs, and English poetry.’ In fact, he was so infatuated by folk tradition and ballads that, in 1907, he compiled The Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air, a collection of ballads, folk-songs, and contemporary poetry. This infatuation clearly fed into his verse: ‘Will You Come?’, for example, is ballad-like in its repetitions and quick rhythms, and his poems are full of harmonious lines, like the ending of ‘November’ (‘Renounce all brightness to the skies’) with its perfect metre and echoing assonance and sibilance. Given the influence of song on Thomas’s poetry, it’s no wonder that 19 of his poems were set to music by Gloucestershire composer Ivor Gurney (his rendition of ‘Snow’ is particularly poignant). A quick look at Thomas’s prose supports this view of his melodic writing style. In The Woodland Life (1897), Thomas describes how the ‘robins rustle gently and fly a yard or two, or a blackbird blusters out’. The alliteration, along with the trochaic rhythm of ‘robins rustle gently’, is prophetic of Thomas’s conversion into a poet.

The ending of ‘Adlestrop’ is similarly rhythmic. As John Bayley explains, the third and fourth stanzas abandon ‘the short choppy sentence structure of the first two’ developing into more flowing, effortless lines of iambic tetrameter. This fluidity is most obvious in the line ‘No whit less still and lonely fair’, which with its repeated ‘l’ and ‘o’ sounds seems to roll off the tongue with ease. In the final stanza, Thomas describes how ‘for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by,’ and then the poem cinematically zooms out to take in ‘all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’ This echoing final line, referring to specific places Thomas knew well, carries with it a subtle sense of nostalgia. The whole stanza does, in fact, particularly with the phrase ‘for that minute’, immediately suggesting the transiency of human experience. Perhaps, too, the words ‘mistier’ and ‘farther’ suggest not only a physical distance but also a temporal distance. This uneventful train journey took place about a month before the First World War began, but Thomas only started writing poetry about five months later, once the war had begun, so possibly this sense of nostalgia is one of anxiety that ‘This England’ may be destroyed by the war. After all, when he was asked why he had become a soldier, he is said to have picked up a handful of English soil and said ‘Literally, for this’. Just as Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ expresses a fear that there may not be ‘Beauty yet to find’ and there may not be ‘honey still for tea’ in the village of his childhood, so ‘Adlestrop’ captures a single moment of quietness and of calm before the ‘Guns of August’ wrought havoc across Europe. Like Larkin, Thomas worried that there would be ‘Never such innocence again’. As Andrew Motion argues, ‘Behind every line [of Thomas’s poetry], whether mentioned or not, lies imminent danger and disruption.’

Though Thomas did employ the occasional Georgian inversion in his poetry (‘Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob…’ or ‘Fast beat / My heart’), it would be hard to argue that he was not innovative for his time. As David Gervais put it, he should be read as a modern poet rather than as a revisionist Georgian. His style is perhaps the most distinctly modern aspect of his work – his reconciling of the speaking voice with traditional forms, whilst also allowing for bursts of lyrical vitality. But it’s also important to note his modern sensibility – throughout his poetry, Thomas emphasizes his sense of solitude and loneliness, so much so that J.P. Ward has referred to him as an early existentialist. In fact, various comparisons could be drawn between Thomas the poet and J. Alfred Prufrock, the bundle of inhibitions in Eliot’s eponymous poem. Likewise, the words ‘I should be glad of another death’ (Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’) could really have come from either poet’s pen, which goes to show how modern Thomas really was, in content as well as style. But it’s not as if Thomas was trying to break down barriers, to ‘Make it new’. His close friend and fellow poet Walter De La Mare summarized Thomas’s poetry best when he said: ‘His chief desire was to express himself and his own truth – and therefore life and humanity…’ Thomas, with his thorough knowledge of contemporary poetry and poetic criticism, with his history of depression and anxieties about his turbulent marriage, and most importantly, with his love of nature and his fear of its war-time destruction, was bound to write great poetry. Perhaps if he had not died in Arras, and if he had kept writing years after, we would now see Thomas as the greatest of all the twentieth century poets.

