Attitude Status in Urdu

Searching for attitude status in Urdu language, if yes then you are at right place. Attitude status searched by young boys because boys have more attitude then girls this is the reason why boys search for attitude status in Urdu. Read some attitude status below.

GOD IS REALLY CREATIVE
I MEAN JUST LOOK AT ME

Q BANU ?? MAI KISI OR JAISA.
ZAMANEY ME JAB KOI MUJH JAISA NHI

LOVE ME OR HATE ME I'M STILL GONNA SHINE

MAIN DIKHNE MAIN BHOLI
LEKIN CHLNEY MEIN GOLI

ROK TOK !! MUJHEY PASAND NHI.
MAI APNE MARZI KA MALIK HU.

SUDHAR JAO, WARNA...
HUM BIGAD JAEIN GEY !!

BHAAD ME JAAYE DUNIYA DAARI
SALAAMAT RAHEY BS APNI YAARI.

SUN PAGAL DIWAANI THI, DIWANI HU
BUT TERI NAHI APNE ATTITUDE KI

APNA ATTITUDE APNI JUTTI MEIN RAKHNA
HOGA TU NAWAAB APNEY MEIN
MERE SAAMNEY APNI AUKAAT MEIN REHNA !!

YE KHUDA APNO SEY BACHAANA !!
DUSHMANI SE KHUD NIPAT LENGE !!

IF YOU CANNOT DO GREAT THINGS,
DO SMALL THINGS IN A GREAT WAY.

I HAVE MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES
AND NONE OF THEM LIKE YOU.

AGAR LADKI PATAANA SAWAAB HOT
TO AAJ MAIN NAWAAB HOTA

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Masks and Poses in Donne's Holy Sonnets

In his poem ‘Jordan’, George Herbert criticises the convoluted nature of Renaissance poetry and urges poets towards straightforward expressions of emotion, particularly religious emotion. He questions ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ and opens the poem’s third stanza with the memorable line: ‘Shepherds are honest people; let them sing…’ With the pastoral reference and the use of the word ‘honest’, Herbert also seems to be condemning the insincerity of 17^th Century courtly life contrasted with a sense of rustic innocence. John Donne himself was acutely aware of this artificiality, evident in his sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me…’ (often printed as the last sonnet in the sequence) in which he reveals the variety of masks he adopts in his poetry. He questions whether he can really demonstrate the real truth of his soul ‘By circumstances, and by signes that be / Apparent in us…’ He looks back at his past and sees only a succession of skilfully-adopted poses: ‘to day / In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: / To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod.’ He showed a similar awareness in his sermons, as when he discussed the dangers of rhetoric and the power of words ‘to shape that beliefe’ and ‘to powre it into new molds… to stamp and imprint new formes, new images, new opinions in it.’ In his Holy Sonnets, Donne does exactly that: he uses his poetic skill to shape various different identities for himself.

Indeed, Donne’s whole life seems to have been divided into a dual identity. A clear split has been forged between the young and lustful Donne of the Songs and Sonnets and the old and devout Donne of the Divine Poems. This division was partly driven by the mature Donne’s desire to distance himself from the sensuousness of his early poetry, a distance reinforced by Izaak Walton’s biography of Donne, in which he compared the poet to a latter-day Augustine, the saint whose conversion at the hands of St. Ambrose became an influential Christian paradigm. But this division is unhelpful in a number of ways, not least because it is based on the false assumption that the religious poems were written much later than the Songs and Sonnets, an assumption with very little evidence to support it. Moreover, the poems themselves undermine the so-called ‘myth of two Donnes’ in that, throughout the Holy Sonnets, we see the same wit and performance for which the Songs and Sonnets are renowned. As P.M. Oliver points out, ‘Donne’s religious writing… demonstrates a striking continuity with the amatory and satirical verse he had already written.’ True, the matter of the religious poems may be different, but their manner and style are very similar. Like the love poems, the divine poems are often ‘witty, individualistic performances.’ This does, however, leave us with some problems: the idiosyncratic wit and rhetorical skill of the poet often undermines the masks he is attempting to adopt, and to that extent the authenticity of emotion in the Holy Sonnets must be called into question.

