Poetry:

(British)
 Thomas Hardy: ‘Hap’; ‘Convergence of the Twain’; ’The Oxen’ + ‘A Drizzling Easter
Morning’
 W. B. Yeats: ‘Easter 1916’; ‘The Second Coming’; ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
 T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: ‘The Burial of the Dead’; ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
 Philip Larkin: ‘Church Going’, ‘High Windows’
 Seamus Heaney: ‘Bogland,’ ‘Digging’

(American)
 Robert Frost: “Design”, “Apple Picking,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
 Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro” + “A Pact”
 William Carlos Williams: “The Young Housewife”
 Allen Ginsberg: “A Supermarket in California”
 Robert Lowell: “For the Union Dead”
 Sylvia Plath: “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”

Drama:
(British)
 Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

(American)
 Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
 Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
 Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire

Prose fiction:
(British)
 Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
 Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

(American)
 Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw”
 William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily”
 Ernest Hemingway: The Snows of Kilimanjaro
 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Babylon Revisited
  Bernard Malamud: The Magic Barrel
 Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
 Raymond Carver: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
 Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

BRITISH POETRY
HAP BY THOMAS HARDY
In summary, then, Thomas Hardy laments in ‘Hap’ (the word ‘hap’ being another word for chance,
hence the word ‘perhaps’) that the misfortune he has endured and suffered throughout his life is not
the result of some angry and capricious god: he could live with that, he says, since at least then he
could attribute his bad luck to some higher power. But no: Hardy could not believe in a god,
benevolent or malevolent, and so has no choice but to conclude that the suffering he has endured is a
result of blind chance rather than some grand divine plan. Thomas Hardy lost his own religious faith
early in life, though he retained a fondness for ‘churchy’ things such as the King James Bible and
church architecture, as can be seen in many of his novels (such as A Laodicean or A Pair of Blue Eyes,
both of which feature architects or architect’s assistants as characters).
Hardy asks: ‘How arrives it joy lies slain, / And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?’ ‘Unblooms’
is one of Hardy’s negatives which he’s so fond of: hope did once grow and bloom, but now doesn’t
simply wither, it unblooms, the word reminding us wryly of the word’s opposite. (Compare the word
‘unhope’ in his poem ‘In Tenebris: I’: how much more piercing is that word than the more
straightforward synonym, ‘despair’.) What causes pain and unhappiness in the world? Not some
divine power, but ‘Casualty’ and ‘Time’, which are personified in the poem’s concluding stanza,
described as ‘purblind doomsters’ – that is, entities which secure Hardy’s ‘doom’ or fate but which,
unlike an all-seeing and all-powerful god, do so half-blindly (hence ‘purblind’) rather than with some
grand scheme in mind. We aren’t the playthings of the gods; we are at the mercy of random chance, or
‘hap’.
CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN BY THOMAS HARDY
"The Convergence of the Twain" is constructed with the precision of the mighty ship that inspired it;
perhaps more so as it manages to complete its journey without sinking so much as an inch. The
composition is mathematically pure: 11 stanzas of three lines each with each stanza standing on its
own as an independent sentence. The precision continues into the typography: the first two lines of
each stanza are indented with the third line flush to the left and stanza is individually numbered using
a formal Roman numeral system. Finally, those first two indented lines of each stanza serves to create
a recurring motif of the grandness and majesty of the Titanic as its sped across the surface of the
Atlantic. The concluding line is then engaged to present a contrast to this hubris by the forces of nature
beneath the waves utterly oblivious to the accomplishments of man sailing high above. Written from
the perspective of the aftermath of the event when the Titanic was no longer a glorious monument to
man’s innovation, those longer third lines present a world beneath the waves where the ship has found
her fate, expanding the parallel so that the ship actually inhabits both sphere seemingly at once.
The opening lines actually situate the ship there at the bottom of the sea as a monument to the vanity
of man that is now as far away from him as possible. The second stanza contrasts the fiery boilers that
drove its engines with the cold currents of the sea below. Stanza three sets off the economic opulence
of the ship’s décor with the slimy sea worms now reflected in its mirrors and glass. And so Hardy’s
calculation plays out line by line, stanza by stanza as the jewel-encrusted fixtures now have no light to
reflect and as fish swim by and ponder this behemoth, they cannot help but wonder what purpose it
could serve stuck there in the sands of the depth.
That question posed at the end of stanza V becomes the point at which the focus of the poems shifts as
Hardy seeks to provide an answer to his fanciful fish. The suggestion is that the Titanic lies there in
the sand as the result of a inescapable and unknowable force of fate that predestined the coming
together of the ship and the ice. The seventh stanza is where Hardy makes manifest his overarching
theme that ship and iceberg were locked into an arranged marriage that destined they be brought
together. The ship—the creation of men that insists upon referring to all vessels in the feminine—was
essentially a bride being prepared for her wedding day and the groom in this marriage of
inconvenience is, of course, the ice brought into being by that unknowable force of will.
The poem comes to a conclusion in Stanza XI with an example of the precision with which Hardy
chose his words: the collision between bride and groom is described for almost certainly the first
time—and perhaps even the last—not as a destruction event tearing things apart, but as
“consummation” conferring the union as complete.
THE OXEN BY THOMAS HARDY
A note about the words in ‘The Oxen’: a ‘barton’ is a farm building, and a ‘coomb’ is a small valley.
In summary, first: Hardy recalls how at midnight on Christmas Eve, as the anniversary of the birth of
Christ arrives, he sat with other people by the fire, and they pictured the oxen kneeling down in their
‘strawy pen’, paying homage to the birth of Christ. There is obviously a link with the nativity scene
here, where oxen and other animals knelt in the oxen-thomas-hardybarn where Christ was born,
according to legend. Back then, Hardy says, neither he nor any of the other men present (in an inn,
perhaps, to see in Christmas Day with a few ales?) thought to doubt the idea that oxen knelt in homage
to Christ.
But then, in the third stanza, using fricative alliteration to underscore the sliding away of certainty (‘So
fair a fancy few would weave’), Hardy reflects that, nowadays, most people wouldn’t believe in such a
thing: this magical sense of the oxen somehow knowing that it is Christmas, and kneeling accordingly
in reverence to Jesus, has been lost. Yet, Hardy goes on to say, if one Christmas Eve he was invited to
see the oxen kneeling, he would happily go to see them, hoping that such a thing might indeed happen.
‘The Oxen’ reflects a yearning for childhood beliefs which the adult speaker can no longer hold. The
poem highlights the yearn to believe, even – or perhaps especially – when we know that we cannot
bring ourselves to entertain such beliefs. The specific example of the oxen kneeling might be
understood in the broader context of a belief in a deity: Thomas Hardy had lost his religious faith early
in life, but remained ‘churchy’ (to use his own word), with a profound affection for the liturgy of the
Anglican Church.
The context of the poem is also significant. It was written and published in 1915, during the First
World War. The war stripped away many illusions, and people who might have been clinging to a
residual belief in old customs and traditions often found themselves becoming disillusioned very
quickly. The hopeful note sounded by Hardy’s final line is perhaps at odds with the pessimistic tone of
much of his poetry, but makes sense in the context of his fondness for magical and supernatural beliefs
as part of rustic cultural traditions.
A DRIZZLING EASTER MORNING BY THOMAS HARDY
‘A Drizzling Easter Morning’ is an accusing finger pointed at both the world itself for failing to live
up to our myths and at us for continuing to believe them. It deliberately breaks
the usual conventions of Easter poems to show how badly they match up with reality. Many Easter
poems feature the risen sun as a symbol of the risen Son (the hardest working pun in the history of
English poetry) and the natural rebirths of spring as a concrete expression of the myth of Christ’s
resurrection. Hardy points out what most of us know all too well – Easter weekend can
be as cold and wet as any other bank-holiday. Nature won’t join in our stories. And the poem’s
speaker is stood in a churchyard where, whilst the Easter story is being celebrated
inside the church, the skeletons ‘wait as long ago’. As has been the case for two thousand years they
stubbornly refuse to burst out of their graves even as (we imagine) the parson
inside proclaims total victory over Death.
The weather and the dead (who are almost, but not quite, endowed with agency when said to be ‘as if
much doubting’) become sorts of sullen antagonists to the community’s shared
beliefs. And the community itself begins to crack under the pressure of that antagonism. We can only
guess why the speaker choses to mope outside in the rain. Maybe he can’t bring himself to
join in when nature itself scorns what is being celebrated. The fact that he doesn’t capitalise ‘he’ (as is
normally done when referring to Christ) is probably a sign that he is
not a believer – the repeated ‘And…And…And’ in the first three lines certainly suggest an
unimpressed scepticism. But we know why ‘on the road the weary wain plods forward,
laden heavily’. There’s work to be done, and at least someone is out doing it rather than joining the
rest of the congregation in the church. The earth continues do demand labour,
whether it’s Easter or not.
Why then, do we continue to believe our myths? Because life is hard and we need comfort. Hardy
was no sentimentalist about rural life. He knew it was one of constant, menial, physically
ruinous work. A life of ‘aches’, of weary plodding, of being one more animal out in the rain. Over his
career as a writer he made his honest documentation of rural drudgery a
symbol of the struggles all people face trying to live happily in a universe so indifferent to us that it
seems malevolent. Hardy may have had no faith in the stories others draw comfort from, but
he understands their hunger for them. And he is tormented by their failures. They aren’t even strong
enough to bind us all together in life and they certainly can’t provide us with
enduring comfort. For his tired and aching toilers the only available consolation is a death which is an
‘endless rest’, not an eternal life. The last half line – ‘though
risen is he’ – is empty, mocking, and sad.

EASTER 1916 BY W. B. YEATS

The poem opens with Yeats remembering the rebels as he passed them on the street. Before the
Rising, they were just ordinary people who worked in shops and offices. He remembers his childhood
friend Constance Markievicz, who is “that woman”; the Irish language teacher Padraic Pearse, who
“kept a school” called St. Enda’s; the poet Thomas MacDonagh “helper and friend” to Pearse; and
even Yeats’s own rival in love John MacBride, “a drunken, vainglorious lout.” After reflecting on the
rebels’ constancy of purpose, as if their hearts were “enchanted to a stone,” the poet wonders whether
the rebellion was worth it. The poem ends on a note of ambivalence and futility, reflecting Yeats’s
own reluctance to engage in political debate. The poem is divided into four stanzas, symbolizing the
month of April, the fourth month. It is known for its famous refrain, “All changed, changed utterly: A
terrible beauty is born.”
The first stanza describes Dublin, where the revolutionaries lived and worked. Dublin is known for its
“eighteenth-century houses,” rows of connected and identical four story brick homes, each doorway
made distinctive by “fan light” windows. Yeats himself lived in one such house, at 82 Merrion Square.
In this stanza not much happens other than remembering how he and the rebels exchanged pleasantries
on the street or talked at the “club.” The club was a traditional gentleman’s social meeting place open
to members only. It was part of a fashionable English upper-class tradition and the revolutionaries
were not members. Yeats admits that he belittled the earnest rebels to his companions at the club.
One should also take note of the language Yeats chose to use in these lines. His writing is commonly
associated with flowery language, and very traditionally poetic sounding verses. This is not the case
here. The lines are simplified, just as his speech is to these revolutionaries. There are certain phrases,
such as ” mocking tale or a gibe” which also speak to the poet’s tone towards the subjects. These
words in particular are intentionally strange and are meant to make a reader questions why they are
being used. It is clear Yeats, or at least his speaker, has a difficult and complicated relationship with
the Rising and those who participated.
Toward the end of the stanza, Yeats introduces the subtle, but powerful, metaphor of “motley.” To
wear motley is to wear different colors combined. The people of Dublin could be said to be a “motley”
group in 1916: they were Catholic and Protestant, Irish in spirit but English in terms of citizenship,
poor and rich. Here Yeats is making use of metonymy, or the creation of a relationship between an
object and something closely related to it. In this case Yeats beliefs about the clothes and their silly,
multicoloured designs, are transferred to the lives of those wearing them.
The River Liffey divides Dublin; many of the rebels worked on the poorer north side of the city. Court
jesters also traditionally wore motley, and Yeats is likely also referring to the tradition of the “stage
Irishman,” a comic figure in English plays, usually portrayed as being drunk. The poet thought the
rebels were like these ridiculous jesters and once mocked their dreams. This one word encapsulates the
social, political, and cultural situation of Dublin in 1916.
The stanza ends with the refrain that will mark all the stanzas of the poem, the oxymoron: “a terrible
beauty is born.” Terrible and beauty are opposite sentiments and speak to the concept of the “sublime”
in which horror and beauty can exist simultaneously. It is usually experienced from afar. This could be
said for Yeats’ perspective on the Rising. The Easter Rising was terrible because of its violence and
loss of life, but the beauty was in the dream of independence, a “wingèd horse” of romantic
imagination.
In the second stanza, Yeats begins to name the rebels by their social roles. Their names will be listed
directly in the fourth and final stanza of the poem. The people Yeats mentions in the text are actual
historical figures. He remembers that Constance Markievicz, one of the leaders of the Easter Uprising.
She is known to have designed the Citizen Army uniform. He states that she was sweeter before
arguing for Irish independence. This is seen through a second instance of metonymy in which her
“shrill” voice is compared to her femininity. She used to ride horses and hunt rabbits, but then she got
involved via her husband, in the Rising.
Yeats also speaks on Padraic Pearse, a poet and another leader of the Uprising. He mentions this man
as riding “our winged horse.” This is a reference to the Pegasus, which represented poets in Greek
mythology. The “other” who Yeats mentions next is Thomas MacDonagh. He was also a poet but was
executed before he could write anything lasting. Yeats hoped this young man would become a great
name in literature.
Next Yeats moves on to John MacBride. He is described as a “drunken vainglorious lout,” or hick.
MacBride was married to Maud Gonne, a woman Yeats was deeply in love with throughout his life.
John MacBride was accused of physically abusing her. Although Yeats clearly hates this person, he
states that he must add him into the narrative as he too died fighting.
The “causal comedy” may refer to the idea of Dublin being a stage, as in the famous line from As You
Like It by William Shakespeare, “all the world’s a stage; and all the men and women merely players.”
In the 19th century, domestic comedies were plays about ordinary middle-class life and family
concerns. Yeats and MacBride had been fighting for the love of the beautiful actress and revolutionary
Maud Gonne, whom Yeats adored, but who MacBride married.
The third stanza of the poem introduces an extended pastoral metaphor. The rebels have hardened their
hearts against the English, and have focused on “one purpose”—armed rebellion. The hearts of these
rebels are compared to a stone that “troubles” a stream of history. Not only are the hearts
representative of the entire person, they are referred to as stones. They are immovable, dedicated to
one purpose. It is at this point that Yeats is changes his tone towards the rebels. They are garnering a
respect they didn’t have before.
In order to emphasize the unchanging nature of the rebels Yeats goes through a variety of images. He
speaks on the rating briefs and and the tumbling clouds. These are things which do change. They
contrast the rebels’ hearts.
In the final stanza of the poem, Yeats asks the significant question about the Rising and the subsequent
executions: “Was it needless death after all?” Was it all worth it? Did the rebels feel so much love for
their country that they were willing to sacrifice their lives? And what good is Ireland if the dreamers
are dead? The immediate political issue that arises is that England was on the verge of granting Ireland
status as an independent—or “free”—state, which would allow it to have its own parliament. The
granting of independence had been set aside during World War I because the English required Irish
support of the war.
In the second stanza, Yeats introduced the idea “the song.” In stanza four he developed the idea more
fully. In Irish political ballad tradition, naming the names of martyrs was important. Yeats follows the
tradition by listing Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and John MacBride. He also includes James
Connolly at this point, the labor leader.
Green is the traditional color associated with Ireland, the Emerald Isle. It is also the color of the
original Irish flag. At the end of the poem, Yeats reconciles himself to the fact that “wherever green is
worn,” people will remember the sacrifices of the rebels of 1916.
THE SECOND COMING BY W. B. YEATS
The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot
hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best
people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No
sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus
Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion
body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows
of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the
sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking
cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?”
“The Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and
about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The poem may not have the
thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work, and may not be a poem with which many people can
personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to
ensure its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM BY W. B. YEATS
The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is “no country for old men”: it is full
of youth and life, with the young lying in one another’s arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish
swimming in the waters. There, “all summer long” the world rings with the “sensual music” that
makes the young neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as “Monuments of unageing intellect.”
An old man, the speaker says, is a “paltry thing,” merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul
can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study “monuments
of its own magnificence.” Therefore, the speaker has “sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of
Byzantium.” The speaker addresses the sages “standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a
wall,” and asks them to be his soul’s “singing-masters.” He hopes they will consume his heart away,
for his heart “knows not what it is”—it is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and the
speaker wishes to be gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.”
The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his
“bodily form” from any “natural thing,” but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of
hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make “To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,” or set upon a
tree of gold “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to come.”
“Sailing to Byzantium” is Yeats’s definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative
and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is “fastened to a dying
animal” (the body). Yeats’s solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium,
where the sages in the city’s famous gold mosaics (completed mainly during the sixth and seventh
centuries) could become the “singing-masters” of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and
take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could
exist in “the artifice of eternity.” In the astonishing final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is
out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a
golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past (“what is past”), the present (that which is
“passing”), and the future (that which is “to come”).