The Portrayal of Marriage in George Eliot’s 'Middlemarch'

Throughout history, marriage has been central to the lives of both men and women – from the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in Chaucer’s Tales to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, the question of matrimony has always been a pervasive theme in the trajectory of literature. It is no surprise, then, that marriage is the most ubiquitous subject of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, with five marriages taking place during the novel and other relationships being analysed. But whilst many female novelists at the time would use marriage to bring their novels to joyful conclusions – Austen’s Emma and Bronte’s Jane Eyre are clear examples – Eliot was more interested in exploring the realities of matrimonial life. In so doing, Eliot distanced herself from the tropes of conventional romance derided in her essay, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists. Eliot opposed the falsely-romantic and idealized view of life and of love, and so her novels adopt a realist approach to nuptial union. Her protagonists do not always end their trials and tribulations ‘with a complexion more blooming and locks more redundant than ever’. This essay shall discuss the marriages of Rosamond and Dorothea to show how Eliot not only rejects idealistic views of marriage and of femininity, but also how she criticises marital conventions in a patriarchal and class-obsessed society.

The marriage between Rosamond and Lydgate exemplifies the problems caused by ideals of romance and femininity. Lydgate wants a wife with ‘that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music.’ This description embodies the conventional model of womanly beauty, and so we see how Lydgate has been manipulated by ideals, leading him to choose a wife for the wrong reasons. It is no wonder, though, that having adopted this interpretation of femininity, Lydgate falls for Rosamond. Owing to her education at Mrs Lemon’s school, Rosamond represents the supposedly perfect lady: she has ‘excellent taste in costume’ and a ‘nymph-like figure’ accompanied by ‘pure blondness’. Lydgate has been deceived into believing that Rosamond would be the best wife for him, simply because she fulfils a societal stereotype, rather than because her personality suits his. But Rosamond is also deceived by ideals and conventions – she is obsessed with appearances, and she arguably chooses her husband because of his aristocratic connections. In fact, she is so concerned with impressing Lydgate’s upper-class relatives that she wants him to get a ‘first-rate position elsewhere than in Middlemarch’ so that they are not shocked by her family. Again, this idea of marrying into the aristocracy is typical of ‘silly novels’, which have clearly influenced Rosamond. Hence, she estimates her interaction with Lydgate as ‘the opening incidents of a preconceived romance’.

Despite the fact that, according to the narrator, ‘Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing,’ and even though she has only known him ‘through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship’, Rosamond convinces herself that meeting Lydgate is ‘the great epoch of her life’. Because of the brevity of their acquaintance, and because they are misled by ideals of femininity and of love, their marriage fails. They do not actually know each other (Rosamond is ‘by nature an actress of parts’), so Lydgate is forced to admit that ‘the tender devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced, and life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation.’ Society, along with the ‘Many-volumed romances of chivalry’, has created false ideals, and both Rosamond and Lydgate suffer for it. Their marriage is rife with conflict, with neither husband nor wife accepting the judgements of the other, leading to a stale-mate. Rosamond is not the ‘docile’ or ‘devoted’ wife that Lydgate desired, and she even begins to think that ‘if she had known how Lydgate would behave, she would never have married him.’ It’s clear, then, that Lydgate and Rosamond, conditioned as they have been by society, married for the wrong reasons, and so they writhe under the failure of ideals and conventions.

Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon is similarly driven by dishonest ideals and flawed conventions. Of course, neither Dorothea nor Casaubon resemble the heroine or hero of a Victorian romance novel. And yet, both still cling to certain ideals of femininity, concerned not so much with beauty or taste, but with the patriarchal stereotype of submissive women (which Lydgate also seems to uphold). Casaubon thinks that Dorothea ‘might really be such a helpmate to him as would enable him to dispense with a hired secretary’, showing the lack of equality in his marital expectations. Dorothea, though ambitious in what Rosemary Ashton calls her ‘idealistic attempt to find a role’, feels similarly. She finds her role in the vocation of wife and, in the words of Cara Weber, ‘internalises the ideal of wifely duty’. Hence, she often compares her ideal relationship to that between a father and daughter. She wishes for the ‘freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.’ This ideal of wifely duty, combined with her Theresa-like ‘passionate, ideal nature’ which ‘demanded an epic life’, leads her to marrying Casaubon, with whom she is utterly incompatible. We only have to compare the speech of the two to see how very different they are. Derek Oldfield argues that, whilst Casaubon’s speech is characterised by intricate constructions and subordinate clauses (as in his proposal letter), Dorothea’s speech is constituted of simple sentences and childish exclamations (“Oh, how happy!” she says to her uncle).