Donne adopts two major poses in theHoly Sonnets: the first is that of the submissive and despairing sinner, terrified that his transgressions will lead to his damnation. The second mask he adopts is that of a man assured of his own election, unafraid and almost swaggering. The first mask, that of fear, despair, and melancholy, is typical of devotional verse: Gerard Manley Hopkins adopted a similar personality in his ‘Terrible Sonnets’. The melancholy pose was also typical of the Renaissance man, hence the abundance of young men painted as forlorn youths tortured by unrequited love. Donne himself had one of these portraits commissioned in which he is depicted in darkness with his arms folded – a standard symbol of melancholy – and a large-brimmed hat shading his face. Just as he adopted this pose as a pitiful lover, so in the Holy Sonnets he adopts the pose of pitiful sinner. For example, the fourth sonnet opens with the impassioned exclamation: ‘Oh my black Soule!’ and ends with the embracing of a mournful pose: ‘Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke, / And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne…’ His repentance, then, seems to be a mask in itself, and thus we can infer that the poem’s opening exclamation is no more than an artificiality. Indeed, a number of the poems seem to come across as theatrical and dramatic representations rather than sincere expressions of despair. In her introduction to the divine poems, Helen Gardner notes this ‘almost histrionic note’ and attributes it to ‘the meditation’s deliberate stimulation of emotion.’ The emotions of the poems seem almost fabricated at points, as is suggested by the repetition of ‘oh’ and ‘alas’ in the sequence. These exclamations seem particularly out of context when they follow relatively collected and rational meditations, as in ‘Father, part of his double interest…’ After meditating on the doctrine of the Bible and the various commandments God has given, Donne exclaims: ‘thy last command / Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!’ The ‘oh’ makes it seem like the speaker is emotionally involved, but as Oliver points out, ‘the level rationality of the preceding lines’ makes it hard to see the speaker as ‘desperate or hysterical.’

There are similarly histrionic notes in the Songs and Sonnets, again showing why the amatory-religious divide is unhelpful. For example, in ‘The Flea’, when his mistress has crushed the flea with her nail, Donne melodramatically exclaims: ‘Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?’ Here, Donne is adopting a tone of sadness in order to inspire the pity of his mistress. Arguably, the Holy Sonnets use a similar tactic, attempting to inspire the pity of God through a pose of despair which often comes across as melodramatic. ‘This is my play’s last scene’ opens very sensationally, with the word ‘last’ repeated four times in the first four lines alone. It’s no wonder, then, that Gardner pointed out the ‘note of exaggeration’ which, ‘in stimulating feeling… may falsify it, and overdramatize the spiritual life.’ But this melodrama is not the only aspect of the Songs and Sonnets which has crept into the religious verse. Throughout the divine poems there are idiosyncratic paradoxes, conceits and puns which, though typical of Donne, seem somewhat out of place in devout religious poetry. For example, in ‘A Hymne to God the Father’, Donne mourns his sinfulness with an authentic voice of fear and despair: ‘Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne, / Which was my sin, though it were done before?’ And yet, the first two stanzas end with a paradoxical pun on his name, jarring with the serious tone of the previous lines: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more.’ This mixture of wit and gloom is something that Wilbur Sanders criticised in the Holy Sonnets as a flaw, though perhaps it shows the tension in Donne between a yearning towards seriousness and an inability to completely escape his jocular self. Hence, in the words of Sanders, ‘the personality becomes the prey of inner division.’

This seems to be the underlying flaw of many of the sonnets: though at times they present us with an apparently sincere sense of grief, fear and despair, this is often counteracted by a strange frivolity, as when he plays verbal games with colours at the end of ‘Oh my black Soule!’ Their other major drawback is that they are often dominated by what Sanders calls ‘blatant theological sophistry.’ This is no more evident than in ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ In the octet, the speaker focuses on the picture of Christ crucified and wonders whether Christ will ‘adjudge thee unto hell’ even though he ‘pray’d forgivenesse for his foes’. The sestet opens with a direct response: ‘No, no…’ This audacity in itself is odd, and somewhat hard to believe: perhaps Donne used his poetry as a method of self-assurance. He then argues that the beauty of Christ’s image on the cross ‘assumes a pitious mind.’ But Donne, as a Calvinist, knew that this could not be true, since Christ could not be merciful to everybody: the elect would receive God’s pity, whilst the non-elect would feel his wrath and eventually be damned. Indeed, Universalism (the theory that everybody could be saved) was condemned as a heresy in Constantinople in 553 and again at the Protestant Augsburg Confession of 1530, and so it’s incredibly unlikely that Donne could have believed this sophistic argument. Thus, Christ’s image cannot assure pity for everybody. Moreover, Donne’s reference to his idolatrous past is telling since, as Stanley Fish points out, ‘The assertion that he is not now in his idolatry is undermined by the fact that he here says the same things he used to say when he was.’ So it’s clear, then, that as Sanders says, ‘the consolation does not console’ – Donne’s verbal ability to assure himself of his safety seems to undermine itself, revealing his manifest casuistry. Fish goes on: ‘as the poem concludes, he is no more assured of what he assumes than anyone else, neither of the ‘piteous minde’ of his saviour, nor of the spiritual stability he looks to infer from the saviour’s picture.’