THE WASTE LAND SECTION I. – THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD BY T. S. ELIOT

The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made
up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an
autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding
and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a
member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the
seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence (“I read, much of the night, and go
south in the winter”). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert
waste, where the speaker will show the reader “something different from either / Your shadow at
morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear
in a handful of dust” (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines).
The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a “hyacinth girl”
and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered
through quotations from Wagner’s operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery
and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the
cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section
is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He
confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World
War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars).
The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The
episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (an important
collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet’s sins.
The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is
not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be
regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a
more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is
indeed preferable. Marie’s childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins,
sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political
consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering
the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with
the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of
the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better
past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.
The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland
of “stony rubbish”; in it, he says, man can recognize only “[a] heap of broken images.” Yet the scene
seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only
of nothingness—a handful of dust—which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides
here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by a mere void.
The speaker remembers a female figure from his past, with whom he has apparently had some sort of
romantic involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of
water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a
revelation of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the
past with the present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the
episode from the past, the “nothingness” is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence.
Despite the overall fecundity and joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is
possible. This in turn leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode
attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and
neither is it the locus for a philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true,
essential nothingness itself. The line comes from a section of Tristan und Isolde where Tristan waits
for Isolde to come heal him. She is supposedly coming by ship but fails to arrive. The ocean is truly
empty, devoid of the possibility of healing or revelation.
The third episode explores Eliot’s fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris
conducts the most outrageous form of “reading” possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into
predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the
traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work
of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeare’s The Tempest (“Those are pearls that
were his eyes” is a quote from one of Ariel’s songs). Transformation in The Tempest, though, is the
result of the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with fraud, vulgarity, and
cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and
transformation is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding
desert section.
The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem,
the modern city. Eliot’s London references Baudelaire’s Paris (“Unreal City”), Dickens’s London
(“the brown fog of a winter dawn”) and Dante’s hell (“the flowing crowd of the dead”). The city is
desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker
recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about
a corpse buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and
fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the
first World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility: as we see in Stetson’s
failure to respond to the speaker’s inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights
of history, tradition, and the poet’s dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.
LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK BY T. S. ELIOT
J. Alfred Prufrock guides a companion through the smoggy, lurid streets of modern London as he
ponders his “overwhelming question” and worries that he is running out of time “for a hundred
indecisions.”
Prufrock visits a party of sophisticated women who “come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” but he
feels self-conscious of his slender, balding appearance. Bored at the prospect of engaging in social
activity, he wishes to withdraw.
Prufrock becomes lost in thought, wondering whether he should “force the moment to its crisis” or
“squeeze the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question.” However, he feels
unable to express the nature of either his crisis or his question.
He considers himself as a side character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, an “attendant lord” or “Fool” who
plays an insignificant part in life’s drama. As the poem ends, Prufrock imagines himself strolling
down the beach, listening to “mermaids singing, each to each” but not to him. He dreams of lingering
“in the chambers of the sea” until “human voices wake us and we drown.”
Lines 1–12
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno that
sets a tone of both despair and candor. The condemned, corrupt statesman Guido da Montefeltro tells
Dante that he will divulge his sinful story, for he doubts Dante will ever return to the mortal world.
With the opening line, “Let us go then, you and I,” Prufrock invites readers to hear his story, laced as
it is with doubt, failure, and ruin. The “you” Prufrock addresses is both an unnamed companion as
well as readers of the poem.
Prufrock moves through a London landscape where “the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a
patient etherized upon a table.” As the journey passes through “half-deserted streets,” “one-night
cheap hotels,” and “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells,” the bleak atmosphere thickens as Prufrock
paints a portrait of a dissolute city. Here Prufrock engages in a mode of projection, using the physical
city to reveal aspects of his own psychology. When Prufrock describes
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
he sees echoes of his own mental processes in his urban surroundings. The “overwhelming question”
figures as a recurring obsession, one which so lurks over his thoughts that Prufrock imagines that the
streets he walks down lead to that very question. The mystery of the question—“‘What is it?’”—gives
the poem an added propulsion. Prufrock refuses to tell, diverting with the line “Let us go and make our
visit.”
Lines 13–34
Prufrock briefly brings us to a festive parlor, where “women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”
This location seems to be the “visit,” but it proves fleeting, for his attention returns to an outdoor scene
in which a yellow, cat-like smog “rubs its back upon the window-panes.”
Prufrock falls into a meditation, reminding himself that “indeed there will be time,” but he does not
say why he desires such consolation. Nor is it clear what he desires to do with time, for Prufrock’s
aims are scattered and abstract: “time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” “time to
murder and create,” and “time yet for a hundred indecisions.” He has limited time to act, but he desires
more time to dither and revise.
Lines 35–74
The scene suddenly shifts back to the parlor of sophisticated women “talking of Michelangelo.” By
this point, the narrative structure of the poem is more a series of fragments, connected only by the
order in which they pass through Prufrock’s consciousness. Prufrock, ascending the stair (perhaps to
the same parlor), deliberates and considers descending, but he fears that “they will say: ‘How his hair
is growing thin!’” Prufrock is unsure, both about his appearance and about the question of whether he
“dare[s] / Disturb the universe.”
Prufrock then shifts into a mode of world-weariness, reflecting that he has “known them all.” It is a
weariness of the social world, for he has “known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,” “the voices,”
“the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,” “the arms[…] that are braceleted and white and bare”
and the “perfume from a dress.” He believes he has experienced all that society can offer and that it
has left him unsatisfied. His mind drifts towards images of isolated figures: “lonely men in shirt-
sleeves, leaning out of windows” and “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent
seas,” whom he feels that he “should have been.”
Lines 75–110
Prufrock descends into a deeper mode of reflection. Though he struggles to articulate the topics
troubling his mind, he tries, asking, “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force
the moment to its crisis?” As with his “overwhelming question,” Prufrock does not, or cannot, name
his crisis. However, he approaches it using religious language, saying “though I have wept and fasted,
wept and prayed[… ] I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter.” One point of clarity is that death
is central to his dilemma, for he has “seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in
short, I was afraid.”
There is a distinct sense that, in the face of death, Prufrock wishes to know what it is all about. He
expresses a desire “To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming
question.” His wish is for a universe-spanning answer. However, Prufrock feels hampered by his
inability to name the question or to express his dilemma to others; as he exclaims, “It is impossible to
say just what I mean!” Prufrock connects this miscommunication back to the parlor scenes, imagining
a woman “throwing off a shawl, / And turning toward the window [to] say: / ‘That is not it at all.’”
Lines 111–131
Prufrock shifts into a personal reflection, comparing himself to Prince Hamlet,whom he is not “meant
to be.” Rather, he is “an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two.” It
is an unflattering but accurate self-portrait. Prufrock embodies the self-revealing spirit of the epigraph,
admitting that he is “obtuse,” “ridiculous,” and “the Fool.”
As the poem moves towards its conclusion, Prufrock chants “I grow old… I grow old…” and imagines
himself walking along the beach, trousers rolled. The final moment is an echo of the ancient Greek
myth of the sirens; Prufrock hears the alluring song of “mermaids singing, each to each.” As Prufrock
solemnly reflects, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Nonetheless, he imagines descending to
those “chambers of the sea[…] Till human voices wake us and we drown.” The final image is notable
in the way it brings about the death Prufrock has so feared. It also involves “we,” presumably the
readers who have joined Prufrock on his journey and who also “drown” upon awakening from the
poem as it ends.
CHURCH GOING BY PHILIP LARKIN
Explores the issue of the church as a spiritual base. It begins ordinarily enough, as do many of Larkin's
poems, then progresses deeper into the subject matter, the narrator questioning why people still need
to go to church.
Although set in England at a time when traditional religion was beginning to decline, the poet skilfully
teases out more universal issues, using metaphor and pun and other devices to produce a memorable,
technically efficient poem.
Larkin's narrator is initially just curious, stepping into a quiet church, but then becomes more
perceptive, knowledgeable and dry. Each stanza furthers the inquiry until the conclusion comes at the
end, radical yet tempered.
This churchgoer is someone a little different, probably the poet himself, timidly soft-footing it in to the
church only because it is empty. The speaker is drawn to the tense, musty, unignorable silence of yet
another church, curious to find out more about why he's there, wondering what to look for.
It's quite clear that the speaker has an initial tongue-in-cheek approach to the interior. There is a hint
that he thinks it like a brewery (Brewed God knows how long); he has an awkward reverence and in
fact doesn't stay that long. But he does sign the book, a sign of respect, whilst the donation of an Irish
sixpence is worthless.
This churchgoer is ambivalent, unsure of his own religious feelings. Is he in the church to find solace,
or is he only there to have a go at those who have faith?
Larkin teases the reader, presenting a rational argument laced with doubt and agnostic cynicism.
Acerbic in tone, the speaker is just human enough to acknowledge that A serious house on serious
earth it is, suggesting that people will always need a holy space to worship in.
This is a poem of unusual reflection although it starts out ordinarily enough.
The speaker appears to be a person who frequents churches with the attitude of a museum-goer - he's
only there for the history and the architecture, and to have a laugh with a biblical text - yet he is
humble in one respect: he rides a bicycle and wears old fashioned clips to stop chain oil getting onto
his clothes.
He feels he has to do this, perhaps because he's been brought up in a god-fearing environment, where
it is proper to be clean; after all, cleanliness is next to godliness, as the saying goes.
After mounting the lectern, which suggests he fancies himself as a minister, a vicar, a priest, he
confesses an ignorance, which is a pretext, for he knows a lot about church interiors, and knows the
names of things.
This humble cyclist is more than he makes out, for he starts to ask himself serious questions about
churches in general, what sort of future have they in a world that seems to be ignoring religious
tradition. A world that's becoming more secular, more materialistic.
Has it been mere superstition holding the fabric of the church together for so long? Power of some sort
has to continue but how? Just imagine a time when the last ever person leaves a place of worship such
as this. It could a carpenter, a pious tourist, an aged worshipper - or someone else with a religious
impulse who wants to rebuild and start over?
HIGH WINDOWS BY PHILIP LARKIN
Completed in February 1967, ‘High Windows’ was one of several poems which Larkin wrote around
this time – during the so-called Summer of Love – which analyse the poet’s own middle-aged attitudes
to the younger generation and the changing attitudes to sex.
Larkin could hardly fail to be aware of the "bonds and gestures pushed to one side", but the paradise in
question is not that of the young couple but the dream of "everyone old", himself included. He regrets
that he could not have behaved in this way when he was younger, due to the unavailability of modern
birth control methods, and he envies the modern generation their sexual liberation. He uses the image
of a fairground "long slide" to picture the one-way ride to endless happiness that this is bringing
"everyone young".
Larkin then throws the thought process backwards to imagine what the generation before his would
have thought of his own prospect of liberation from constraint. However, this is expressed not in
sexual but religious terms. It is release from fear of eternal damnation and offending the priesthood
that he sees as their abiding desire, expressed in terms of envy of the next generation who will have
the liberty that is denied to them.
The image of the long slide is used again as the means to achieve freedom. Once on the slide the
desired outcome is inevitable, and Larkin reverses the traditional image of sliding downwards to
perdition by emphasising that freedom must lie at its base, as does happiness for the generation that
Larkin envies.
However, the final stanza brings all this to a halt in a rather startling way. The natural conclusion to
the two scenarios that Larkin has offered would be the suggestion that every generation, going back to
time immemorial, has thrown off the shackles of its parents and found liberty by sliding away from its
constraints. But the image that Larkin has of his own situation is that the promise of godless and hell-
less freedom has not been achieved. Instead, his thoughts turn to the "high windows" of a church or
cathedral where he is still on the inside with the sunlight shining down on him. The promised freedom
has therefore been an illusion.
The poem ends with a despairing recognition that there is no ultimate freedom. The young couple
might hope for endless happiness, but what is endless is the "deep blue air" that "shows nothing, and is
nowhere". It is the windows that are "sun-comprehending" and not people with their mortal longings.
By making "High Windows" the title poem of his collection, Larkin makes the point that the
individual can never have what he or she ultimately wants, because they can never know what that is.
Just as freedom from religion is not the answer, neither is 1960s "free love" and, Larkin implies, the
same will apply to every imagined desire of future generations.
BOGLAND BY SEAMUS HEANEY
The poem comprises seven four-line unrhymed stanzas. The poem is dedicated to T P Flanagan (1929-
2011), a landscape artist and personal friend of Seamus Heaney whose vision and analysis of the Irish
countryside was a major influence on him. The two would often explore a place together, with
Flanagan capturing a scene on canvas and Heaney “seeing” it in words.
The poem begins with a negative statement: “We have no prairies / To slice a big sun at evening”,
which immediately draws a contrast between the Irish scene and that of the wide open spaces of North
America. Whereas an American observer might interpret the seemingly infinite expanse as a symbol of
unfettered progress and ambition, an Irishman will have a more limited vision. In Ireland, the view “Is
wooed into the cyclop’s eye / Of a tarn” (a tarn being a pond or small lake of water stained black by
the peat of the bog).
The bog is the preserver of many things, including the remote past. A symbol of this is given in the
third stanza, in the shape of the “Great Irish Elk”, a skeleton of which has been dug up and is now on
display in a museum as “An astounding crate full of air”. There is therefore a question mark over this
find; it looks magnificent (indeed, the antlers of Megaloceros giganteus had a span of up to nine feet),
but it contains nothing of importance. Likewise, what other aspects of Ireland’s past have no real
meaning in the present, other than what might be imagined?
The fourth stanza mentions another preservation, namely that of hundred-year-old butter, which, being
a manmade object, symbolises the works of Irish people of the past that have not been lost to time.
The works of today’s generations might likewise expect to live into the future, preserved by the “kind,
black butter” of the bog.
However, the bog produces nothing of real value. It has missed “its last definition / By millions of
years”, by which is meant that, although peat can be dried out and burned for fuel, it is far less
efficient as a heat source than coal, which is only formed after peat bogs have become buried under
other strata and been subjected to millions of years of pressure. Hence Irish people of the conceivable
future will “never dig coal here”.
The function of the bog is therefore to be a conduit to the past, in which the most valuable thing is
knowledge. “Our pioneers”, in contrast to those of 19th century America who set off westwards across
the prairies, go “inwards and downwards” to explore the past rather than create the future.
The final line, “The wet centre is bottomless”, implies that the search for the past can go on for ever.
But is this a good thing or not? The poet does not draw a definite conclusion on this point, and the
hints seem to be that what will be discovered will be of academic rather than practical benefit. The
discoveries mentioned in the poem, namely empty skeletons and inedible butter, are curiosities and of
considerable interest in their own right, but do they have any real significance for Ireland’s future?
Seamus Heaney seems to regret that the vision of the Irish is “wooed into the cyclop’s eye” of the past
rather than the future.
DIGGING BY SEAMUS HEANEY
Digging by Seamus Heaney was first published in 1966 in his poetry collection, Death of a Naturalist.
He deals with the themes of root consciousness and respect to the ancestors in this poem.
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is sitting at his desk with a pen that is resting in his hand.
He compares the pen to the gun with the use of simile. Suddenly he is diverted by the continuous
sound of digging outside by his father. His father is digging potato field with the help of spades. He
travels back to his past with the imagination and finds his grandfather digging for peat. Ultimately, the
speaker comes back to the present being ready for the writing.
In the first couplet and last tercet of the poem, the speaker repeats the same line “Between my finger
and my thumb/ The squat pen rests.’ Using this refrain, he implies the message that he has been
digging with the pen which is as powerful as the gun. As he digs into the memory, he finds the
tradition of digging in both father and grandfather. Then he is digging into the memory as symbolized
by ‘bog’. Then, this bog is the symbol of personal memory where he digs to identify the personal
history.
He proudly declares that his father was the digger who followed the tradition of digging from his
father when father dug for the potato drills, grandfather dug for the turf. Whatever the reason is, they
were digging for their survival. His father and grandfather are the simple digger. They have not done
anything great, but he finds greatness in the trifling family history. It is his root, which may be ugly,
but it is always lovely. The change might have come in the nature of digging, but the tradition of
digging has continued.
The digging of his parents differs from the digging of a son. When the son digs, he digs for history in
which he is proud. He finds rhythm in his personal history. What is personal that is political. So, he
wants to celebrate the root consciousness by exploring into the personal history, which for him is as
important as the Irish history.
Now, the speaker digs for his identity. His going for family history means that he has gone for his root
or origin. His digging can thus be seen with root-consciousness in mind. The speaker listens to the
rhythm of the sound produced by the digging of his father and grandfather. He finds his family history
sweet, musical and melodious. He comes from a long line of diggers, and he seems pretty proud. Both
the father and the grandfather seem to be pretty hard-working, tough men, and the lines in the poem
continue to emphasize that fact by calling our attention to the grandfather's constant effort.
Heaney is aware by the end of the poem with the fact that his skill of digging with a pen is as powerful
as his forefathers’ act of digging for the survival. Though the mode of digging is absolutely different
from that of his ancestors, he is giving continuation to the tradition of digging, but with a pen. His
ancestors used manual force to dig, now he is using his intellectual force to dig. When he says, ‘I’ll
dig’ in the end of the poetry, he is sure with his writing career and proud enough for his selection.