Perhaps Dorothea thinks that, in helping Casaubon with his ‘Key to all Mythologies’, she will achieve the ‘epic life’ she so desires, cultivating her intelligence towards some higher end. But there is a tension here: Dorothea’s energetic personality is surely incompatible with her religious commitment to subservience, arguably influenced by the inequality of Victorian society. She has attempted to conform to a stereotypical role she simply cannot play. This is why ‘the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind’ become ‘anterooms and winding passages’ leading ‘nowhither.’ The metaphorical ‘anterooms and winding passages’ seem an apt description of her married life, trapped as she is in Casaubon’s ‘small windowed and melancholy-looking’ abode. In this sense, her confession to Celia that she is “rather short-sighted” is symbolic of her illusions about the virtues of marrying a secluded old man. It is when she is in Rome, confronted by the ‘ruins and basilicas’ that she realises her mistake. Rather than being charmed by the city’s antique beauty, she is shocked by a ‘vast wreck of ambitious ideals’ and ‘a glut of confused ideas’. Here she comprehends the foolishness of her marriage with Casaubon and her desire to be a submissive wife – her marriage is a ‘wreck of ambitious ideals’. Things worsen when she returns to Middlemarch from her lonely honeymoon only to be even more separated from her husband: they inhabit different spheres within the house, Casaubon’s domain being his library, Dorothea’s being her blue-green boudoir. This separation arguably reflects the 19^th Century distinction between masculine and feminine spheres, which Dorothea fights against in other ways (planning housing and trying to set up the hospital).

The other problem in the Dorothea-Casaubon marriage is that, as with Lydgate and Rosamond, their courtship is extremely short. Dorothea meets Casaubon in chapter two, and after ‘three more conversations with him,’ she is ‘convinced that her first impressions had been just.’ Dorothea receives Casaubon’s engagement letter in chapter five, and they are married five chapters later. As Bernard Paris argues, ‘Dorothea is a victim of the conditions of civilised courtship, which do not allow the parties to gain much knowledge of each other.’ And so we see again how dangerous these conventions can be. It is because they hardly know each other that they fail to trust one another properly – hence Casaubon’s ‘disgust and suspicion’ about Ladislaw. Moreover, their lack of closeness as a couple is evident throughout (‘She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers’), especially when compared to the Garth relationship, who are touchingly communicative – Caleb’s habit is to ‘take no important step without consulting Susan’. And so, Eliot is not just pointing out the failings of ideals and feminine stereotypes – she also condemns the brevity of modern courtship, since it deceives expectations. After embarking on the voyage of marriage, we discover ‘that the sea is not within sight – that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.’ This is why the marriage between Mary and Fred is a ‘solid, mutual happiness’ – they have known each other from childhood, and as Fred says, “I have never been without loving Mary.”

So what, in Eliot’s view, constitutes a successful marriage? Romantic idealism and societal conventions certainly do not – we see from the Cadwalladers that marriages across social classes can still succeed, even if they are unorthodox. It’s clear from the above examples that the happiest marriages follow on from lengthy courtships and also some sort of mutuality. Mary and Fred become published authors later in life, both giving credit to the other for their help – this alone demonstrates the value of mutuality. The Garth’s are also mutually happy, both working to provide for the family (Susan is a teacher). Susan Garth feels she married the cleverest man she has ever known whilst Caleb thinks he has a woman he is not worthy of. This illustrates the importance of mutual admiration and love in a marriage, something that can only be certain after a long courtship. This love is clear in Dorothea’s marriage to Will – as she tells her sister, “you would have to feel with me, else you would never know,” showing how ineffably strong her love is. The problem with her first marriage was its lack of love, and as we discover later, ‘No life would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion’. Moreover, she has something worthwhile to do in her second marriage: she lives ‘a life filled… with beneficent activity’ helping Will in his political work. This explains the historical placing of the novel, since we might argue that the passing of the Great Reform Bill was directly influenced by Will Ladislaw and Dorothea’s help.

And yet, as aforementioned, Eliot’s novels do not end in idealistic perfection. There is still much unhappiness and ambiguity in the Finale. Harriet Bulstrode is martyred in her extreme loyalty to her husband, and we see her at the end of the novel with greying hair and black clothing. Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage continues turbulently until Lydgate dies at 50, having achieved none of his great ambitions. Even the happiness of Dorothea and Will seems uncertain. The narrator makes a particularly sarcastic comment about Dorothea’s loss of agency in life: ‘she had now a life filled… with a beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and making out for herself.’ She may be doing great things, but she is only doing them in terms of ‘wifely help’ rather than making independent changes, as the novelist herself has done. She has sadly been ‘absorbed into the life of another’ and is ‘only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother’. But perhaps this is unfair: after all, Dorothea’s influence is clear in that, in the Finale, her epithet is used to describe Will as an ‘ardent public man’. Moreover, as Kathleen Blake argues, ‘the novel’s focus on the disabilities of a woman’s lot’, and thus Eliot is showing that, despite all of her ambitions, the best Dorothea could hope for was a productive and happy marriage to the man she loved. To suggest her marriage is a submission to patriarchy is to miss the point – she has done the best she could within societal restraints, refusing to consider Will’s ‘low-birth’ and instead marrying for love.