The same can be said for Donne’s famous sonnet ‘Death be not proud’. Throughout his life, Donne was obsessed with the idea of death: as a young Catholic in Protestant England, he was taken to see Catholics martyred, an experience that stayed with him into his elderly years. He also wrote tracts on the morality of suicide, and, most famously, is said by Walton to have ‘preached his own Funeral Sermon’ known as ‘Death’s Duel’, a sermon he gave in the final days of his life. He was terrified by the idea that death takes away our individual essence as humans:

‘[T]hat private and retired man, that thought himself his own for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be published, and (such are the revolutions of the grave) be mingled with the dust of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond. This is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider.’ (‘Death’s Duel’)

In the sermon, he defeats this fear by concluding that every man must ‘lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection…’ The sonnet ‘Death be not proud…’ follows a similar line, though it is much more bravado in its argument. He addresses personified mortality as ‘poore death’ and bravely says: ‘nor yet canst thou kill mee…’ Death, he says, is ‘slave to Fate’ and asks ‘why swell’st thou then?’ This question in itself, though, supposes that death still assumes a large portion of Donne’s thought, swelling beyond reason into an irrational fear. The poem ends with a theatrical and yet hollow flourish: ‘death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die’. Despite the bravado of this statement, Donne’s declaration is vacuous – as John Stachniewski argues, the fact that it ends with the word ‘die’ ironically demonstrates that death still has power in the poem. Similarly, when Donne says ‘valiantly I hels wide mouth o’rstride’ we see him adopting a peculiarly audacious stance resonating with the precarious assertiveness of ‘Death be not proud’. Thus, whilst these sophistic arguments may have worked in seducing mistresses with wit and humour, they seem incredibly out of place in an eschatological context of salvation or damnation. They may show Donne’s poetic and rhetorical skill, but as Fish notes, ‘The effort of self-persuasion… fails in exactly the measure that his rhetorical effort succeeds.’

In his poem ‘Metempsychosis’ Donne reflects upon the stretching of ‘reasons… to so nice a thinness through a quill / That they themselves break, do themselves spill…’ This stretching of reason is frequently dramatized in the Holy Sonnets, the strength of the sophistic arguments often driven to a ludicrous extent, revealing their weakness. But this is not to say that the poems themselves are weak: this may have been part of Donne’s intention. Perhaps the meaning of the poems is to be found in their note of feigned assurance. As Stachniewski suggests, ‘the argument of Donne’s poems is often so strained that it alerts us to its opposite, the emotion or mental state in defiance of which the argumentative process was set to work. The poem’s meaning lives in the tension between the argument and the emotion.’ Perhaps in ‘This is my playes last scene’ we are not meant to believe with such assurance that Donne’s sins will fall away to Hell whilst he goes up to Heaven. We are, perhaps, urged to question this argument. And so, this self-conscious casuistry is a subtle and effective way of establishing the poetry’s dominant emotions, doubt and fear.

It’s clear, then, that Donne’s poetic style largely stayed with him throughout his career. The same use of wit and paradox can be seen in the Holy Sonnets as was seen in the Songs and Sonnets. It’s also clear that Donne’s poetry is largely a succession of poses, and this is something he himself seems to have been aware of. The sonnets often begin with a pose of despair and then move onto a pose of self-assured certainty. It’s no wonder, really, that the pose of despairing sinner seems, as Gardner says, ‘exaggerated’ to the modern reader given that we no longer live in a country dominated by Calvinism and the fear of God’s wrath – perhaps, then, we can look past this histrionic note as understandable. Moreover, perhaps this tone of feigned emotion simply demonstrates the impossibility of expressing such strong feeling in words. It’s somewhat harder to excuse the strange use of wit and paradox, which seems to undermine Donne’s apparent despair, revealing it to be just a pose (though that’s not to say he never felt despair, just to say that the despair expressed in the sonnets comes across as somewhat feigned). Similarly, the paradoxical sophistry destabilises any sense of self-assurance and comfort, revealing the mask of boldness adopted by the poet. But, as I argued earlier, perhaps this sense of failed assurance was intentional. Though Donne forces his fierce emotions into the restricted sonnet form, and though he apparently attempts to mitigate his despair with theological sophistry which he surely cannot fail to doubt, other emotions inevitably seep out. Just as the highly-wrought passions of ‘Batter my heart…’ seem almost to break free from the strict rhyme scheme and metre (the initial trochee ‘Batter’ being an obvious example), so the despair of the other Holy Sonnets is never really soothed. Perhaps Donne was partly right when he said: ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For, he tames it, who fetters it in verse.’ But, as we read the sonnets, we get the sense that Donne never truly succeeded in ‘taming’ his grief and his fear completely. Each line is bursting with tension, uncertainty, and doubt, and it is this that gives the sonnets their excitement. 