AMERICAN POETRY
DESIGN BY ROBERT FROST
One of the most difficult poems, Design, an Italian sonnet by Robert Frost was published in 'A Further
Range' in 1936. The sonnet is the expression of the poet's surprise over the mysterious existence of the
world surrounded by omens and evil designs. According to a critic, ‘this is a poem of finding evil in
innocence, a song of experience, though the voice is hardly that of Blake's childlike singer.'
The poet has drawn the picture of a fat and white dimpled spider which had caught hold of a moth like
the white piece of the cloth on a flower called white heal-all. This simile has been used to indicate the
white color of the moth. All these three things – spider, heal-all flower, and the moth are shown to be
white. All these three white creatures and flower are brought together for some terrible reason. The
terrible reason is a dark design of death or we can say the food chain in a positive term.
By bringing all these white things together, the speaker is trying to highlight the food chain lying in
the nature. The moth has gone there in search of the juice of heal-all flower and spider has gone there
in search of the moth. One day, even the spider will become the food for the flower. All these things of
the universe are interconnected. The nature has designed us to be interdependent. Even living thing
and being survives upon each other. Nature has already designed this interconnection.
The "heal-all" is a common country plant supposed to have healing properties: it is almost always blue
in color. The poet has found a strange white variety and stranger still, attained to it a white spinner, "a
snow-drop spider", holding a white moth, completing a pattern of whiteness. Here, in the world of
chaos and darkness, there is purpose and design, "if (the poet speculates whimsically) design govern in
a thing so small."
The white color is generally a symbol of purity and innocence, but in this poem this color has been
contrasted with its meaning. The white color of the wicked flower heal-all (an ironic name) and the
white natural born killer spider bring forth the image of an actual horror scene and the innocence ness
of the white color does not matter here. So, in this respect, white color in this poem has been used as a
symbol of decay, death and destruction. It is the design of the god to bring them together and it is also
the dark design of nature to turn blue color heal-all flower into white, black color spider into white and
the moth into white. These three characters of death and disease are at the same place like the
ingredients of witch’s broth. This image does not bring the idea of life enhancing, but the image of
destruction, cruelty and dependency. By showing everything white so cruel and horrific, Frost infers
that darkness is everywhere, even under the hide of so called innocent people. Humanity is vulnerable
as the moth in the poem.
Design is, beyond doubt, a difficult and ambiguous poem. It is rich in symbolic interpretation. In the
words of Thompson, "For various and complicated reasons, his fluctuating and ambiguous viewpoint
mocks, at times, any complacent notions concerning a benevolent design in nature. One of his sonnets
which has occasionally been singled out for particular praise is a dark study in-white, ambiguously
entitled ‘Design’.”
Taken out of context, the sonnet might seem to carry overtones more ominous than the context of
Frost's other poems actually permits. By contrast, if this sonnet is considered in relation to the other
poems, it suggests not so much a mood of depressed brooding over "the design of darkness to appall"
but rather a grim pleasure in using such a peculiar exemplar for challenging and upsetting the smug
assurance of complacent orthodox belief concerning who steers what, where, and how. Yet this sonnet
resists even that much reduction. For Frost, the attempt to see clearly, and from all sides, requires a
willingness to confront the frightening and the appalling even in its darkest forms?' The poem,
presented in its entirely as above, follows the strict structure of a good sonnet.
Speaking of its artistic excellences, Reuben A. Brower remarks, "Few poems by Frost or more
perfectly and surely composed, few where the figure in the mind and in the ear are better matched."
There are "the daring use of tone end-rhymes," "the surprising and apt use of the many double and
triple stresses on successive syllables", and the weighting of rhythm evoking seemingly slight and
charming images."
AFTER APPLE-PICKING BY ROBERT FROST
After a long day’s work, the speaker is tired of apple picking. He has felt drowsy and dreamy since the
morning when he looked through a sheet of ice lifted from the surface of a water trough. Now he feels
tired, feels sleep coming on, but wonders whether it is a normal, end-of-the-day sleep or something
deeper.
Metaphorically, we may want to look at it as a poem about the effort of writing poetry. The cider-
apple heap then makes a nice metaphor for saved and recycled bits of poetry, and the long sleep
sounds like creative (permanent?) hibernation. This is one possible metaphoric substitution among
many; it seems plausible enough (though nowise definitive or exclusive). However, our search for
“ulteriority” may benefit from respecting, not replacing, the figure of the apples. Apple picking, in
Western civilization, has its own built-in metaphorical and allegorical universe, and we should
especially remember this when we read a poet whose work frequently revisits Eden and the Fall (c.f.
“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” “It is Almost the Year
Two Thousand,” “The Oven Bird”). When the poet speaks of “the great harvest I myself desired,”
consider also what apples represent in Genesis: knowledge and some great, punishable claim to
godliness—creation and understanding, perhaps. This sends us scurrying back to lines 1and 2, where
the apple-picking ladder sticks through the tree “Toward heaven still.” What has this harvest been,
then, with its infinite fruits too many for one person to touch? What happens when such apples strike
the earth—are they really of no worth? And looked at in this new light, what does it mean to be “done
with apple-picking now”?
STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING BY ROBERT FROST
Lines 1 - 4
Starting off a poem with a possessive pronoun is a brave and unusual thing to do but Frost manages to
make it work, immediately grabbing the reader's attention. It's as if the speaker is sitting close by,
thinking out loud, perhaps whispering.
But this initial thought isn't crystal clear, the speaker only thinks he knows who owns the wood - the
first uncertainty is introduced - and he is making this statement to reassure himself as he comes to a
stop, breaking his journey.
There is a gentle, slightly mysterious atmosphere created by the second, third and fourth lines, all
suggesting that the owner of the woods lives elsewhere, is separate and won't see this visual
'trespasser' near the woods.
It's as if there's something clandestine going on, yet the image presented to the reader is as innocent as
a scene on a Christmas card. The rhythm of each line is steady, without variation, and there is nothing
odd about it at all.
Lines 5 - 8
The second stanza concentrates on the horse's reaction to the rider stopping. Enjambment, when one
line runs into another without a loss of sense, is employed throughout. In effect, this is one long
sentence, the syntax unbroken by punctuation.
Again the tetrameter reassures and lulls the reader into a false sense of security - the language is
simple yet the meaning can be taken two ways. Queer is a word that means odd or strange, and the
implication is that this person doesn't ordinarily stop to admire the view; he only stops at farmhouses,
to visit, to feed and water the horse?
Why stop tonight of all nights? It's December 21st, winter solstice, longest night of the year,
midwinter. Or is that word darkest misleading the reader? It is certainly winter, we know from the
snow and cold, but darkest could just mean that, deep into the night, dark as ever.
Here sits the rider on his horse in what appears to be inhospitable countryside, staying too long,
thinking too much? And all the long vowels tend to reinforce the lingering doubts of the horse.
Lines 9 - 12
The horse is uncertain, it shakes the bells on the harness, reminding the rider that this whole business -
stopping by the woods - is a tad disturbing. This isn't what they normally do. This is unfamiliar
territory.
It takes a creature like a horse, symbol of intuition, noble grace and sacrifice, to focus the rider's mind
on reality. They ought to be moving ahead; there's something about the way this person is fixed on the
woods that worries the horse, apart from the cold and dark.
There is no logical or direct rational answer given to the horse, there is just the speaker's observation
beautifully rendered in lines eleven and twelve, where alliteration and assonance join together in a
kind of gentle sound dance.
Lines 13 - 16
The final quatrain has the speaker again reaffirming the peace and haunting beauty of the snowy
woods. On another night perhaps he would have dismounted and gone into the trees, never to return?
The lure of idyllic nature, the distraction from the everyday, is a strong theme; how tempting just to
withdraw into the deep silence of the woods and leave the responsibilities of work and stress behind?
But the speaker, the rider, the contemplative man on the horse, the would-be suicide, is already
committed to his ongoing life. Loyalties forbid him to enter the dreamworld, as much as he would love
to chuck it all in and melt into the snowy scene, he cannot. Ever.
The last repeated lines confirm the reality of his situation. It will be a long time before he disengages
with the conscious world.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO BY EZRA POUND