Wealth and Corruption in Charles Dickens’s 'Our Mutual Friend'

Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens’ most complicated novels, made up of a complex of interrelated plots and sub-plots. This multi-layered storyline enables Dickens to give a comprehensive vision of the breadth of London life, from the aristocrats and nouveaux riches to the teachers and paupers. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickensian London becomes most whole, bringing alive what Deborah Wynne described as ‘a disturbing vision of Victorian society’ fissured by ‘class divisions’ and ‘greed’. Because every echelon of society has its representatives in the novel, wealth and class are central to the narrative. As the plot develops, Dickens demonstrates the corrupting power of money and wealth in the context of an ‘unjust, commercialized, and de-naturing society’ (Barbara Hardy). And yet, the novel is far too complex to be branded as a straightforward didactic tale about how ‘money corrupts’. Our Mutual Friend seems to be more of a study of values and principles and how they work in Victorian society, rather than a complete satire on the upper classes. What Dickens seems to be suggesting is that, whilst modern society is both corrupt and corrupting, depravity and corruption can be navigated in certain ways, namely the avoidance of greed and the pursuit of love.

Still, it is important to consider Dickens’s presentation of the rich before we move onto his exploration of counteracting values. The Veneerings are the novel’s most obvious example of the shallow rich, suggested by their name alone. They are first introduced in Chapter 2, which slips into the present tense and mimics the clipped and lazy speech of the privileged: ‘Reflects Veneering; forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy…’ It is interesting that the Veneerings are described through their presentation in a mirror, again implying that they are incomplete and without depth – they are characterised by superficiality and surface appearances. Hence, they only exist in relation to their ‘bran-new’ home full of ‘bran-new’ objects. Even their ‘friends’ (who are not really friends at all) become objects, with Twemlow becoming ‘an innocent piece of dinner furniture’. And so, our first view of the rich (in this case, the nouveau riche) is one of shallow façades, reminiscent of Gilbert Osmond in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, for whom life is only ‘a thing of forms, a conscious, calculated attitude.’ The Podsnaps are similarly satirised, with Mr Podsnap’s arrogance being emphasised throughout: he is ‘happily acquainted with his own merit and importance’ and stands ‘very high in Mr Podsnap’s opinion’. This sardonic humour was possibly influenced by the biting satire of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a novel which likewise mocks the superficiality and arrogance of the rich. We might also recall Browning’s mockery of the bishop in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”, a poem that shows a Veneering-like obsession with appearances. To some extent then, Dickens depicts an unattractive group of wealthy individuals, perhaps suggesting that money is apt to corrupt, leading to egotism or ostentation. This is also implied in his novel Great Expectations, which tracks Pip’s descent into snobbishness and ungratefulness due to his ‘great expectations’. 

And yet, in Our Mutual Friend, money does not always have this same corrupting effect. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the Boffins, who acquire the wealth of the old, misanthropic John Harmon, but avoid corruption and stick to their values. They are described as ‘unpolished people’, immediately contrasting them with the highly-polished Veneerings. Their surface might not be ‘bran-new’ but they are motivated by kindness and good will, as is seen in their adoption of Bella. Mrs Boffin explains: “Next I think… of the disappointed girl; her that was so cruelly disappointed, you know, both of her husband and his riches. Don’t you think we might do something for her?” Mr Boffin even offers to help Silas Wegg to set up a new stall, despite all the Machiavellian scheming Wegg has done to blackmail him – Boffin would not like to see Wegg “worse off in life” than when they first met. This shows a genuine generosity so clearly lacking in the Podsnaps and Veneerings of Dickens’s world. But it’s not just the newly-wealthy Boffins that avoid the corrupting effect of wealth. Although Mr Twemlow comes across as relatively spineless throughout most of the novel, he can be read as another example of a comparatively rich man who has not been corrupted by money. At the end of the novel, it is Twemlow who resists the ‘Voice of Society’ and the cruelty of Lady Tippins, who mocks Lizzie Hexam and is outraged by Eugene Wrayburn’s decision to marry her – she describes them as “savages” and questions whether Lizzie was dressed “In rowing costume” at her wedding. But Lightwood and Twemlow both defend them, with Lightwood describing Lizzie as “a brave woman” and Twemlow arguing that wealth and class do not matter in the case of marriage. Wrayburn married her out of “feelings of gratitude, of respect, of admiration, and affection” – the feelings of a gentleman, a rank which “may be attained by any man”. And so, Twemlow and Lightwood show that it is not necessarily money that has led to the corruption of society – wealth does not necessitate Podsnappery, Dickens seems to suggest here – but a lack of ‘gentlemanly values’ and an over-obsession with both wealth and class. Their handshake at the end of the novel can be seen as a silent act of resistance against the more prevalent tones of societal injustice.