Opposition and Ambiguity in Milton's 'Paradise Lost'

The story of the Fall is one of opposition and conflict, centred around the battle of good and evil, faith and temptation. Michelangelo’s Fall of Man epitomises this opposition with its two separate depictions of Adam and Eve. On the left, Adam and Eve are shown in the throes of temptation, about to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; and on the right, Adam and Eve are shown in their post-Lapsarian state, banished from Eden by the Archangel Michael. These two opposing presentations of pre-Lapsarian and post-Lapsarian man are divided by the evil figure of the wily serpent, the manifestation of wickedness in the Genesis story. John Milton, in adopting this story as the material for his epic poem, likewise adopts this emphasis on opposition and duality, with two main conflicts highlighted throughout: firstly, and most importantly, the conflict between good and evil, and secondly, how that conflict manifests itself in the two different states of humankind, sinless and then, after ‘Man’s first disobedience’, sinful. And yet, Milton’s presentation of these conflicts is not so straightforward as we might expect – there are ambiguities throughout. With the dubiously heroic portrayal of Satan and the rather ominous and seemingly cruel portrayal of God, we are forced to question, as readers, whether the line between the abstract concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is really so finite. Likewise, with the hints at sinfulness and wantonness in Eve and in Eden before the Fall, and conversely, with the sense of man’s retained goodness after the Fall, Milton stresses the elusiveness of sinlessness and sinfulness, whilst also preparing us for the inevitable – first, the Fall of Man, and second, Man’s salvation through the death of Christ. In this way, Milton plays on these oppositions and conflicts in the poem and uses ambiguity to increase our anticipation and thrill as readers.

The epic poem begins with Milton declaring his intentions, to ‘assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.’ Less than ten lines later, we are introduced to Satan, first referred to as ‘Th’infernal Serpent… whose guile’ is ‘Stirred up with envy and revenge.’ Thus, the poem begins with the aforementioned opposition of good and evil, the just ways of God as Milton perceives them, contrasted with the envious deceptions of his foe, the fallen angel Lucifer. This conflict is repeatedly emphasised in the poem – Christ is presented to us as the archetype of goodness in whom ‘the fullness dwells of love divine,’ whilst Satan declares his mission in completely opposing terms: ‘To do aught good never will be our task, / But ever to do ill our sole delight, / As being the contrary to his high will…’ This conflict between good and evil is stressed again and again, as when Milton observes how all Satan’s malice will serve ‘but to bring forth / Infinite goodness,’ a direct reversal of Satan’s wish to ‘out of good still to find means of evil’. Indeed, throughout the poem, there are echoing phrases like these that serve to recall earlier lines and give emphatic poignancy to their contrasting sentiments. For instance, in Book I, Satan exclaims: ‘hail, horrors, hail / Infernal world…’ whilst Book III opens with Milton’s similarly alliterative interjection, ‘Hail holy Light.’

We might also see this contrast in the epic poem’s contrasting elements of creation and destruction in the poem. Whilst God (the representative of ‘good’ in the poem) is the force of creation in Milton’s cosmos, Satan is the force of destruction – having already ‘sought / Evil to others’, he is now pictured ‘In meditated fraud and malice, bent / On man’s destruction.’ This opposition between creation and destruction is made particularly potent in Milton’s beautiful description of God’s creative acts, with all aspects of this new world revelling in fresh life. For example, the mountains heave their ‘broad bare backs’ into the clouds and the rivers hasten ‘with glad precipitance’. When we first see Eden, it is described (through Satan’s eyes) thus: ‘In narrow room Nature’s whole wealth, yea more, / A Heav’n on earth, for blissful Paradise / Of God the garden was, by him in the east / Of Eden planted…’ Here, Milton is drawing on the teleological argument to highlight God’s goodness as it manifests itself in the beauty and harmony of the natural world. As Helen Gardner notes, these descriptions of Edenic splendour demonstrate God’s kindness and are ‘inspired by Milton’s passionate belief in the goodness of the natural world as it was created and his delight in the principle of life...’ And yet, Satan’s evil prevents him from appreciating that beauty and goodness: he ‘Saw undelighted all delight’. I also ought to mention briefly the contrast between Satan and Abdiel (perhaps a manifestation of Milton himself), whose heroism we cannot help applaud as Milton describes him: ‘Among the faithless, faithful only he; / Among innumerable false, unmoved, / Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified…’ There is, then, clearly an opposition created in the poem between good and evil, between creation and destruction, and between faithfulness and faithlessness.