In a Station of the Metro published in 1913 by Ezra Pound is the best example of Imagist poetry that
contains just 14 words reduced from thirty lines which depict the precision of language. This poem is
one of the verb-less poem among the very few.
Pound describes his experience in a metro station in Paris in this poem. The different faces of
individual in the metro station is best shown in the poem with an equation of words. This kind of
treatment of the words creates a visual effect which is known as the quintessential Imagist text.
This poem is extremely short, but carries a deep meaning with it. On the surface, this poem has two
separate images: the crowd and the branch. Actually, Pound is placing one image on top of the other,
so that we see them as a single image. Therefore, the faces in the crowd become beautiful, like flower
petals on a rainy day. The petals, meanwhile, become faces in a crowd. This new combined image is
the real "apparition" - it floats before our eyes like a ghost which lives in no particular time or place.
Written in Japanese famous poetic form haiku, Pound in three lines (including the title) creates a chain
of images like the metro station, the apparition, the faces in the crowd and the petals on a wet black
bough. The title of the poem creates the visual image of the busy city life with the hustle and bustle of
the people and their carelessness to other people. The apparition literally means ghostly figure that
suddenly appears in front of you. Here, Pound equates the new strange faces seen in a Paris subway
with the apparition. These apparitions are mysterious, and the poet shows the expression of surprise.
The faces in the crowd are blurred for the poet and he finds inexpressible beauty in that blur vision.
Till now the words and their images, create a visual image of something undesirable and messy
situation of metro life. But the sudden image of "petals on a wet, black bough" amazes because of the
unexpected beauty in a boring city metro station. The unexpected beauty in an unexpected place is
beautifully and tactfully presented in a very precise way. This is the exact power and splendor of the
Imagist poetry to depict the relationship among the different images to cater a beautiful meaning. The
‘apparition’ and the ‘petals on a wet, black bough’ are distinctly opposite images that create two
distinct images in our minds, but the poet surprisingly delivers a stunning message to see beauty in
chaos and in the humdrum of life. The color, shape and size of a person may vary, but each has his/her
own beauty that may be an inner or outer beauty.
The human life is described and summarized in just few imagery that goes beyond the limits of
standard imagery. ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’ is the phrase which vividly shows the elegance of life
and meanwhile show the impermanence of human life. Petals are found in nature in various vibrant
colors which represents different human faces and the petals that lie in the wet, black bough
symbolizes the transitory ness of life. It was alive and attached to its stem few moments earlier and
now it is on the wet surface of bough lying lifeless. It may live a few moments long, but not longer.
This metaphor of petals on the surface of bough powerfully yet simply summarizes the human life and
its shortness: we all are mortal being.
A PACT BY EZRA POUND
The topic/subject of the poem is Ezra feeling betrayed. He feels like that Walt is not like his family
and that it’s the reason why he betrayed the pact that they made. The poem is about making a pact
with a friend and that after all Ezra did for his friend he betrayed him. The theme of the poem is that
don't always believe what other people say they will do because it won’t always stay the way they say
it. This poem is a narrative & dramatic because he is writing it from his point of view. And i choose
dramatic because he is choosing to be over dramatic of saying all the things that he did for him but
doesn't choose to say anything that Walt did for him. I choose this story because i can relate to it. I can
relate to the story because me and my friend made a pact of always helping each other out and we did
except she hardly helped me out so i stop helping her out. The Pact reminds me of a song that Miley
Cyrus would have wrote. I did not understand "we have one sap and one root". detested:(verb) hate
commerce: (noun) business
sap:(noun) the juice or vital circulating fluid of a plant, especially of a woody plant.

THE YOUNG HOUSEWIFE BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Even though Williams had only recently begun the poetic career that would last more than fifty years
when he wrote “The Young Housewife,” the poem embodies at least two elements with which, like the
aforementioned parallelism, he would work throughout his life.
One of these is a stylistic feature that impinges strongly on the poem’s interpretation and meaning: the
sense of the poem’s being literally autobiographical—an effect that is characteristic of much of
Williams’s poetry. Although some critics identify the poem’s narrator as Williams himself, one cannot
do this with any certainty, since the poem may be partly or entirely fictional. The most one can say
with certainty is that the narrator possesses the skills of a poet and storyteller.
The second element is a thematic one: “The Young Housewife” is about women—a subject that is
often at the heart of Williams’s poetry. The poem is an early, successful rendering of several themes
relating to women that Williams treated throughout his career, all of which can be summed up under
the theme of how a lustful man sometimes behaves in response to a desirable but unobtainable woman.
The interior monologue that makes up the poem represents the way in which a man might transform
his sexual attraction to an unobtainable woman into a personally and publicly acceptable gesture of
homage to her. Psychologically known as sublimation, this activity informs not only the plot of the
story but also the poem’s diction. The effect is that the narrator appears to speak on two levels: a
conscious and public level, on which he tells an acceptable story, and an unconscious and private
level, on which his thinly concealed libido (or sexual drive), perhaps along with his conscience,
reveals itself.
Thus, his mind jumps from the image of the woman “in negligee” immediately to the highly
suggestive word “behind,” and throughout the poem he seems to speak in a kind of Freudian language
containing buried words and hidden meanings. In this view, the poem suggests that, public
appearances notwithstanding, some women do not fare well at the hands (or in the stories) of some
men—a universal truth that Williams knew well and about which he wrote often.
The Young Housewife contains a myriad of different examples of Williams breaking from standard
poetic form—rather he tells a narrative. In this particular poem, Williams paints an image of a
particular moment in time without much context. This poem can certainly be interpreted different
ways but by focusing on specific details in this poem; Williams sheds light on the parts of the picture
that he wants to shine clearer than others.
This poem is organized into three stanzas: the first is four lines, the second is five lines, and the third is
three lines. Although there are so few lines in this poem, a lot can be inferred from the different
literary devices in which they are conveyed. In the first line, the speaker informs the audience that the
poem takes place in the morning—10 A.M. to be exact. This alerts the audience that it is light outside
and the day is in the process of beginning. In the same line, the speaker introduces us to the housewife
that is mentioned in the title and the only adjective used to describe her is that she is young. The
audience has no other information about this woman apart from the fact that she is newly married. She
could be jaw-droppingly beautiful or a plain Jane.
The sentence continues on to the next line of the poem and begins to describe what the young
housewife is doing. We are able to physically picture the housewife better since she is described as
wearing a negligee. This article of clothing provides interesting context for the housewife, herself.
Negligees are often sheer and since this is the only piece of clothing the housewife is wearing, it is
presumable that the speaker might be able to see some of the housewife’s naked body. This certainly
sexualizes the housewife and could be the reason as to why the speaker is focused on this woman so
intently. Instead of appealing to the physical appearance of the housewife, the speaker could also be
looking into her character—he presents the idea of her being transparent or invisible. The word choice
of “negligee” adds to the idea of invisibility because in French, negligée literally means “neglected”.
Williams could have chosen to use the word “lingerie” instead, however this additional description of
the housewife complements the working theme of the poem. The next line of this poem changes the
setting because instead of picturing this woman maybe through a window or an open door, the speaker
explains that she is, “behind / the wooden walls of her husband’s house,” (2-3). The audience now
knows that the speaker cannot visibly see the woman, but that he/she is picturing her in their head.
This line conveys that the speaker is aware of the housewife’s routine in the morning and could
possibly have history with her. Another interesting artistic choice that Williams makes in the line
mentioned above is referring to the house as “her husband’s”. There is a tone of possessiveness and
almost a paternalistic-like quality that arises from this sentence due to the fact that the housewife’s
only descriptor is “young”
In contrast with the three-line sentence before, the last line in the first stanza is a sentence all by itself.
Williams may have done this to place extra emphasis on this line which reads, “I pass solitary in my
car.” The content of this sentence parallels the isolation that the speaker experiences because it is at
the bottom of the stanza and is independent of the lines before it. This line is where the speaker is
interjected into the narrative and is introduced as a character in this poem.
In the second stanza, the attention is turned back to the housewife when, “Then again she comes to the
curb / to call the ice-man, fish-man…” (5-6). The audience is able to picture the housewife coming out
of her home in her most likely see-through negligee and calling to these random men. Since the
speaker never adds what the woman calls out to these men for, he allows them to infer what she wants
through the details provided in the poem. To describe someone as an “ice-man” or a “fish-man” is
very peculiar. Williams possibly chose these descriptors to convey a routine-like schedule that the
housewife does in the morning to call out to these men. The question at hand, though, is what is she
saying? Could she be calling out to them for the specific service they provide, is she merely saying
hello, or could she be calling out to them for the attention that she does not receive from her husband?
Williams is certainly putting emphasis on the fact that both of these people are men and since this
could be a routine that the housewife does often, she must have or is building some sort of relationship
with them whether it is friendly or romantic. It is also interesting that in the next lines she, “…stands /
shy, uncorseted, tucking in / stray strands of hair,” (6-8). The speaker seems to be describing the
housewife in a very vulnerable state. The messy hair and lack of clothes can be attributed to the fact
that it is still morning, but since she calls out to these men while she is in this revealing state, it
suggests that she may want some male attention or a simple “hello”. When the woman tucks in the
strands of her hair, it is easy to imagine this action as a coping method or a nervous twitch as a result
of an action that the housewife knows is morally wrong. This seems like a subconscious reaction to the
men that she encounters.
Similar to the first stanza, the speaker of the poem inserts himself in the last part of this stanza
although he doesn’t separate himself in a completely different sentence. Although the speaker doesn’t
explicitly judge the housewife, he/she, “…compare[s] her / to a fallen leaf.” (8-9). Williams could
have used this metaphor to convey how the housewife seems to be out of place and rejected. When a
leaf falls from a tree, it is no longer together with all of the other leaves, it hits the ground—an
unfamiliar substance, and dies because it no longer has the complex system of the tree to give it life.
This leaf has gone from being carried above the rest of the world, to having no support and at the
lowest point on earth. This could potentially parallel to the lonely situation of the young housewife
and the reason why she calls out to these various men.
The last stanza of the poem is vastly different from the previous two because it focuses solely on the
speaker of the poem and his actions rather than on the housewife. The speaker explains that, “The
noiseless wheels of [his] car / rush with a crackling sound over /
dried leaves as [he] bow[s] and pass[es] smiling,” (10-12). The intriguing part of this stanza is that the
wheels of the speaker’s car are only “noiseless” until it passes over the leaves in the road. The
repetition of leaves in this poem is very important because first the speaker compared the housewife to
a leaf and then out of nowhere the audience pictures the speaker running over leaves. Williams could
have included this to foreshadow the future of the housewife and explain the true intentions of the
speaker in this poem. It is mysterious that after all of the description of the housewife, Williams ends
this poem with the speaker smiling as her passes her. Even though the title of the poem is The Young
Housewife, it is uncertain now whether or not the focal point of the poem is her or the speaker.

A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA BY ALLEN GINSBERG

This poem criticizes the mainstream of American culture and is considered one of the major poetic
works of the Beat Generation. It seems that there's nothing more American than a neon supermarket in
California, filled with mothers, babies, and canned soup. This is not just a poem about Walt Whitman,
Ginsberg, or even a supermarket, the title announces that it's a poem about America.
In this antithesis to Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg imagines Walt Whitman shopping in the
supermarket of California. As he goes for shopping, Ginsberg follows him whenever he goes. He asks
whether he was making the survey of the lost America of love. But the question carries the main
concern of the poet. To Walt Whitman, America is the country of democracy, love, benevolence,
kindness and so on. But all these things have been lost in today’s America. This nation has not
inherited its past virtues and has been forgotten the ideals of Walt Whitman. Whitman always taught
love and affection to the Americans, but modern Americans could not learn his values. So Ginsberg
metaphorically says ‘childless.’ Children inherit the father’s blood in their veins, but no American has
inherited those values from their father. When Whitman weeps even when the bird weep, his children
are not weeping even when the bird weeps, his children are not weeping even when the human beings
weep. They are merciless and unkind today. Therefore, Whitman is lonely without children in today’s
America.
Whitman and Ginsberg represent two different ideals of American society. When in the longest lines
of his poems Whitman sings of beautiful and democratic America, Ginsberg in the same style presents
the dark and ugly aspect of America. In fact, Ginsberg worries that Whitman’s America is no more in
an existence. While Whitman worries when he-bird loses his mate and consoles with the thought that
death is just a transition from one mode of life to another, Ginsberg raises a question: Is the sympathy,
love, affection and human behavior present in contemporary America?
It's nighttime, and it’s dark, and the speaker wanders aimlessly, staring at the full moon and posing
deep questions about the meaning of life that he'll never get answers to. In this setting of night, the
speaker follows Walt Whitman in the supermarket of California. Supermarket in itself is the icon of
material prosperity and progress. It makes availability of many items under a single roof. This also
highlights the swiftness a supermarket provides. But in such America the speaker feels headache
finding Whitman childless. Whitman always preaches humanity, democracy, mutual respect and
inclusiveness. His America is the America of prosperity in terms of humanity. Therefore, his America
is human America. He teaches courage to the people to love each other, but that old courage-teacher
America of America does not have any children. If he had any children, they would inherit certain
qualities from their father. Since these qualities are no more present in America, he has no children.
Probably, the speaker's headache stands for his worry about loveless America. As a poet of the
counterculture, he finds America without love. Therefore, he describes it as the lost America of love.
In concluding part of the poem, he further intensified the description of loveless America with the
mythical reference of Charon and Lethe. Lethe is a river which brings forgetfulness in the underworld
and Charon is the ferryman who brought the souls of the dead across the river. Here, material
prosperity has become Charon; when people sink in the river of material prosperity, they forget the
essential humanity and love. What Americans were advertising as American prosperity, the speaker
finds adversity and hollowness. Humanity has been replaced by petty self-interested selfishness.
Because of them family values have collapsed. The scene of chopping also indicates the loss of family
values among the American. By the time they should be joining families or the family values, they are
in the supermarket shopping for images. So, in the prose poem he is presenting the antithetical vision
of America as given by Walt Whitman.
Allen Ginsberg writes this poem in vers libre technique which is an open form of poetry that rejects
conventional meter, rhyme, musical pattern and consistency. It follows the naturalness of speech
pattern, thus it is a flexible form of free verse. It is also called prose poem.
The main issue of the poem is to portray the difference between the American society that is shown by
Walt Whitman and the chaotic America of Allen Ginsberg. From the time of Whitman to Ginsberg,
America has experienced the civil war, two world wars, the industrial revolution, hydrogen bomb,
mustard gas, and the new era of technological revolution. Through this change, now America has lost
its essence and beauty that once Whitman used to sing in his poetry. ‘Love’ of Whitman has been
replaced by Ginsberg’s ‘supermarket and automobiles.’