It is clear, then, that money in and of itself is not the corrupting force of the novel, though Dickens has shown that it is dangerous. Arnold Kettle is to some extent right when he argues that “The corrupting force in Our Mutual Friend is not money but bourgeois attitudes to it.” And yet, though bourgeois attitudes do play a role in the corruption of society (Lady Tippins and the Podsnaps are examples), the primary force of corruption seems to be greed – the desire for wealth, leading to jealousy and cruelty. Kenneth Muir argues that, in Our Mutual Friend, ‘Radix malorum est cupiditas’. For example, the Lammles marry for money only to discover that they had both been deceiving each other. Coming to terms with their relative poverty, they instigate insidious schemes to boost their wealth, such as their attempts to marry Georgiana Podsnap with Fascination Fledgeby. As Mrs Lammle later admits to Twemlow, Georgiana was to “be sacrificed” in “a partnership affair, a money speculation”. The greed of the Lammles is again reminiscent of James’s Portrait of a Lady, with Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle planning marriages (Isabel to Osmond, and Pansy to Warburton) simply for monetary gain. This leaves us with what Marx called a ‘cash nexus’ – the reduction of all relationships to financial exchange, also realised in Dickens’s Dombey and Son. The other villains of the novel, Roger Riderhood and Silas Wegg in particular, are similarly driven by greed. Riderhood unjustly blames Hexam for the murder of John Harmon in the hope of a reward, and Silas Wegg tries to blackmail Boffin with a second will, despite all the good that Boffin has already done for him. Dickens’s comment on Wegg’s actions is cogent: ‘Such was the greed of the fellow, that his mind had shot beyond halves, two-thirds, three-fourths, and gone straight to spoliation of the whole.’ Evidently, it is greed that drives these characters to their cruel and criminal acts.

Another study of yearning for wealth is that of Bella Wilfer, who begins the novel (in her own words) “the most mercenary little wretch that ever lived in the world.” It is her desire for money that leads to her cruel and haughty refusal of Rokesmith/Harmon, whom she rejects only on monetary and class terms. She tells him: “It is not generous in you, it is not honourable in you, to conduct yourself towards me as you do,” and asks him “not to pursue me”. Her obsession with money makes her a relatively unattractive character, though we cannot help being drawn in by her coquettish charm. It is only when Mr Boffin adopts the pose of unpleasant miser that she realises the dangers of her mercenary viewpoint. As she tells her father, “Mr Boffin is being spoilt by prosperity, and is changing every day.” When Boffin accuses Rokesmith of “impudent addresses” and states that Bella is motivated only by money, she has her heroic moment in the novel, telling Boffin, “you don’t right me… You wrong me, wrong me!” She calls him a “hard-hearted Miser” and, having seen how an obsession with money can corrupt, abandons her monetary ambitions, choosing Rokesmith’s love over the pursuit of wealth. This is, perhaps, the crux of the novel, since it shows the values that Dickens truly champions: love over pecuniary gain.

All of this demonstrates that Dickens’s novel is not simply an attack on the rich. Dickens shows that money does not always corrupt, though it often can. The novel is, in fact, an attack on a society which is governed largely by an obsession with money and class. Such a society has no time for real human values and promotes the Machiavellian scheming we see from Riderhood and Wegg, amongst others. So the divide in Dickens’s view is not so much based on class or wealth, but rather on principles: there are members of the upper classes whom Dickens’s satirises ruthlessly, whilst there are members of the lower classes to whom the reader is immediately averse, and vice versa. The novel does not present us with a black-and-white view of the problems in Victorian society. Rather, it stresses the importance of certain values and the possibility that there can indeed be hope: money and class will not always get the upper-hand. Hence, Eugene rejects societal conventions and marries Lizzie, and Bella and the Boffins reject monetary gain for kindness and love. As Kettle argues, Dickens has “an almost childlike faith in Low Church goodness” valuing “kindness, patience, the innocence and elation of youth, the power of love…”. This is clear throughout the novel, and the final handshake arguably demonstrates Dickens’s hope that class distinctions will diminish over time and that, one day, people will be judged on their actions and principles rather than on their wealth or status.