And yet, it’s hard to deny that, at some points, that good/evil division becomes blurred. Indeed, though in the first book Milton’s vocal interruptions colour our view of Satan as evil, Satan is still one of the most charismatic and apparently heroic figures in the poem, if not in the entirety of English literature. Who has ever read the aphoristic line ‘Awake, arise, or be forever fall’n’ without feeling an overwhelming sense of admiration for Satan’s heroic ambition and ‘fierce passion’? As Hazlitt remarks, we cannot help applauding Satan and his Promethean valour: ‘After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he does more than this – he founds a new empire in hell, and from it conquers this new world…’ Satan’s charm and irresistibility may come, in part, from the fact that his speeches were the first of the work to be written, originally part of Milton’s plan for a dramatic tragedy – hence, Gardner comments, ‘The intensely dramatic handling of the figure of Satan is a main cause of the extraordinary hold he has on the imagination.’ Moreover, we often find ourselves agreeing with Satan’s view of God as a cruel monarch who ‘Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.’ After all, when God is first introduced, he is seen ‘High throned above all heighth’ and he later ‘Commands all the angels to adore him’. Given Milton’s own religiously individualist and politically republican stances, it is no wonder, really, that he ‘wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God’ – in the words of Samuel Johnson, Milton had an ‘envious hatred of greatness,’ ‘a sullen desire of independence’ and a ‘pride disdainful of superiority’. Thus, the beginning of the poem, whether intentionally or not, tempts us to agree with Satan that it is ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n’. The lines between good and evil are blurred, and though we know that Satan’s speeches only ‘bore / Semblance of worth, not substance,’ we cannot help being attracted towards him.

There are similar oppositions in the presentation of Adam and Eve as they are seen before and after the Fall. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve are

‘Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,

Godlike erect…

And worthy seemed, for in their looks divine

The image of their glorious Maker shone,

Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,

Severe, but in true filial freedom placed…’

They are presented to us as the image of perfect innocence – even their sexuality contains in it a certain pure nobility, repeatedly described with the word ‘mysterious’ which, in Milton’s time, had more to do with divinity than secrecy. Indeed, Milton even defends their open sexuality, saying that ascetics and Puritan hypocrites often defame ‘as impure what God declares / Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.’ Moreover, before the Fall, there was no sense of ‘guilty shame’ or dishonour in embracing sexuality. This pre-Lapsarian innocence is explicitly and immediately reversed after Adam and Eve eat the divinely prohibited fruit, when they engage at once in the ‘carnal pleasure’ against which Raphael warns them in Book VIII. They are described ‘As with new wine intoxicated both,’ the fruit inflaming in them ‘Carnal desire’. Adam casts ‘lascivious eyes’ on Eve, and ‘in lust they burn’. Likewise, Eve’s ‘eye darted contagious fire’. These repeated references to heat and fire highlight not only the sensuous and wanton nature of these desires, they also recall the burning fires of Pandemonium, and thus implicitly link this sexual depravity to the evil of Satan. And it’s not just in their sexuality that their post-Fall corruption reveals itself – they also grow blasphemous and proud, ‘and fancy that they feel / Divinity within them breeding wings…’ After eating the fruit, Eve even contemplates how the fruit may ‘render me more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior; for inferior who is free?’ The final question here again recalls Satan’s rhetoric when, in Book V, he questions how unequals can really be free. Not long after, the two are filled with ‘high passions, anger, hate, / Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore / Their inward state of mind, calm region once / And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent.’ Thus, Milton is keen to highlight the immediate change in his two human protagonists after they commit their first sin.

But there are ambiguities in this shift, too. Even before the fall, there are suggestions of sin and wantonness in both Eden and in man, prophetic suggestions of what is to come. This is largely insinuated through Milton’s descriptions of Eve’s hair, and as Jason Scott-Warren argues, ‘Milton makes Eve’s naturally curly hair indirectly responsible for the Fall of Man.’ Eve’s hair is described as ‘Disheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav’d, / As the Vine curles her tendrils’. This directly links Eve with the serpent, who is described as both ‘sly’ and ‘insinuating’ even before Satan has adopted the serpent’s form (demonstrating the evil already present in Eden before the Fall). The word ‘insinuating’, as Scott-Warren points out, comes from the Latin word ‘sinuare’ (notably containing the word ‘sin’) which means ‘to bend’ or ‘to curl’, thus linking Eve’s curling tresses to the serpent’s curling body. Thus, we are here given a premonition of Eve’s temptation and her eventual sin, highlighted in the word ‘wanton’ as used to describe her ‘ringlets wav’d’. This word is also used to describe the trees of the garden, which require ‘More hands than ours to lop their wanton growth…’ And finally, the river of Eden is described as curving and curling in ‘mazie error’. All of this combines to insinuate from our very first sighting of Eden that sin and the possibility of sin is indeed already present, despite the apparently innocent purity of Adam and Eve.