FOR THE UNION DEAD BY ROBERT LOWELL

Lowell continues in the confessional mode in For the Union Dead, whose title poem, originally
delivered at the Boston Arts Festival in 1960s, is regarded as one of his best.
Beginning as a private meditation on his childhood memory of the Boston Aquarium, 'For the Union
Dead' commemorates the sacrifice of Colonel Robert Shaw, a Union officer killed while leading a
regiment of black troops during the Civil War. Shifting between the historic past and present, Lowell
laments the erosion of heroic idealism in contemporary America and technological encroachment.
The poem contemplates the legacy of the Civil War, embodied in a memorial to Colonel Robert Shaw,
a white soldier who died while commanding an all-black regiment. Colonel Shaw was a twenty-one
year old son of a well-to-do white man, but he had sacrificed himself for the unity of the nation; he
symbolized union idealism. One hundred years after his death, Lowell contrasts Shaw’s heroism with
contemporary forms of self-interest and greed in this poem. The title suggests that the Union army,
now symbolizing national unity/patriotism, has been dead for the people of America of 1963 (and the
modern culture in general).
The epigraph of the poem is the inscription (letters carved under the statue, written in Latin) on the
memorial to Colonel Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment that he commanded. In
English, the inscription (which Lowell revised for the poem) means, “He leaves everything else to
serve the republic”. The original inscription is: “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam” (or “They
relinquish/ sacrifice everything to serve the Republic”). By quoting this inscription Lowell introduces
the theme of noble self sacrifice.
The poet begins by surveying the Boston memorial from a distance; as he looks at the surrounding, he
feels that the place looks like a “Sahara of snow now” - symbolically a place devoid of feelings. The
South Boston Aquarium (a big aquarium was also placed before the statue for decorating it) has been
so neglected that it has broken and there are no more fish in it. The weathercock upon the building has
lost its scales so that it no longer shows any direction: this is symbolic of the lack of direction in the
“progress” of the material American civilization. In the second stanza, the poet recalls his visit of the
aquarium. As he was a child, he rubbed his nose on the glass wall of the aquarium and wished that he
could break the bubbles that rose from the fish’s mouths! The bubbles, as we shall see later, symbolize
many things including the American dream, values that modern people regard too unreal to be
pursued, the heroism of the past, and so on. This image of rising bubbles presents the fish as trapped
and submissive. The kingdom of fish is literally heading “dark downwards” as they swim down and
away from the aquarium light. More broadly, this image suggests a sense that the modern American
kingdom is also getting worse, darker, and less noble. "For the Union Dead" addresses the mode of
American society as it regresses from the idealism of the nineteenth century to the despairing loss of it
in the mid twentieth century. The very image of the dilapidated landscape and the broken language
reinforces this sense of breakdown of values. Everything is ruined, broken and bare, both literally and
symbolically.

DADDY BY SYLVIA PLATH

The speaker of the poem begins with an angry attack. She begins with a kind of conclusion that the
'you' does not do anything anymore. She calls him a 'black shoe'. She says that she has lived in that
black shoe (like a foot) for thirty years. The speaker is not only using the traditional symbols; she is
also using the symbols in the 'private' sense.
For instance, to live in a shoe must mean ‘living in a deplorable condition’. The speaker adds to the
imagery when she says that she has been living in that condition for thirty years being poor and
‘white’; and she is also not able to breathe properly and express her pain.
The speaker now directly addresses her daddy and tells him that she always wanted to kill him. She
calls him a heavy man, “a bag full of God”, a horrible (ghastly) statue with one gray toe as big as a
San Francisco seal (large sea animal). The images in this stanza give several kinds of shapes and
qualities to the picture of the speaker’s father. To be heavy must be suggestive of being imposing and
fearful.
The speaker says that her father is also like a gigantic statue that has a head in the freakish Atlantic.
She adds that its head is pouring green bean over the blue ocean. It is dirtying the waters of the
beautiful beach of Nauset. She used to pray to get him back from his grave; as we see later, she always
wanted to get him back and kill him again!
She expresses her hatred against the Germans, and identifies (sees as the same) her father with them.
She sees her father’s image in the Nazi soldiers, the Germans and their Hitler. In the German language
(tongue), she can hear her father. She can see him in the Polish towns where the Nazi ran the roller
machines over men on the streets! The role of war (symbolically) brings his image in her mind. He is
the symbol of atrocity and genocidal tyranny. She can never talk to such a man. It is as if her tongue is
stuck in her jaw.
She adds that her tongue has stuck in a barbed wire snare. The fence with thorny (barbed) wire is the
signal of the army. The sounds “ich, ich, ich, ich” is an expression of not being able to speak, because
her tongue is hooked by the army wires. Then she says that she thought every German was he. She
also thought that his language was the vulgar (obscene) language of the soldiers.
The next is an image of an engine, a roller, which he German army used to roll over the people in
Polish towns in 1941. She adds that she feels that she herself is being crushed by the engine. She says
that she is like one of the Jews who were crushed or tortured to death, in one of the concentration
camps of Hitler: Dachau, Auschwitz and Belsen are the places where Hitler gathered and killed
thousands of innocent Jews. The speaker says that when she remembers this she begins to talk like a
Jew. She even thinks that she is a bit of a Jew.
The speaker changes subject and says that the blood and oppression have made the world impure. The
snows of Tyrol in Italy and the beer of Vienna in Austria are no longer pure or true. The speaker here
implies that history and the world of male traditions are all false and impure. She adds a quite a
different issue when she repeats that she may be a Jew because she has a Tarot pack of astrologer’s
card. She remembers that her grandmothers (ancestress) were short (gypsy), and so she could be really
a Jew. We know that Plath’s ancestry was mixed one and her mother was an Austrian. She remembers
her father and says to him that she has always been afraid of him.
He is not a God, but a swastika; she calls him a terribly black and huge swastika that covers the sky
itself. The swastika itself is the symbol of ‘goodwill’ used since ancient times in Hindu communities,
but Hitler took it to symbolize his ideals and rule and so it is taken as a sign of the devil here in this
poem (there’s noting wrong with the original swastika, though). Changing issues in mid-stanza, the
speaker says that women love the Fascists (of Italy) who believed in absolute rule. This is obviously
an irony because women in particular hate oppression and tyranny. Then she adds an image of a boot
in the face, certainly an image of the Fascist way of dominating men. They are brutes, with a brutish
heart, and a savage nature. This stanza contains, like many others, such a language which suggests that
the speaker is so disturbed mentally that she cannot follow a simple line of thought. The change of
subject in mid stanza, the absurd images, the unrelated ideas and the exaggerated and twisted
expressions all suggest that her anger is so much that she is not able to properly organize and logically
express them.
The speaker brings up a simpler image of her own father when she was a child. She suggests that she
remembers the exact image of her father as he stood before the blackboard. This seems to be her
mental picture of his harshness as he tried to teach her. She remembers the cleft (parted) chin instead
of having a cleft foot. The demons are believed to have cleft feel.
He is no less a devil for that, because he has bitten her pretty red heart into two pieces. She says that
she was ten when they buried him. This is one autobiographical clue in the poem, because Plath’s
father had died when she was about ten (eight). At the age of twenty, she says, she tried to die. But she
says she got back to kill him. In fact, her relatives had prevented Plath from her attempts at suicide for
two times, and she had succeeded on her third attempt. Here she says that she came back to kill him;
even his bones would do. She would take revenge by destroying them, imagining to have killed him.
She says that they pulled her out of her suicidal attempts (sack). They stuck her back to life. But then
she knew how to utilize the life forced upon her: she made a black effigy (model) of her father and
destroyed it.
She says that she has killed two men, her daddy and his ghost (vampire is a blood- sucking ghost)
which drank her blood for seven years. She tells that to her daddy and adds that he can now go and rest
forever. In the last stanza she concludes that there is a big stick (stake) in his black fat heart. She
reminds him that the villagers never liked him. And now after his death, they are dancing and
stamping upon his grave. She says that they always knew that it was he who was the rogue, the tyrant,
and so on. The speaker uses the most angry word ‘bastard’ in the last line. And now that she has
expressed her anger to the fullest, she seems to be relieved. She says that she is satisfied (to be
though).
LADY LAZARUS BY SYLVIA PLATH
Lady Lazarus is not a raw, direct confessional poem, despite that first person conversational opening
line, but a melodramatic monologue on the subject of identity.
For Sylvia Plath, identity had a strong, inherent existential element. Her German father died
prematurely when she was eight years old, leaving her emotionally bereft. She nearly drowned when
10 years old whilst swimming out to sea. Many think this was an attempted suicide. This incident is
mentioned in the poem.
Later on in life she again attempted suicide and failed. Bouts of depression throughout her adult life
had to be treated with medication and electroconvulsive shocks.
In the poem the speaker compares herself to a cat, having nine lives. But she also grotesquely states:
Dying
is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
There is also parody, performance and pain but in the end the reader is left in little doubt that the
speaker, a suffering woman out for revenge, is reborn as a mythological creature capable of eating
men.
Male characters play an important role in Plath's poetry and in Lady Lazarus they feature prominently.
The fact that she used German words - Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy and so on - relates to her father, who
was German. She had a complex relationship with Otto Plath. Her poem 'Daddy' attests to this.
Her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes ended in the summer of 1962 when Sylvia Plath got to know
of an affair between Hughes and one Assia Wevill. This must have influenced the tone of the poem
with regards to the warning given to all males near the end.
It is clear from reading biographies and her letters that the final few months of Sylvia Plath's life were
a mix of creative highs and devastating emotional and psychological lows. She never could quite find
a tolerable way through.
From the title, with its reference to the biblical Lazarus, raised from the dead by Christ, to the final
stanza where the speaker, having been burnt to ash, rises like a phoenix, the emphasis is on
regeneration - new form, miraculous transformation - the artist, the artistic work, living on.
The most controversial aspect of the poem is the reference to the awful events at the Belsen
concentration camp run by the Nazis in the second world war. Jews from all sorts of backgrounds were
subject to the most gruesome experiments before being murdered.
Sylvia Plath was well aware of the provocative contents of her poem. She wrote:
'What the person out of Belsen - physical or psychological - wants is nobody saying the birdies still go
tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what
it is like.'
Letter to Mother, Oct 1962
The speaker's suffering in the poem relates to that of any individual who went through the trauma of
the holocaust. Many critics have questioned Plath's inclusion of Belsen and associated horrors; they
see it as insensitive and gross.
Equally it could be argued that an artist has a duty to provoke and challenge and that no subject should
be taboo.
Sylvia Plath must have known that by using such sensitive language she would shock and offend, just
as she did in her poem Daddy, which focuses mainly on her father Otto. In the poem he is portrayed as
a Nazi, yet in real life there is no evidence to suggest this. So the poet Plath is creating a poetic
persona, a fictional character0.
The same goes for Lady Lazarus. This is not a straight autobiographical confessional poem at all but a
created drama, a set of scenes in which Plath's frustrations and struggles can play out.
From this the question arises - does her use of such controversial language actually work within the
poem and enhance it as a work of art? The final answer must be up to the reader.
We'll let Sylvia Plath herself explain:
'The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she
has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain,
very resourceful woman.'

BRITISH DRAMA
WAITING FOR GODOT BY SAMUEL BECKETT
The play opens on an outdoor scene of two bedraggled companions: the philosophical Vladimir and
the weary Estragon who, at the moment, cannot remove his boots from his aching feet, finally
muttering, "Nothing to be done."[nb 1] Vladimir takes up the thought loftily, while Estragon vaguely
recalls having been beaten the night before. Finally, his boots come off, while the pair ramble and
bicker pointlessly. When Estragon suddenly decides to leave, Vladimir reminds him that they must
stay and wait for an unspecified person called Godot—a segment of dialogue that repeats often.
Unfortunately, the pair cannot agree on where or when they are expected to meet with this Godot.[nb
2] They only know to wait at a tree, and there is indeed a leafless one nearby.
Eventually, Estragon dozes off and Vladimir rouses him but then stops him before he can share his
dreams—another recurring activity between the two men. Estragon wants to hear an old joke, which
Vladimir cannot finish without going off to urinate, since every time he starts laughing, a kidney
ailment flares up. Upon Vladimir's return, the increasingly jaded Estragon suggests that they hang
themselves, but they abandon the idea when the logistics seem ineffective. They then speculate on the
potential rewards of continuing to wait for Godot, but can come to no definite conclusions.[7] When
Estragon declares his hunger, Vladimir provides a carrot (among a collection of turnips), at which
Estragon idly gnaws, loudly reiterating his boredom.
"A terrible cry"[8] heralds the entrance of Lucky, a silent, baggage-burdened slave with a rope tied
around his neck, and Pozzo, his arrogant and imperious master, who holds the other end and stops now
to rest. Pozzo barks abusive orders at Lucky, which are always quietly followed, while acting civilly
though tersely towards the other two. Pozzo enjoys a selfish snack of chicken and wine, before casting
the bones to the ground, which Estragon gleefully claims. Having been in a dumbfounded state of
silence ever since the arrival of Pozzo and Lucky, Vladimir finally finds his voice to shout criticisms
at Pozzo for his mistreatment of Lucky. Pozzo ignores this and explains his intention to sell Lucky,
who begins to cry. Estragon takes pity and tries to wipe away Lucky's tears, but, as he approaches,
Lucky violently kicks him in the shin. Pozzo then rambles nostalgically but vaguely about his
relationship with Lucky over the years, before offering Vladimir and Estragon some compensation for
their company. Estragon begins to beg for money when Pozzo instead suggests that Lucky can "dance"
and "think" for their entertainment. Lucky's dance, "the Net", is clumsy and shuffling; Lucky's
"thinking" is a long-winded and disjointed monologue—it is the first and only time that Lucky
speaks.[nb 3] The monologue begins as a relatively coherent and academic lecture on theology but
quickly dissolves into mindless verbosity, escalating in both volume and speed, that agonises the
others until Vladimir finally pulls off Lucky's hat, stopping him in mid-sentence. Pozzo then has
Lucky pack up his bags, and they hastily leave.
Vladimir and Estragon, alone again, reflect on whether they met Pozzo and Lucky before. A boy then
arrives, purporting to be a messenger sent from Godot to tell the pair that Godot will not be coming
that evening "but surely tomorrow".[10] During Vladimir's interrogation of the boy, he asks if he came
the day before, making it apparent that the two men have been waiting for a long period and will likely
continue. After the boy departs, the moon appears, and the two men verbally agree to leave and find
shelter for the night, but they merely stand without moving.
Act II
It is daytime again and Vladimir begins singing a recursive round about the death of a dog, but twice
forgets the lyrics as he sings.[nb 4][12] Again, Estragon claims to have been beaten last night, despite
no apparent injury. Vladimir comments that the formerly bare tree now has leaves and tries to confirm
his recollections of yesterday against Estragon's extremely vague, unreliable memory. Vladimir then
triumphantly produces evidence of the previous day's events by showing Estragon the wound from
when Lucky kicked him. Noticing Estragon's barefootedness, they also discover his previously
forsaken boots nearby, which Estragon insists are not his, although they fit him perfectly. With no
carrots left, Vladimir is turned down in offering Estragon a turnip or a radish. He then sings Estragon
to sleep with a lullaby before noticing further evidence to confirm his memory: Lucky's hat still lies on
the ground. This leads to his waking Estragon and involving him in a frenetic hat-swapping scene. The
two then wait again for Godot, while distracting themselves by playfully imitating Pozzo and Lucky,
firing insults at each other and then making up, and attempting some fitness routines—all of which fail
miserably and end quickly.
Suddenly, Pozzo and Lucky reappear, but the rope is much shorter than during their last visit, and
Lucky now guides Pozzo, rather than being controlled by him. As they arrive, Pozzo trips over Lucky
and they together fall into a motionless heap. Estragon sees an opportunity to exact revenge on Lucky
for kicking him earlier. The issue is debated lengthily until Pozzo shocks the pair by revealing that he
is now blind and Lucky is now mute. Pozzo further claims to have lost all sense of time, and assures
the others that he cannot remember meeting them before, but also does not expect to recall today's
events tomorrow. His commanding arrogance from yesterday appears to have been replaced by
humility and insight. His parting words—which Vladimir expands upon later—are ones of utter
despair.[13] Lucky and Pozzo depart; meanwhile Estragon has again fallen asleep.
Alone, Vladimir is encountered by (apparently) the same boy from yesterday, though Vladimir
wonders whether he might be the other boy's brother. This time, Vladimir begins consciously realising
the circular nature of his experiences: he even predicts exactly what the boy will say, involving the
same speech about Godot not arriving today but surely tomorrow. Vladimir seems to reach a moment
of revelation before furiously chasing the boy away, demanding that he be recognised the next time
they meet. Estragon awakes and pulls his boots off again. He and Vladimir consider hanging
themselves once more, but when they test the strength of Estragon's belt (hoping to use it as a noose),
it breaks and Estragon's trousers fall down. They resolve tomorrow to bring a more suitable piece of
rope and, if Godot fails to arrive, to commit suicide at last. Again, they decide to clear out for the
night, but again, they do not move.

