sadness
The allusion to Sophocles’ in Dover Beach associates human misery with the sounds of the sea and reflects on the pathetic human milieu.
In the third stanza the significance of his Christianity is discharged, it is getting harder to hold on to his faith and protect himself from the sadness he is feeling about reality.
The Sea of Faith
This metaphor reflects a time when religion was experienced without the doubt of Darwinism. When his religion was intact, the world was dressed, like the folds of bright girdle furled it now was naked to him the vast edges drear… …naked shingles of the world, this bleakness caused by Darwin’s’ book of evolution.
Ah, love, let us be true
The commas used here slow the poem down again, you understand and recognise his consternation for normality, and he hopes he can disguise his feeling of hopelessness if only love can stay the same.
The poem speed up again, as he accentuates a series of denials. He has been left in the darkness and uncertainty of humanity.
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light
He is pessimistic, he sees no method to change the way he is feeling, and ignorance was bliss.
Swept with confused alarms… … … Where ignorant
armies clash by night.
He is sensitive to what is happening in the world, when talking about armies of people believing in one thing or another, there is certainly a clashing of philosophies. There is a confused alarm in his thoughts about Christianity and the writing of Darwin, and this is portrayed beautifully in this poem.
My second poem is Porphyria’s Lover by Robert Browning, which is one of the earliest, and most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues. This poem is in one long stanza, with a remarkable even tone throughout, which is told through the speaker, a psychotic killer (not the poet) recalling an appalling incident that has already happened. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing Porphyria, this poem seeks to freeze our consciousness with reality. The cadence of the poem mimics natural speech, the intensity of the rhyming ABABB scheme, suggests the madness and state of mind of the speaker.
In the first four lines the speaker creates the scene very well, the description of the weather shows the violence in his head and his outward projection of his anger.
…It tore the elm-tops down for spite…
Porphyria is young and pretty, and her entrance to the cottage out of the storm is her metaphorically closing the speakers’ bad thoughts out
and bringing in her beauty. She has tried to get a response from the brooding presence in the room, but his ambient mind has already hatched a plot.
Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the
storm……when no voice replied,
In his sad twisted mind, he has an elevated sense of his own importance. He is a God, and porphyria has come to worship him and he rejoices knowing he will be the last person to see her alive.
But passion sometimes would prevail………
………So, she was come through wind and rain.
He was going to fix her – kill her, sever her ties to anyone else.
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine.
It is clear for the first time, that the lover is in fact recounting step by step the history of a sexual murder. He wraps her yellow hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening her eyes and propping her body up against his side.
I propped her head up as before
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
………So glad it has its utmost will…
There is a shift in tense, and the speaker changes her head to it. He has gained this beautiful object. The visual imagery used is chilling, the denouement in the closing lines is shockingly apparent, and he savours her dead body resting against his. Nothing has been gained by her death, but in his crazed mind, he has increased his power.
And thus we sit together now………
………God has not said a word!
He sits with her body this way the entire night and in his final reference, he remarks that even God approves of what he as done. He has logically justified his actions and will not take responsibility. This is indeed, an explicitly haunting adaptation of a psychotic killer.
Assignment for 24th May 2003