Milton also highlights the retained goodness in Adam and Eve even after their fall – unlike Satan, who knows there is ‘no place / Left for repentance’, Adam and Eve commit themselves to penitence and remorse. Milton describes how they ‘fell / Before him reverent, and both confessed / Humbly their faults, and pardon begged, with tears / Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air / Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign / Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.’ This repentance is wholly ‘unfeigned’, distinct from Satan’s false and superficial protestations of sorrow in Milton’s sequel, Paradise Regained. As Johnson says, Adam and Eve are ‘amiable’ after the Fall ‘for repentance and submission.’ But it is not just in their repentance that we sympathise with them. It is also in the pure and wholly virtuous love that they show towards one another – for example, they both wish they could take all the punishment on themselves (Eve wishes ‘that all / The sentence from thy head removed may light / On me’). But it is Milton’s beautiful expression of their love that leaves us most sympathetic: Adam says to Eve, ‘How can I live without thee, how forgo / Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined, / To live again in these wild woods forlorn? / Should God create another Eve, and I / Another rib afford, yet loss of thee / Would never from my heart…’ Eve reflects these sentiments when she tells Adam in such honourable terms, ‘thou to me / Art all things under Heav’n…’ Thus, as Waldock argues, we cannot help sympathising here, not only because they are now imperfect, mortal humans like us, but also because they are ‘following here the highest moral value we know – Love.’ And finally, we can only admire their dignity in accepting the loss of their paradise and embracing the ‘Paradise within’ as they ‘Through Eden took their solitary way.’

So it’s clear that Milton was keen, in this poem, to employ established oppositions and conflicts, whilst also manipulating them and making us question their validity. Just as Satan and God are held up against each other and yet both presented relatively ambiguously, so pre- and post-Fall humanity are explicitly contrasted though depicted in a nuanced way, with both sin and honour present before and after the Fall. Milton did this for a number of reasons, but it is largely due to the fact that the story of Paradise Lost was universally known, so Milton plays games with this idea of foreknowledge throughout. Satan is presented as tempting and almost admirable in Book I not only as an indication of Eve’s later temptation and seduction, but also as a warning to us to demonstrate how easy it is to be charmed by rhetoric, thus encouraging us to sympathise with Eve in her Fall.

In the same way, the descriptions of Eden and pre-Lapsarian Adam and Eve are littered with subtle insinuations of their future wantonness, thus preparing us for the Fall that we know is already inevitable. Because we’ve been prepared for the event by all these subtle references to sin, the simple climax of the poem needs no adornment to give it weight: ‘So saying, her rash hand in evil hour / Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat…’ As Gardner points out, ‘When at last we come to it, with the weight of the poem behind it, the undramatic presentation of this simple act of disobedience is profoundly dramatic.’ And finally, Adam and Eve are shown to retain their goodness after the Fall in order to prepare the Christian reader for what was to come – not only the goodness of Noah and Moses, but more importantly, the redemption and salvation of man through Christ’s death, as narrated by Michael. It is perhaps in this sense that Coleridge referred to Milton as ‘the deity of prescience,’ in that Milton is recounting a story that all his readers knew, and thus he fills it throughout with portentous and fateful hints to add to the story’s unfolding excitement. So, by blurring these traditional lines of opposition, Milton not only surprises his readers, he also makes his poem more dramatically effective. He has indeed fulfilled his wish that he might ‘leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.’ 

The Flaws of More's Fictional 'Utopia'

The so-called ‘Living Hall’ is the only room of The Frick Collection that has been left entirely unchanged since Henry Clay Frick moved into the mansion at the turn of the 20^th Century. With its engaged columns, broken pediments and Victorian architraves, the room is typical of the Gilded Age mansions built in 19^th century New York. It was Mr Frick himself who supervised the arrangement of the room, so it’s no surprise that, having purchased in 1912 Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More, he set his eyes on another of Holbein’s great works: his depiction of Thomas Cromwell. The portraits hang on either side of the Living Hall’s grand neoclassical fireplace, the two Thomases facing each other in apparent antagonism. Though painted five years apart, the portraits are seen as a pair, representative of the friction between these two royal advisors. Indeed, their roles in Henry VIII’s reign couldn’t have been more conflicting: Cromwell was one of the architects of England’s break with Rome and the Act of Supremacy, whilst More was martyred for his commitment to the Roman Catholic Church. Cromwell, along with Lord Richard Rich, was actually one of the major driving forces behind More’s execution, making the juxtaposition of these two portraits even more evocative.