AMERICAN DRAMA
DEATH OF A SALESMAN BY ARTHUR MILLER
As a flute melody plays, Willy Loman returns to his home in Brooklyn one night, exhausted from a
failed sales trip. His wife, Linda, tries to persuade him to ask his boss, Howard Wagner, to let him
work in New York so that he won’t have to travel. Willy says that he will talk to Howard the next day.
Willy complains that Biff, his older son who has come back home to visit, has yet to make something
of himself. Linda scolds Willy for being so critical, and Willy goes to the kitchen for a snack.
As Willy talks to himself in the kitchen, Biff and his younger brother, Happy, who is also visiting,
reminisce about their adolescence and discuss their father’s babbling, which often includes criticism of
Biff’s failure to live up to Willy’s expectations. As Biff and Happy, dissatisfied with their lives,
fantasize about buying a ranch out West, Willy becomes immersed in a daydream. He praises his sons,
now younger, who are washing his car. The young Biff, a high school football star, and the young
Happy appear. They interact affectionately with their father, who has just returned from a business
trip. Willy confides in Biff and Happy that he is going to open his own business one day, bigger than
that owned by his neighbor, Charley. Charley’s son, Bernard, enters looking for Biff, who must study
for math class in order to avoid failing. Willy points out to his sons that although Bernard is smart, he
is not “well liked,” which will hurt him in the long run.
A younger Linda enters, and the boys leave to do some chores. Willy boasts of a phenomenally
successful sales trip, but Linda coaxes him into revealing that his trip was actually only meagerly
successful. Willy complains that he soon won’t be able to make all of the payments on their appliances
and car. He complains that people don’t like him and that he’s not good at his job. As Linda consoles
him, he hears the laughter of his mistress. He approaches The Woman, who is still laughing, and
engages in another reminiscent daydream. Willy and The Woman flirt, and she thanks him for giving
her stockings.
The Woman disappears, and Willy fades back into his prior daydream, in the kitchen. Linda, now
mending stockings, reassures him. He scolds her mending and orders her to throw the stockings out.
Bernard bursts in, again looking for Biff. Linda reminds Willy that Biff has to return a football that he
stole, and she adds that Biff is too rough with the neighborhood girls. Willy hears The Woman laugh
and explodes at Bernard and Linda. Both leave, and though the daydream ends, Willy continues to
mutter to himself. The older Happy comes downstairs and tries to quiet Willy. Agitated, Willy shouts
his regret about not going to Alaska with his brother, Ben, who eventually found a diamond mine in
Africa and became rich. Charley, having heard the commotion, enters. Happy goes off to bed, and
Willy and Charley begin to play cards. Charley offers Willy a job, but Willy, insulted, refuses it. As
they argue, Willy imagines that Ben enters. Willy accidentally calls Charley Ben. Ben inspects Willy’s
house and tells him that he has to catch a train soon to look at properties in Alaska. As Willy talks to
Ben about the prospect of going to Alaska, Charley, seeing no one there, gets confused and questions
Willy. Willy yells at Charley, who leaves. The younger Linda enters and Ben meets her. Willy asks
Ben impatiently about his life. Ben recounts his travels and talks about their father. As Ben is about to
leave, Willy daydreams further, and Charley and Bernard rush in to tell him that Biff and Happy are
stealing lumber. Although Ben eventually leaves, Willy continues to talk to him.
Back in the present, the older Linda enters to find Willy outside. Biff and Happy come downstairs and
discuss Willy’s condition with their mother. Linda scolds Biff for judging Willy harshly. Biff tells her
that he knows Willy is a fake, but he refuses to elaborate. Linda mentions that Willy has tried to
commit suicide. Happy grows angry and rebukes Biff for his failure in the business world. Willy
enters and yells at Biff. Happy intervenes and eventually proposes that he and Biff go into the sporting
goods business together. Willy immediately brightens and gives Biff a host of tips about asking for a
loan from one of Biff’s old employers, Bill Oliver. After more arguing and reconciliation, everyone
finally goes to bed.
Act II opens with Willy enjoying the breakfast that Linda has made for him. Willy ponders the bright-
seeming future before getting angry again about his expensive appliances. Linda informs Willy that
Biff and Happy are taking him out to dinner that night. Excited, Willy announces that he is going to
make Howard Wagner give him a New York job. The phone rings, and Linda chats with Biff,
reminding him to be nice to his father at the restaurant that night.
As the lights fade on Linda, they come up on Howard playing with a wire recorder in his office. Willy
tries to broach the subject of working in New York, but Howard interrupts him and makes him listen
to his kids and wife on the wire recorder. When Willy finally gets a word in, Howard rejects his plea.
Willy launches into a lengthy recalling of how a legendary salesman named Dave Singleman inspired
him to go into sales. Howard leaves and Willy gets angry. Howard soon re-enters and tells Willy to
take some time off. Howard leaves and Ben enters, inviting Willy to join him in Alaska. The younger
Linda enters and reminds Willy of his sons and job. The young Biff enters, and Willy praises Biff’s
prospects and the fact that he is well liked.
Ben leaves and Bernard rushes in, eagerly awaiting Biff’s big football game. Willy speaks
optimistically to Biff about the game. Charley enters and teases Willy about the game. As Willy
chases Charley off, the lights rise on a different part of the stage. Willy continues yelling from
offstage, and Jenny, Charley’s secretary, asks a grown-up Bernard to quiet him down. Willy enters and
prattles on about a “very big deal” that Biff is working on. Daunted by Bernard’s success (he mentions
to Willy that he is going to Washington to fight a case), Willy asks Bernard why Biff turned out to be
such a failure. Bernard asks Willy what happened in Boston that made Biff decide not to go to summer
school. Willy defensively tells Bernard not to blame him.
Charley enters and sees Bernard off. When Willy asks for more money than Charley usually loans
him, Charley again offers Willy a job. Willy again refuses and eventually tells Charley that he was
fired. Charley scolds Willy for always needing to be liked and angrily gives him the money. Calling
Charley his only friend, Willy exits on the verge of tears.
At Frank’s Chop House, Happy helps Stanley, a waiter, prepare a table. They ogle and chat up a girl,
Miss Forsythe, who enters the restaurant. Biff enters, and Happy introduces him to Miss Forsythe,
continuing to flirt with her. Miss Forsythe, a call girl, leaves to telephone another call girl (at Happy’s
request), and Biff spills out that he waited six hours for Bill Oliver and Oliver didn’t even recognize
him. Upset at his father’s unrelenting misconception that he, Biff, was a salesman for Oliver, Biff
plans to relieve Willy of his illusions. Willy enters, and Biff tries gently, at first, to tell him what
happened at Oliver’s office. Willy blurts out that he was fired. Stunned, Biff again tries to let Willy
down easily. Happy cuts in with remarks suggesting Biff’s success, and Willy eagerly awaits the good
news.
Biff finally explodes at Willy for being unwilling to listen. The young Bernard runs in shouting for
Linda, and Biff, Happy, and Willy start to argue. As Biff explains what happened, their conversation
recedes into the background. The young Bernard tells Linda that Biff failed math. The restaurant
conversation comes back into focus and Willy criticizes Biff for failing math. Willy then hears the
voice of the hotel operator in Boston and shouts that he is not in his room. Biff scrambles to quiet
Willy and claims that Oliver is talking to his partner about giving Biff the money. Willy’s renewed
interest and probing questions irk Biff more, and he screams at Willy. Willy hears The Woman laugh
and he shouts back at Biff, hitting him and staggering. Miss Forsythe enters with another call girl,
Letta. Biff helps Willy to the washroom and, finding Happy flirting with the girls, argues with him
about Willy. Biff storms out, and Happy follows with the girls.
Willy and The Woman enter, dressing themselves and flirting. The door knocks and Willy hurries The
Woman into the bathroom. Willy answers the door; the young Biff enters and tells Willy that he failed
math. Willy tries to usher him out of the room, but Biff imitates his math teacher’s lisp, which elicits
laughter from Willy and The Woman. Willy tries to cover up his indiscretion, but Biff refuses to
believe his stories and storms out, dejected, calling Willy a “phony little fake.” Back in the restaurant,
Stanley helps Willy up. Willy asks him where he can find a seed store. Stanley gives him directions to
one, and Willy hurries off.
The light comes up on the Loman kitchen, where Happy enters looking for Willy. He moves into the
living room and sees Linda. Biff comes inside and Linda scolds the boys and slaps away the flowers in
Happy’s hand. She yells at them for abandoning Willy. Happy attempts to appease her, but Biff goes
in search of Willy. He finds Willy planting seeds in the garden with a flashlight. Willy is consulting
Ben about a $20,000 proposition. Biff approaches him to say goodbye and tries to bring him inside.
Willy moves into the house, followed by Biff, and becomes angry again about Biff’s failure. Happy
tries to calm Biff, but Biff and Willy erupt in fury at each other. Biff starts to sob, which touches
Willy. Everyone goes to bed except Willy, who renews his conversation with Ben, elated at how great
Biff will be with $20,000 of insurance money. Linda soon calls out for Willy but gets no response.
Biff and Happy listen as well. They hear Willy’s car speed away.
In the requiem, Linda and Happy stand in shock after Willy’s poorly attended funeral. Biff states that
Willy had the wrong dreams. Charley defends Willy as a victim of his profession. Ready to leave, Biff
invites Happy to go back out West with him. Happy declares that he will stick it out in New York to
validate Willy’s death. Linda asks Willy for forgiveness for being unable to cry. She begins to sob,
repeating “We’re free. . . .” All exit, and the flute melody is heard as the curtain falls.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT BY EUGENE O’NEILL