Urdu Poetry, Sad Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Sad Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Designed Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Designed Urdu Poetry, 

Kabhi Dard ha Dawa Nahi

Kabhi Dard ha Dawa Nahi

Urdu Poetry, UrduPoetryPoint, 

Urdu Poetry, UrduPoetryPoint

Urdu Poetry, UrduPoetryPoint

Aqwal-e-Zareen, Urdu Quotes

Aqwal-e-Zareen, Urdu Quotes

Urdu Poetry, UrduPoetryPoint, Best Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, UrduPoetryPoint, Best Urdu Poetry

Aqwal-e-Zareen, Urdu Quotes

Aqwal-e-Zareen, Urdu Quotes

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry, 

Urdu Quotes, Aqwal-e-Zareen

Urdu Quotes, Aqwal-e-Zareen

Designed Urdu Poetry

Designed Urdu Poetry, 

Urdu Quotes, Aqwal-e-Zareen

Urdu Quotes, Aqwal-e-Zareen

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry

Urdu Quotes, Aqwal-e-Zareen

Urdu Quotes, Aqwal-e-Zareen

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry

Urdu Poetry, Best Urdu Poetry

Conflict in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Poetry, said Yeats, is made out of a “quarrel with ourselves”. This statement seems to exemplify Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems, rife as they are with internal religious conflict. The two major conflicts or tensions in Hopkins’ verse are between aestheticism and asceticism, and between doubt and belief. The first of these tensions is due to the fact that Hopkins, as a Jesuit priest, always felt guilty for his love of beauty, creating in Hopkins what many critics call the poet-priest divide. The second is caused by the existence of suffering, which Hopkins struggles to reconcile with the idea of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. He is faced, like many other Christians, with the Problem of Evil. Perhaps these tensions explain why his style is so enigmatic: only through sprung-rhythm, neologisms, omissions, and idiosyncrasies could he reveal the struggles that wracked his soul. But Hopkins’ poetry does not simply present these two conflicts to the reader. As George M. Johnson argues, through poetry, Hopkins attempted to unify the divisive elements of his mind and to manage his “world within”. This arguably explains his use of the sonnet form: often, he presents a problem in the octave, and a solution in the sestet. So for Hopkins, poetry became a sort of literary therapy, a medium in which he attempted (not always successfully) to explain away or rationalize his various fears or doubts.

The tension between sensuousness and asceticism was a constant throughout the Victorian age. Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” shows the irony of materialism in a religious man, and Rossetti’s “The Goblin Market” demonstrates the danger of pursuing sensuous joy. But this conflict was exacerbated in Hopkins far more than in any other Victorian poet, arguably because of his upbringing: his father was allegedly autocratic, and his headmaster at Highgate was said to be a cruel tyrant. Hopkins escaped both of these authority figures, but he could never truly escape the self-accusatory spirit they had instilled in him, exemplified in his approach to beauty – he once wrote to Robert Bridges that certain kinds of beauty are “dangerous” and abandoned his wish to become a painter precisely because of this sentiment. This feeling that worldly beauty is somehow anti-religious is what led him to burn his poetry in 1868, just days after he decided to become a Jesuit. I.A. Richards is right in his assertion: “the poet in him was often oppressed and stifled by the priest”.

But seven years after the poetry-burning, Hopkins began writing once more. During the years of silence, Hopkins seems to have concluded that aestheticism and religion are not entirely incompatible. In this sense, he was particularly influenced by the thinking of Duns Scotus, whose concept of ‘haecceitas’ or ‘thisness’ is very similar to Hopkins’ theory of ‘inscape’ – “the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing” (W.A.M. Peters). Scotus’ theories helped Hopkins to make his own sensuality more acceptable to himself and to link the world’s beauty with God, as in poems like “God’s Grandeur” – “The world is charged with the grandeur of God…” His poems seem to draw on various religious ideas, including the teleological (or design) argument and the concept of panentheism, most clear in Sonnet 57 where Hopkins writes: “Christ plays in ten thousand places…” Through these ideas, that beauty is representative of God’s skill and that God is in all of the world, Hopkins reconciled his love of the sumptuous world with his strict adherence to religious customs.