It is testament to Holbein’s skill as a portraitist that, not only has he brought these figures so fantastically to life, he has also hugely influenced the way we view both More and Cromwell. More, who hosted Holbein on his first visit to England, is presented as affluent, wise, and confident. Cromwell, by contrast, is jowly and clad in black, looking cold and indrawn. More certainly comes out on top in this comparison, a wise and kindly man compared to a grim political fixer. This is how, until very recently, the two men have been regarded. There is, though, a darker side to Thomas More, a side that should not be ignored. Though Hilary Mantel’s depiction of More as a heretic hunting misogynist may be slightly extreme, it is perhaps more apt than Robert Bolt’s description of him as ‘A Man for All Seasons’. He was undoubtedly a great politician and an intelligent Humanist scholar, but that should not obscure completely an appraisal of the more questionable aspects of his character – he did, after all, think it acceptable to burn Protestants. The same can be said for More’s Utopia: though it has long been heralded as a great progressive work, there are features of the fictional world that lead us to ask uncomfortable questions. Hence, Utopia is one of the most hotly-debated works ever written, with critics wondering not only what More actually believed, but also whether Utopia comes anywhere near to the perfect commonwealth. And so, with reference to More’s life and work, I intend to explore the more unsavoury aspects of the Utopian world, present a nuanced view of the commonwealth, and thus unravel the enigma of Utopia.

There certainly are parts of the Utopian vision that were significantly ahead of their time. The abolishment of private property serves as the obvious example – because Utopia is a proto-communist state, (almost) everyone is equal. Nobody ever goes hungry or without a home, and the Utopians have no reason to be proud, greedy, or jealous. It was for this ideal that the Soviet Union honoured More when they placed his name on Moscow’s Stele of Freedom. And yet, even this aspect of Utopia must be questioned – after all, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn argued, communism needs enslavement and forced labour to survive, something ‘...foreseen as far back as Thomas More, the great-grandfather of socialism, in his Utopia’. Hence, in order to ensure that the Utopian regime works, the Utopians have almost no freedom – they are, in effect, slaves. Hythloday explains to More and Giles that in Utopia, ‘wherever you are, you always have to work.’ Even more sinister is what he says next: ‘Everyone has his eye on you, so you’re practically forced to get on with your job…’ Reading this, we can’t help thinking of Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and, in particular, the omniscient figure of Big Brother controlling the mass-surveillance of Oceania. Like the characters of Orwell’s novel, the people of Utopia are deprived of much of their liberty. Even their sleeping patterns are governed by the state, and it’s hard not to imagine More chuckling to himself when he wrote: ‘They go to bed at 8 p.m., and sleep for eight hours…’ With the naming of Utopia after its founder, Utopos, we are also reminded of the disastrous attempt at a utopia known as ‘Jonestown’, also named after its leader and almost cult-like in its worship.

Along with this deprivation of freedom comes an undeniable lack of fun and excitement in Utopia. People are not allowed to travel without getting a passport, and even then they still have to work their normal hours. There are no ‘wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places,’ perhaps a good thing, though it still demonstrates how restricted Utopian life is. Moreover, there is complete uniformity amongst people, destroying almost any sense of individuality: everybody wears the same clothes (distinctions only made between sex and marital status), and every house on the island is identical. We cannot help doubting whether Utopia really could be the perfect commonwealth, given its lack of freedom, excitement and individuality. Hythloday himself seems to point out this flaw in Book I: ‘he who cannot reform the lives of citizens in any other way than by depriving them of the good things of life must admit that he does not know how to rule free men’. It would be hard to deny that the Utopians have been deprived of excitement: the game of virtues and vices, for example, sounds almost like More making a little joke.

Another aspect of Utopia that causes concern is the use of slavery. Just as in Plato’s Republic there were those who counted as citizens and those who were slaves, so Utopia can claim equality even whilst it uses slaves to hold its commonwealth together. If these slaves don’t count as citizens, then the Utopian egalitarian model has no responsibility to them. This was one of the premises of Greek utopias, the goal of the commonwealth being the happiness of its citizens, rather than the happiness of all. As Aristotle said, ‘the state is an association of equals… But… this is not for all’. The slaves in Utopia seem to be almost dehumanized: ‘The slaughtering of livestock and cleaning of carcasses are done by slaves. They don’t let ordinary people get used to cutting up animals, because they think it tends to destroy one’s natural feelings of humanity.’ There is a sinister quality to the distinction it makes between slaves and ‘ordinary people’. By dehumanising the slaves of Utopia, it seems acceptable that they should be enslaved and thus not regarded as equal. True, slavery is better than capital punishment, and the slaves of Utopia are treated relatively well – but is it really ethical to enslave someone for committing adultery, for example? Along with the use of slavery, there is an ominous sense of Utopian superiority reminiscent of the Aryan ideal in Nazi Germany. Hence, rather than risking the lives of their own citizens in war, the Utopians use ‘foreign mercenaries – whose lives they risk more willingly than their own.’ These mercenaries are the savage Zapoletans, who the Utopians have absolutely no concern for. Thus, Utopian policy towards these savages is inconsistent with the concept of universal human brotherhood depicted in the New Testament. As H.G. Wells argued, a real utopia requires a world state – every human in the world must work together and be equal for the concept of a utopia to be fulfilled.