Act I
8:30 am
James Tyrone is a 65-year-old actor who had long ago bought a "vehicle" play for himself and had
established his reputation based on this one role with which he had toured for years. Although that
"vehicle" had served him well financially, he is now resentful that his having become so identified
with this character has limited his scope and opportunities as a classical actor. He is a wealthy though
somewhat miserly man. His money is all tied up in property which he hangs onto in spite of
impending financial hardship. His dress and appearance are showing signs of his strained financial
circumstances, but he retains many of the mixed affectations of a classical actor in spite of his shabby
attire.
His wife Mary has recently returned from treatment for morphine addiction and has put on some
much-needed weight as a result. She is looking much healthier than the family has been accustomed
to, and they remark frequently on her improved appearance. However, she still retains the haggard
facial features of a long-time addict. As a recovering addict, she is restless and anxious. She also
suffers from insomnia, which is not made any easier by her husband and children's loud snoring. When
Edmund, her younger son, hears her moving around at night and entering the spare bedroom, he
becomes alarmed, because this is the room where, in the past, she would satisfy her addiction. He
questions her about it indirectly. She reassures him that she just went there to get away from her
husband's snoring.
In addition to Mary's problems, the family is worried about Edmund's coughing; they fear that he
might have tuberculosis, and are anxiously awaiting a doctor's diagnosis. Edmund is more concerned
about the effect a positive diagnosis might have on his mother than on himself. The constant
possibility that she might relapse worries him still further. Once again, he indirectly speaks to his
mother about her addiction. He asks her to "promise not to worry yourself sick and to take care of
yourself." "Of course I promise you," she protests, but then adds ('with a sad bitterness'), "But I
suppose you're remembering I've promised before on my word of honor."
Act II
12:45 pm and 1:15 pm
Jamie and Edmund taunt each other about stealing their father's alcohol and watering it down so he
won't notice. They speak about Mary's conduct. Jamie berates Edmund for leaving their mother
unsupervised. Edmund berates Jamie for being suspicious. Both, however, are deeply worried that
their mother's addiction may have resurfaced. Jamie points out to Edmund that they had concealed
their mother's addiction from him for ten years, explaining that his naiveté about the nature of the
disease was understandable but deluded. They discuss the upcoming results of Edmund's tests for
tuberculosis, and Jamie tells him to prepare for the worst.
Mary appears. She is distraught about Edmund's coughing, which he tries to suppress so as not to
alarm her, fearing anything that might trigger her addiction again. When Edmund accepts his mother's
excuse that she had been upstairs so long because she had been "lying down", Jamie looks at them
both contemptuously. Mary notices and starts becoming defensive and belligerent, berating Jamie for
his cynicism and disrespect for his parents. Jamie is quick to point out that the only reason he has
survived as an actor is through his father's influence in the business.
Mary speaks of her frustration with their summer home, its impermanence and shabbiness, and her
husband's indifference to his surroundings. With irony, she alludes to her belief that this air of
detachment might be the very reason he has tolerated her addiction for so long. This frightens
Edmund, who is trying desperately to hang on to his belief in normality while faced with two
emotionally horrific problems at once. Finally, unable to tolerate the way Jamie is looking at her, she
asks him angrily why he is doing it. "You know!", he shoots back, and tells her to take a look at her
glazed eyes in the mirror.
Act III
6:30 pm
Mary and Cathleen return home from their drive to the drugstore, where Mary has sent Cathleen in to
purchase her morphine prescription. Not wanting to be alone, Mary does not allow Cathleen to go to
the kitchen to finish dinner and offers her a drink instead. Mary does most of the talking and discusses
her love for fog but her hatred of the foghorn, and her husband's obvious obsession with money. Mary
has already taken some of her "prescription". She talks about her past in a Catholic convent and the
promise she once had as a pianist and the fact that it was once thought that she might become a nun.
She also makes it clear that while she fell in love with her husband from the time she met him, she had
never taken to the theatre crowd. She shows her arthritic hands to Cathleen and explains that the pain
is why she needs her prescription – an explanation which is untrue and transparent to Cathleen.
When Mary dozes off under the influence of the morphine, Cathleen exits to prepare dinner. Mary
awakes and begins to have bitter memories about how much she loved her life before she met her
husband. She also decides that her prayers as an addict are not being heard by the Virgin and decides
to go upstairs to get more drugs, but before she can Edmund and James Sr. return home.
Although both men are drunk, they both realize that Mary is back on morphine, although she attempts
to act as if she is not. Jamie has not returned home, but has elected instead to continue drinking and to
visit the local whorehouse. After calling Jamie a "hopeless failure" Mary warns that his bad influence
will drag his brother down as well. After seeing the condition that his wife is in, James expresses the
regret that he bothered to come home, and he attempts to ignore her as she continues her remarks,
which include blaming him for Jamie's drinking. Then, as often happens in the play, Mary and James
try to get over their animosity and attempt to express their love for one another by remembering
happier days. When James goes to the basement to get another bottle of whiskey, Mary continues to
talk with Edmund.
When Edmund reveals that he has tuberculosis, Mary refuses to believe it, and attempts to discredit
Dr. Hardy, due to her inability to face the reality and severity of the situation. She accuses Edmund of
attempting to get more attention by blowing everything out of proportion. In retaliation, Edmund
reminds his mother that her own father died of tuberculosis, and then, before exiting, he adds how
difficult it is to have a "dope fiend for a mother." Alone, Mary admits that she needs more morphine
and hopes that someday she will "accidentally" overdose, because she knows that if she did so on
purpose, the Virgin would never forgive her. When James comes back with more alcohol he notes that
there was evidence that Jamie had attempted to pick the locks to the whiskey cabinet in the cellar, as
he has done before. Mary ignores this and bursts out that she is afraid that Edmund is going to die. She
also confides to James that Edmund does not love her because of her drug problem. When James
attempts to console her, Mary again rues having given birth to Edmund, who appears to have been
conceived to replace a baby they had lost before Edmund's birth. When Cathleen announces dinner,
Mary indicates that she is not hungry and is going to bed. James goes in to dinner all alone, knowing
that Mary is really going upstairs to get more drugs.
Act IV
Midnight
Edmund returns home to find his father playing solitaire. While the two argue and drink, they also
have an intimate, tender conversation. James explains his stinginess, and also reveals that he ruined his
career by staying in an acting job for money. After so many years playing the same part, he lost his
talent for versatility. Edmund talks to his father about sailing and of his aspiration to become a great
writer one day. They hear Jamie coming home drunk, and James leaves to avoid fighting. Jamie and
Edmund converse, and Jamie confesses that although he loves Edmund more than anyone else, he
again ambiguously lashes out at his father calling on him to fail. Jamie passes out. When James
returns, Jamie wakes up, and they quarrel anew. Mary, lost in her drug-laden dreams of the past,
comes downstairs. Holding her wedding gown, she babbles incoherently about her convent days and
falling in love with James, while her husband and sons silently watch her.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Blanche DuBois, a schoolteacher from Laurel, Mississippi, arrives at the New Orleans apartment of
her sister, Stella Kowalski. Despite the fact that Blanche seems to have fallen out of close contact with
Stella, she intends to stay at Stella’s apartment for an unspecified but likely lengthy period of time,
given the large trunk she has with her. Blanche tells Stella that she lost Belle Reve, their ancestral
home, following the death of all their remaining relatives. She also mentions that she has been given a
leave of absence from her teaching position because of her bad nerves.
Though Blanche does not seem to have enough money to afford a hotel, she is disdainful of the
cramped quarters of the Kowalskis’ two-room apartment and of the apartment’s location in a noisy,
diverse, working-class neighborhood. Blanche’s social condescension wins her the instant dislike of
Stella’s husband, an auto-parts supply man of Polish descent named Stanley Kowalski. It is clear that
Stella was happy to leave behind her the social pretensions of her background in exchange for the
sexual gratification she gets from her husband; she even is pregnant with his baby. Stanley
immediately distrusts Blanche to the extent that he suspects her of having cheated Stella out of her
share of the family inheritance. In the process of defending herself to Stanley, Blanche reveals that
Belle Reve was lost due to a foreclosed mortgage, a disclosure that signifies the dire nature of
Blanche’s financial circumstances. Blanche’s heavy drinking, which she attempts to conceal from her
sister and brother-in-law, is another sign that all is not well with Blanche.
The unhappiness that accompanies the animal magnetism of Stella and Stanley’s marriage reveals
itself when Stanley hosts a drunken poker game with his male friends at the apartment. Blanche gets
under Stanley’s skin, especially when she starts to win the affections of his close friend Mitch. After
Mitch has been absent for a while, speaking with Blanche in the bedroom, Stanley erupts, storms into
the bedroom, and throws the radio out of the window. When Stella yells at Stanley and defends
Blanche, Stanley beats her. The men pull him off, the poker game breaks up, and Blanche and Stella
escape to their upstairs neighbor Eunice’s apartment. A short while later, Stanley is remorseful and
cries up to Stella to forgive him. To Blanche’s alarm, Stella returns to Stanley and embraces him
passionately. Mitch meets Blanche outside of the Kowalski flat and comforts her in her distress.
The next day, Blanche tries to convince Stella to leave Stanley for a better man whose social status
equals Stella’s. Blanche suggests that she and Stella contact a millionaire named Shep Huntleigh for
help escaping from New Orleans; when Stella laughs at her, Blanche reveals that she is completely
broke. Stanley walks in as Blanche is making fun of him and secretly overhears Blanche and Stella’s
conversation. Later, he threatens Blanche with hints that he has heard rumors of her disreputable past.
She is visibly dismayed.
While Blanche is alone in the apartment one evening, waiting for Mitch to pick her up for a date, a
teenage boy comes by to collect money for the newspaper. Blanche doesn’t have any money for him,
but she hits on him and gives him a lustful kiss. Soon after the boy departs, Mitch arrives, and they go
on their date. When Blanche returns, she is exhausted and clearly has been uneasy for the entire night
about the rumors Stanley mentioned earlier. In a surprisingly sincere heart-to-heart discussion with
Mitch, Blanche reveals the greatest tragedy of her past. Years ago, her young husband committed
suicide after she discovered and chastised him for his homosexuality. Mitch describes his own loss of
a former love, and he tells Blanche that they need each other.
When the next scene begins, about one month has passed. It is the afternoon of Blanche’s birthday.
Stella is preparing a dinner for Blanche, Mitch, Stanley, and herself, when Stanley comes in to tell her
that he has learned news of Blanche’s sordid past. He says that after losing the DuBois mansion,
Blanche moved into a fleabag motel from which she was eventually evicted because of her numerous
sexual liaisons. Also, she was fired from her job as a schoolteacher because the principal discovered
that she was having an affair with a teenage student. Stella is horrified to learn that Stanley has told
Mitch these stories about Blanche.
The birthday dinner comes and goes, but Mitch never arrives. Stanley indicates to Blanche that he is
aware of her past. For a birthday present, he gives her a one-way bus ticket back to Laurel. Stanley’s
cruelty so disturbs Stella that it appears the Kowalski household is about to break up, but the onset of
Stella’s labor prevents the imminent fight.
Several hours later, Blanche, drunk, sits alone in the apartment. Mitch, also drunk, arrives and repeats
all he’s learned from Stanley. Eventually Blanche confesses that the stories are true, but she also
reveals the need for human affection she felt after her husband’s death. Mitch tells Blanche that he can
never marry her, saying she isn’t fit to live in the same house as his mother. Having learned that
Blanche is not the chaste lady she pretended to be, Mitch tries to have sex with Blanche, but she forces
him to leave by yelling “Fire!” to attract the attention of passersby outside.
Later, Stanley returns from the hospital to find Blanche even more drunk. She tells him that she will
soon be leaving New Orleans with her former suitor Shep Huntleigh, who is now a millionaire.
Stanley knows that Blanche’s story is entirely in her imagination, but he is so happy about his baby
that he proposes they each celebrate their good fortune. Blanche spurns Stanley, and things grow
contentious. When she tries to step past him, he refuses to move out of her way. Blanche becomes
terrified to the point that she smashes a bottle on the table and threatens to smash Stanley in the face.
Stanley grabs her arm and says that it’s time for the “date” they’ve had set up since Blanche’s arrival.
Blanche resists, but Stanley uses his physical strength to overcome her, and he carries her to bed. The
pulsing music indicates that Stanley rapes Blanche.
The next scene takes place weeks later, as Stella and her neighbor Eunice pack Blanche’s bags.
Blanche is in the bath, and Stanley plays poker with his buddies in the front room. A doctor will arrive
soon to take Blanche to an insane asylum, but Blanche believes she is leaving to join her millionaire.
Stella confesses to Eunice that she simply cannot allow herself to believe Blanche’s assertion that
Stanley raped her. When Blanche emerges from the bathroom, her deluded talk makes it clear that she
has lost her grip on reality.
The doctor arrives with a nurse, and Blanche initially panics and struggles against them when they try
to take her away. Stanley and his friends fight to subdue Blanche, while Eunice holds Stella back to
keep her from interfering. Mitch begins to cry. Finally, the doctor approaches Blanche in a gentle
manner and convinces her to leave with him. She allows him to lead her away and does not look back
or say goodbye as she goes. Stella sobs with her child in her arms, and Stanley comforts her with
loving words and caresses.

BRITISH PROSE
MRS. DALLOWAY BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway covers one day from morning to night in one woman’s life. Clarissa Dalloway, an
upper-class housewife, walks through her London neighborhood to prepare for the party she will host
that evening. When she returns from flower shopping, an old suitor and friend, Peter Walsh, drops by
her house unexpectedly. The two have always judged each other harshly, and their meeting in the
present intertwines with their thoughts of the past. Years earlier, Clarissa refused Peter’s marriage
proposal, and Peter has never quite gotten over it. Peter asks Clarissa if she is happy with her husband,
Richard, but before she can answer, her daughter, Elizabeth, enters the room. Peter leaves and goes to
Regent’s Park. He thinks about Clarissa’s refusal, which still obsesses him.
The point of view then shifts to Septimus, a veteran of World War I who was injured in trench warfare
and now suffers from shell shock. Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia, pass time in Regent’s Park.
They are waiting for Septimus’s appointment with Sir William Bradshaw, a celebrated psychiatrist.
Before the war, Septimus was a budding young poet and lover of Shakespeare; when the war broke
out, he enlisted immediately for romantic patriotic reasons. He became numb to the horrors of war and
its aftermath: when his friend Evans died, he felt little sadness. Now Septimus sees nothing of worth in
the England he fought for, and he has lost the desire to preserve either his society or himself. Suicidal,
he believes his lack of feeling is a crime. Clearly Septimus’s experiences in the war have permanently
scarred him, and he has serious mental problems. However, Sir William does not listen to what
Septimus says and diagnoses “a lack of proportion.” Sir William plans to separate Septimus from
Lucrezia and send him to a mental institution in the country.
Richard Dalloway eats lunch with Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton, members of high society. The
men help Lady Bruton write a letter to the Times, London's largest newspaper. After lunch, Richard
returns home to Clarissa with a large bunch of roses. He intends to tell her that he loves her but finds
that he cannot, because it has been so long since he last said it. Clarissa considers the void that exists
between people, even between husband and wife. Even though she values the privacy she is able to
maintain in her marriage, considering it vital to the success of the relationship, at the same time she
finds slightly disturbing the fact that Richard doesn’t know everything about her. Clarissa sees off
Elizabeth and her history teacher, Miss Kilman, who are going shopping. The two older women
despise one another passionately, each believing the other to be an oppressive force over Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, Septimus and Lucrezia are in their apartment, enjoying a moment of happiness together
before the men come to take Septimus to the asylum. One of Septimus’s doctors, Dr. Holmes, arrives,
and Septimus fears the doctor will destroy his soul. In order to avoid this fate, he jumps from a
window to his death.
Peter hears the ambulance go by to pick up Septimus’s body and marvels ironically at the level of
London’s civilization. He goes to Clarissa’s party, where most of the novel’s major characters are
assembled. Clarissa works hard to make her party a success but feels dissatisfied by her own role and
acutely conscious of Peter’s critical eye. All the partygoers, but especially Peter and Sally Seton, have,
to some degree, failed to accomplish the dreams of their youth. Though the social order is undoubtedly
changing, Elizabeth and the members of her generation will probably repeat the errors of Clarissa’s
generation. Sir William Bradshaw arrives late, and his wife explains that one of his patients, the young
veteran (Septimus), has committed suicide. Clarissa retreats to the privacy of a small room to consider
Septimus’s death. She understands that he was overwhelmed by life and that men like Sir William
make life intolerable. She identifies with Septimus, admiring him for having taken the plunge and for
not compromising his soul. She feels, with her comfortable position as a society hostess, responsible
for his death. The party nears its close as guests begin to leave. Clarissa enters the room, and her
presence fills Peter with a great excitement.