But these arguments by no means solve the tensions. Perhaps, to an extent, Hopkins’ poetry was simply a literary enactment of self-deception in which he wrote what he wanted to believe. Frederick Page argues along these lines, suggesting that Hopkins felt uneasy about his love of beauty and felt the “imperious necessity of connecting it with God…” Although Hopkins wrote poems like “Pied Beauty” in which he praises God for ‘fathering forth’ a variety of beauty, he also wrote “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”. The poem begins with a description of the “stupendous / Evening” with its “fond yellow hornlight”, but later Hopkins says: “… let life wind / Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon, áll on twó spools”. These “twó spools” are “black, white” or “right, wrong”, and he warns us to “mind / But thése two…” Rather than beauty in nature, we could infer that he wants morality. So here the “counter, original, spare, strange” is replaced by the asceticism of simple monochrome, “black, white”.

We may also find a similar conclusion in his most famous poem, “The Windhover”, in which he describes the “mastery” of a kestrel’s flight. At the start of the sestet, the speaker says: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle!” This word “Buckle” is the ambiguous crux of the poem. We do not know exactly what the word should be taken to mean, but if, as Robert Rehder argues, we take the word to be an imperative meaning ‘submit’, then Hopkins could be seen as rejecting the world’s outward beauty. When the bird does submit, the fire of God will be “a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous…” If the bird (possibly a metaphor for Hopkins) buckles under God’s authority, its “brute beauty” becomes divine beauty. Of course, there are other interpretations, but this reading is succinct with the aesthetic-ascetic tension we see in Hopkins’ letters, and it also answers the question of the two comparatives, “lovelier, more dangerous” – the change will come in rejecting superficialities and embracing spiritualties. And so, we can see that, despite adopting Scotist thought, and despite attempting to rationalise his inner conflicts through poetry, his anxieties about sensuousness never truly disappeared.

The other major tension in Hopkins’ work is that of doubt and belief and the attempt to understand suffering. This conflict is most evident in “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, in which Hopkins tries not only to understand the suffering of those on the ship, but also to come to terms with his own suffering during his conversion. He compares himself to “soft sift / In an hourglass,” with God (the hourglass) sifting and testing him. The suffering we experience, he argues, can either bring “the best or worst” out of us. Like with a sloe that bursts “sour or sweet” in our mouths, we can either submit to God in the face of suffering, or we can reject him. God must “Wring thy rebel… / Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm,” and so encourage sinners to beg for salvation. Hence, he is “lightning and love,” both authority and mercy, and it is through his authority that we come to find his mercy – we are like metal on an anvil to be shaped to “thy will”. This blacksmith imagery recalls Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” which begins with the emphatic words “Batter my heart…” as Donne begs God to save him, through his mastery, from the devil.

In this way, “The Deutschland” is a theodicy in which Hopkins explains suffering as teleologically good – we suffer in order to find God. Hopkins clarifies the nun’s cry in the same way: though God did not rescue her, by her cry and by her belief in Christ’s agency, she “reincarnated Christ afresh, brought his real presence, alive, into the scene of the shipwreck.” (Helen Vendler) And so, because of Christ’s presence, the others who drowned on the Deutschland are “not uncomforted” – the nun’s cry brought “the poor sheep back” and the shipwreck became “a harvest” of souls for God. The shipwreck brought faith to the faithless, a theodicy which justifies the deaths of those on the ship. At the end, Hopkins hopes that the same faith will be instilled in the people of England and “be a dayspring to the dimness of us”. The same can be said for some of Hopkins’ other poems. In “Felix Randal”, Hopkins grieves at the death of his parishioner – “O is he dead then?” But again he explains this suffering with another theodicy, arguing that “seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears” and that through his sickness, Randal went from his “boisterous years” to a man with “a heavenlier heart”. Again, Hopkins argues that suffering led Randal to God, and so we see that many of his poems are an exercise in rationalising pain.