Linked to this xenophobic sense of superiority is the questionable practice of Utopian colonisation. The Utopians govern according to their own values, and very often they force their own values on surrounding states, most notably the ideal that all land should be cultivated as much as possible. When natives won’t allow the Utopians to invade, colonise and cultivate their soil, the Utopians go to war, ‘for they consider war perfectly justifiable, when one country denies another its natural right to derive nourishment from any soil which the original owners are not using themselves, but are merely holding on to as a worthless piece of property.’ This argument seems logical, since the additional produce gained from newly cultivated land could improve the lives of Utopian citizens. And yet, this same argument could have been used against the Native Americans who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline. Donald Trump could very well have claimed his ‘natural right to derive nourishment from any soil’, ignoring the fact that, not only does the land belong to the indigenous Native Americans, but also that the land is sacred and thus non-expendable. So, just as with Trump’s approach to the Native Americans, there is clearly a sense that the Utopians know better, and thus they can excuse themselves for invading and exploiting the land of others. As George M. Logan suggests, the same is true of Plato and Aristotle, whose ‘attitude toward foreigners resembles their attitude toward slaves and artisans.’ Though they try to minimise death and destruction during times of war, and though they kindly give one seventh of exports to the poor of other countries, there is still the menacing sense that the Utopians are superior.

So it’s clear then that, just as with every imagined or attempted utopia, the fictional state created by More is undeniably flawed. The question we must now ask ourselves, though, is whether More actually believed Utopia was a perfect commonwealth. Many would like to think so, and thus proclaim him as a great communist thinker. But as Anthony Kenny points out, ‘Wherever we turn in Utopia… we find something which is contradicted in More’s life.’ It’s hard to imagine that a staunch Catholic, who strongly opposed the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, would ever advocate divorce in any form. We question, too, whether a man who spent much of his life as a lawyer and as Chancellor (the most important legal figure in the land), would have created a world without lawyers and attacked the length of legal codes: ‘it’s quite unjust for anyone to be bound by a legal code which is too long for an ordinary person to read right through, or too difficult for him to understand.’

But these are relatively small contradictions: the major inconsistency involves the treatment of religion in Utopia. Hythloday praises the Utopian tolerance of other religions and the fact that ‘no one is held responsible for what he believes’ (unless, of course, they are atheists, who are despised by Utopians). There is also a modesty in Utopian belief in that their prayer involves a confession of human ignorance: they ask God to show them ‘the truest religion,’ admitting that theirs may not be the best. The question is, would Thomas More ever have questioned the truth of the Catholic religion? Would More, who referred to himself as grievous to heretics and who burned six protestants during his reign as Chancellor, really preach religious tolerance? Well, perhaps. What qualifies the Utopian tolerance of religion is that religious trouble-making is not allowed. One man is arrested for disturbance of the peace because he ‘started giving public lectures on the Christian faith, in which he showed rather more zeal than discretion.’ Conversion attempts are permitted, but Utopians are ‘not allowed to make bitter attacks on other religions.’ Perhaps More viewed the likes of Tyndale and Luther as troublemaking heretics rather than simply people with different beliefs, and as they threatened to disband Christendom, he felt he had a duty to fight them: they must be ‘oppressed and overwhelmed in the beginning.’

These are, of course, debates that will never end. It’s most likely, though, that More’s final words on the matter can be used to summarize his point of view: ‘But I freely admit that there are many features of the Utopian Republic which I should like – though I hardly expect – to see adopted in Europe.’ Given that Hythlodeus means ‘dispenser of nonsense’ and that Utopia means ‘no place’, it’s unlikely that More really believed that the Utopian ideal could ever be fulfilled, let alone perfected. Rather, he was simply exploring various different ideas for the construction of a new commonwealth or the improvement of his own, and by speaking through Hythloday, he could be ‘like the ‘all-licens’d fool’ in King Lear’ and ‘tell home-truths with comparative safety’. As Logan argued, ‘Utopia is partly More’s ideal, and partly not.’ So just as we must avoid idealising Thomas More as ‘a man for all seasons’, so we must take Utopia for what it is: a work that includes many progressive ideas (euthanasia and communism, for example), but that also includes many ideas grounded in the mores of the past – hence, colonisation, misogyny, and the keeping of slaves, are seen as acceptable. And we cannot blame More for his strict views on adultery or for his belief in colonisation – these were mainstream views of the time and, after all, More never said he was attempting to create a better world, only ‘the best condition of the commonwealth’. Just as with most things, we need to take a nuanced view of both More and his work. Indeed, this use of nuance has never been so vital given the current political landscape, dominated as it is by partisan arguments and bigoted beliefs. Human beings are flawed, complex, and individual. The inevitable consequence of the human condition is that our policies and views will always be problematic, and the commonwealths we create will never be perfect.