However, Hopkins shows more doubt in “The Loss of the Eurydice”, which begins: “The Eurydice – it concerned thee, O Lord…” (the rhyme of Eurydi-ce and thee emphasising God’s culpability). Hopkins cannot understand why God would let three hundred brave men die – “I need to deplore it.” He struggles to find an explanation, and he grieves that these men were not Catholics, though good men. The only hope he proposes is that suffering leads men to drive “full for righteousness”, and he implores the people of England to pray that those on the ship may be granted “pity eternal”. This doubtfulness recurs in the ‘Terrible’ sonnets, poems written in a time of deep distress, when his state was “much like madness.” Vincent Turner says this distress was due to “the sight of physical and moral evil” in the world, and most importantly, the suffering Hopkins himself experienced. In “Carrion Comfort” Hopkins questions why God would “rude on” him his “wring-world right foot rock” and “lay a lionlimb” against him. But he justifies this with another theodicy, employing the metaphor of harvest. He is buffeted like corn in the wind so that his “chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.” Suffering is necessary for the harvest, and this again recalls the imagery of “The Deutschland”.

But Hopkins is not always so successful in explaining away his pain. In “To seem the stranger” he laments that “dark heaven’s baffling ban / Bars” his words and so, without his poetry and his ability to rationalise his suffering, he is left “a lonely began”. In “I wake and feel the fell of dark” he reaches a similar stalemate, the only comfort being that “The lost are like this… but worse.” He, at least, believes in God, even though his cries are “like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away.” Here, as before, we see that Hopkins could never completely overcome these conflicts. Johnson argues that “By hammering out his emotions… into the sonnet form, Hopkins can manage to a degree the cries which well up from within.” But the doubts were always present in him, and poetry often failed to aid him. Though he tried to understand what Jennings calls “the ennobling power of suffering”, he could never really reconcile himself to “the blight man was born for” (“Spring and Fall”).

To an extent, then, Hopkins was rather like T.S. Eliot, though the comparison seems unusual. In The Waste Land, Eliot searches for hope in this “stony rubbish”, and he finds that hope in “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” And yet, because of all that has come before, Eliot’s romantic conviction that a better world is possible if we ‘give, sympathise, control’ seems somewhat forced. Certainly this is what Eliot hopes: but does he believe it could happen? Perhaps we can say the same about Hopkins’ rationalisations and theodicies: he wants to believe that aestheticism can be reconciled with religion, and he wants to believe that suffering is part of God’s plan. Whether he really believes his arguments, though, is uncertain, and this uncertainty is augmented by the fact that, in poems like “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves” and “To seem the stranger”, he can find no justification for sensuous delight and he can find no explanation of his suffering. And so it’s clear that, throughout his life, Hopkins was haunted by these tensions, and he tried to resolve them through poetry. J Hillis Miller argues that poetry must “make something happen.” Hopkins’ poetry often tried to make something happen, namely the conclusion of his inner conflicts. Sometimes he succeeded. Sometimes he failed. But he is no less a poet for that. 

Excel expression 2016

                                   


                                           Excel expression 2016

                                     It was fantastic experience to participate in Excel competition. it's good to know that Excel is one chemical company and inspite of that it takes deep interest in students personality development. it was like mini youth festival.so many competition were going on side by side. our Department has to send five students for each competition. there were so many competition like Debate, News reading, painting, mobile photography, group song, quiz, folk song etc.

                                    I have participated in two competition news reading and debate competition. News reading i like the most. because it was full of experience and enjoying. it was like real news you can see news reader in t.v. it's much more different when you read news in daily schedule and you read news before the camera. judges observe everything like dressing style, clarity of language and quality of voice, selection of the news, arrangement of news etc. it was like news reading interview for me. i really like to be news reader and it's my long cherished dream to be news reader. but unfortunately i failed in it. because i took it very lightly. i thought that it's not big deal to read news. but next time i will go with more preparation. and i will be succeeded.

                                   Next is debate competition. i think they have some another concept of the debate. it was like instant elocution. they invite each participant one by one. we have to speak for five or seven time. debate should not go like that. i have participated in debate for five times.we can get real charm of debate when we defeat someone with our logical arguments. they gave only one subject and it was quite interesting.
   
                                "Demonetization in India"

                                    Earlier i told my partner Budhiditya that this should be the topic of our debate. because at this time everyone talks about it, everyone discusses about it. this is the major matter in our India.  at the end i told Budhiditya that let me tell them what is the exact meaning of debate. but she told me that leave it then i didn't tell them. i spoke in favor of demonetization and my companion spoke in against demonetization.  i spoke for six minutes in Hindi.

                                  overall it was very nice experience to participates in both the competition. for that i would like to thank Barad sir for giving such a nice opportunity and also excel industries for organizing such good competitions.