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY BY KAZUO ISHIGURO

The Remains of the Day is told in the first-person narration of an English butler named Stevens. In
July 1956, Stevens decides to take a six- day road trip to the West Country of England—a region to
the west of Darlington Hall, the house in which Stevens resides and has worked as a butler for thirty-
four years. Though the house was previously owned by the now-deceased Lord Darlington, by 1956, it
has come under the ownership of Mr. Farraday, an American gentleman. Stevens likes Mr. Farraday,
but fails to interact well with him socially: Stevens is a circumspect, serious person and is not
comfortable joking around in the manner Mr. Farraday prefers. Stevens terms this skill of casual
conversation "bantering"; several times throughout the novel Stevens proclaims his desire to improve
his bantering skill so that he can better please his current employer.
The purpose of Stevens's road trip is to visit Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper of Darlington Hall
who left twenty years earlier to get married. Stevens has received a letter from Miss Kenton, and
believes that her letter hints that her marriage is failing and that she might like to return to her post as
housekeeper. Ever since World War II has ended, it has been difficult to find enough people to staff
large manor houses such as Darlington Hall.
Much of the narrative is comprised of Stevens's memories of his work as a butler during and just after
World War II. He describes the large, elaborate dinner parties and elegant, prominent personages who
come to dine and stay at Darlington Hall in those times. It is gradually revealed—largely through other
characters' interactions with Stevens, rather than his own admissions—that Lord Darlington, due to his
mistaken impression of the German agenda prior to World War II, sympathized with the Nazis.
Darlington even arranged and hosted dinner parties between the German and British heads of state to
help both sides come to a peaceful understanding. Stevens always maintains that Lord Darlington was
a perfect gentleman, and that it is a shame his reputation has been soiled simply because he
misunderstood the Nazis' true aims.
During the trip Stevens also recounts stories of his contemporaries—butlers in other houses with
whom he struck up friendships. Stevens's most notable relationship by far, however, is his long-term
working relationship with Miss Kenton. Though Stevens never says so outright, it appears that he
harbors repressed romantic feelings for Miss Kenton. Despite the fact that the two frequently disagree
over various household affairs when they work together, the disagreements are childish in nature and
mainly serve to illustrate the fact that the two care for each other. At the end of the novel, Miss Kenton
admits to Stevens that her life may have turned out better if she had married him. After hearing these
words, Stevens is extremely upset. However, he does not tell Miss Kenton—whose married name is
Mrs. Benn—how he feels. Stevens and Miss Kenton part, and Stevens returns to Darlington Hall, his
only new resolve being to perfect the art of bantering to please his new employer.
As Salman Rushdie comments, The Remains of the Day is "a story both beautiful and cruel." It is a
story primarily about regret: throughout his life, Stevens puts his absolute trust and devotion in a man
who makes drastic mistakes. In the totality of his professional commitment, Stevens fails to pursue the
one woman with whom he could have had a fulfilling and loving relationship. His prim mask of
formality cuts him off from intimacy, companionship, and understanding.
AMERICAN PROSE
THE TURN OF THE SCREW BY HENRY JAMES
An anonymous narrator recalls a Christmas Eve gathering at an old house, where guests listen to one
another’s ghost stories. A guest named Douglas introduces a story that involves two children—Flora
and Miles—and his sister’s governess, with whom he was in love. After procuring the governess’s
written record of events from his home, he provides a few introductory details. A handsome bachelor
persuaded the governess to take a position as governess for his niece and nephew in an isolated
country home after the previous governess died. Douglas begins to read from the written record, and
the story shifts to the governess’s point of view as she narrates her strange experience.
The governess begins her story with her first day at Bly, the country home, where she meets Flora and
a maid named Mrs. Grose. The governess is nervous but feels relieved by Flora’s beauty and charm.
The next day she receives a letter from her employer, which contains a letter from Miles’s headmaster
saying that Miles cannot return to school. The letter does not specify what Miles has done to deserve
expulsion, and, alarmed, the governess questions Mrs. Grose about it. Mrs. Grose admits that Miles
has on occasion been bad, but only in the ways boys ought to be. The governess is reassured as she
drives to meet Miles.
One evening, as the governess strolls around the grounds, she sees a strange man in a tower of the
house and exchanges an intense stare with him. She says nothing to Mrs. Grose. Later, she catches the
same man glaring into the dining-room window, and she rushes outside to investigate. The man is
gone, and the governess looks into the window from outside. Her image in the window frightens Mrs.
Grose, who has just walked into the room. The governess discusses her two experiences with Mrs.
Grose, who identifies the strange man as Peter Quint, a former valet who is now dead.
Convinced that the ghost seeks Miles, the governess becomes rigid in her supervision of the children.
One day, when the governess is at the lake with Flora, she sees a woman dressed in black and senses
that the woman is Miss Jessel, her dead predecessor. The governess is certain Flora was aware of the
ghost’s presence but intentionally kept quiet. The governess again questions Mrs. Grose about Miles’s
misbehavior. Mrs. Grose reveals that Quint had been “too free” with Miles, and Miss Jessel with
Flora. The governess is on her guard, but the days pass without incident, and Miles and Flora express
increased affection for the governess.
The lull is broken one evening when something startles the governess from her reading. She rises to
investigate, moving to the landing above the staircase. There, a gust of wind extinguishes her candle,
and she sees Quint halfway up the stairs. She refuses to back down, exchanging another intense stare
with Quint until he vanishes. Back in her room, the governess finds Flora’s bed curtains pulled
forward, but Flora herself is missing. Noticing movement under the window blind, the governess
watches as Flora emerges from behind it. The governess questions Flora about what she’s been doing,
but Flora’s explanation is unrevealing.
The governess does not sleep well during the next few nights. One night, she sees the ghost of Miss
Jessel sitting on the bottom stair, her head in her hands. Later, when the governess finally allows
herself to go to sleep at her regular hour, she is awoken after midnight to find her candle extinguished
and Flora by the window. Careful not to disturb Flora, the governess leaves the room to find a window
downstairs that overlooks the same view. Looking out, she sees the faraway figure of Miles on the
lawn.
Later, the governess discusses with Mrs. Grose her conversation with Miles, who claimed that he
wanted to show the governess that he could be “bad.” The governess concludes that Flora and Miles
frequently meet with Miss Jessel and Quint. At this, Mrs. Grose urges the governess to appeal to her
employer, but the governess refuses, reminding her colleague that the children’s uncle does not want
to be bothered. She threatens to leave if Mrs. Grose writes to him. On the walk to church one Sunday,
Miles broaches the topic of school to the governess. He says he wants to go back and declares he will
make his uncle come to Bly. The governess, shaken, does not go into church. Instead, she returns to
the house and plots her departure. She sits on the bottom stair but springs up when she remembers
seeing Miss Jessel there. She enters the schoolroom and finds Miss Jessel sitting at the table. She
screams at the ghost, and the ghost vanishes. The governess decides she will stay at Bly. Mrs. Grose
and the children return, saying nothing about the governess’s absence at church. The governess agrees
to write to her employer.
That evening, the governess listens outside Miles’s door. He invites her in, and she questions him. She
embraces him impulsively. The candle goes out, and Miles shrieks. The next day Miles plays the piano
for the governess. She suddenly realizes she doesn’t know where Flora is. She and Mrs. Grose find
Flora by the lake. There, the governess sees an apparition of Miss Jessel. She points it out to Flora and
Mrs. Grose, but both claim not to see it. Flora says that the governess is cruel and that she wants to get
away from her, and the governess collapses on the ground in hysterics. The next day, Mrs. Grose
informs the governess that Flora is sick. They decide Mrs. Grose will take Flora to the children’s uncle
while the governess stays at Bly with Miles. Mrs. Grose informs the governess that Luke didn’t send
the letter she wrote to her employer, because he couldn’t find it.
With Flora and Mrs. Grose gone, Miles and the governess talk after dinner. The governess asks if he
took her letter. He confesses, and the governess sees Quint outside. She watches Quint in horror, then
points him out to Miles, who asks if it is Peter Quint and looks out the window in vain. He cries out,
then falls into the governess’s arms, dead.

A ROSE FOR EMILY BY WILLIAM FAULKNER

The story is divided into five sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the time of Emily Grierson’s
death and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no stranger had entered for
more than ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale neighborhood, Emily’s house is the last vestige of the
grandeur of a lost era. Colonel Sartoris, the town’s previous mayor, had suspended Emily’s tax
responsibilities to the town after her father’s death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson
had once lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make
unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen
pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to
pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However,
at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out.
In section II, the narrator describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists another official
inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor emanating from
her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk
believed Emily was to marry. As complaints mount, Judge Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to
have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a
couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin to pity the increasingly reclusive Emily,
remembering how her great aunt had succumbed to insanity. The townspeople have always believed
that the Griersons thought too highly of themselves, with Emily’s father driving off the many suitors
deemed not good enough to marry his daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily is still single
by the time she turns thirty.
The day after Mr. Grierson’s death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences.
Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three
days. She finally turns her father’s body over for burial.
In section III, the narrator describes a long illness that Emily suffers after this incident. The summer
after her father’s death, the town contracts workers to pave the sidewalks, and a construction company,
under the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is awarded the job. Homer soon becomes a popular
figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, which scandalizes the
town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her
family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station.
As the affair continues and Emily’s reputation is further compromised, she goes to the drug store to
purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is required by law to reveal how she will use the arsenic. She
offers no explanation, and the package arrives at her house labeled “For rats.”
In section IV, the narrator describes the fear that some of the townspeople have that Emily will use the
poison to kill herself. Her potential marriage to Homer seems increasingly unlikely, despite their
continued Sunday ritual. The more outraged women of the town insist that the Baptist minister talk
with Emily. After his visit, he never speaks of what happened and swears that he’ll never go back. So
the minister’s wife writes to Emily’s two cousins in Alabama, who arrive for an extended stay.
Because Emily orders a silver toilet set monogrammed with Homer’s initials, talk of the couple’s
marriage resumes. Homer, absent from town, is believed to be preparing for Emily’s move to the
North or avoiding Emily’s intrusive relatives.
After the cousins’ departure, Homer enters the Grierson home one evening and then is never seen
again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows plump and gray. Despite the occasional lesson she gives in
china painting, her door remains closed to outsiders. In what becomes an annual ritual, Emily refuses
to acknowledge the tax bill. She eventually closes up the top floor of the house. Except for the
occasional glimpse of her in the window, nothing is heard from her until her death at age seventy-four.
Only the servant is seen going in and out of the house.
In section V, the narrator describes what happens after Emily dies. Emily’s body is laid out in the
parlor, and the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the service. After some time has passed,
the door to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in forty years is broken down by the
townspeople. The room is frozen in time, with the items for an upcoming wedding and a man’s suit
laid out. Homer Barron’s body is stretched on the bed as well, in an advanced state of decay. The
onlookers then notice the indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homer’s body and a long strand of
Emily’s gray hair on the pillow.

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The story opens with a paragraph about Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, whose
western summit is called the “House of God.” There, we are told, lies the frozen carcass of a leopard
near the summit. No one knows why it is there at such altitude.
We are introduced to Harry, a writer dying of gangrene, and Helen, who is with him on safari in
Africa. They are stranded in the camp, because a bearing in their truck's engine burnt out. Harry's
situation makes him irritable, and he speaks about his impending death in a matter-of-fact, sarcastic
way that upsets Helen. He quarrels with her over minute things, from whether he should drink a
whiskey and soda, to whether she should read to him. Helen is obviously concerned for his welfare,
but Harry's frustration makes him talk unpleasantly towards her.
Harry then begins to ruminate on his life experiences, which have been many and varied, and on the
fact that he feels he has never reached his potential as a writer because he has chosen to make his
living by marrying wealthy women. In italicized portions of the text that are scattered throughout the
story, Hemingway narrates some of Harry's experiences in a stream-of-consciousness style. Harry's
first memories consist of traveling around Europe following a battle: hiding a deserter in a cottage,
hunting and skiing in the mountains, playing cards during a blizzard, and hearing about a bombing run
on a train full of Austrian officers.
Harry then falls asleep and wakes in the evening to find Helen returning from a shooting expedition.
He meditates on how she really is thoughtful and good to him, and how she is not to blame that his
talent as a writer has been destroyed. Helen, he remembers, is a rich widow who lost her husband and
a child, was bored by a series of lovers, and eventually "acquired" Harry because "she wanted some
one that she respected with her"; she loves Harry "dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as
a proud possession", while Harry makes it clear that he does not love her. Harry then recalls how he
developed gangrene two weeks earlier: they had been trying to get a picture of some waterbuck, and
Harry scratched his right knee on a thorn. He had not applied iodine right away, and the wound got
infected; because all other antiseptics ran out, he used a weak carbolic solution that "paralyzed the
minute blood vessels", thus the leg developed gangrene.
As Helen returns to drink cocktails with Harry, they make up their quarrel. Harry's second memory
sequence then begins. He recalls how he once patronized prostitutes in Constantinople "to kill his
loneliness", pining for the very first woman he fell in love with, with whom he quarreled in Paris and
broke up. Harry had a fight with a British soldier over an Armenian prostitute, and then left
Constantinople for Anatolia, where, after running from a group of Turkish soldiers, "he had seen the
things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse". Then Harry recalls that
upon his return to Paris, his then-wife inquired about a letter that was actually from Harry's first
love—a reply to the letter he wrote to that woman (mailed to New York, asking to write to his office
in Paris) while being in Constantinople.
Helen and Harry eat dinner, and then Harry has another memory—this time of how his grandfather's
log house burned down. He then relates how he fished in the Black Forest, and how he lived in a poor
quarter of Paris and felt a kinship with his poor neighbors. Next, he remembers a ranch and a boy he
turned in to the sheriff after the boy protected Harry's horse feed by shooting and killing a thief. Harry
ponders: "That was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out
there and he had never written one. Why?". Then he felt once again that he'd prefer to be in a different
company rather than with Helen, as "rich were dull". Next, his thoughts wander to beating the fear of
death, and the limits of being able to bear pain. He remembers an officer named Williamson who was
hit by a bomb, and to whom Harry subsequently fed all his morphine tablets. Harry considers how he
does not have to worry about pain in his current condition.
As Harry lies on his cot remembering, he feels the overwhelming presence of death and associates it
with the hyena that has been spotted running around the edge of the campsite. He is unable to speak.
Helen, thinking that Harry has fallen asleep, has him moved into the tent for the night. Harry dreams
that it is morning, and that a man called Compton has come with a plane to rescue him. He is lifted
onto the plane (which has space only for him and the pilot) and watches the landscape go by beneath
him. Suddenly, he sees the snow-covered top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and knows that is where he is bound.
Helen wakes up in the middle of the night to a strange hyena cry, and finds Harry unresponsive on his
cot.

BABYLON REVISITED BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Part I opens in the middle of a conversation between Charlie Wales and Alix, a bartender at the Ritz.
Charlie asks Alix to pass along his brother-in-law’s address to Duncan Schaeffer. The narrator says
that Paris and the Ritz bar feel deserted. Charlie says he has been sober for a year and a half and that
he is now a businessman living in Prague. He and Alix gossip about old acquaintances. Charlie says
he’s in town to see his daughter.
Charlie gets in a taxi. The Left Bank looks provincial to him, and he wonders whether he’s ruined the
city for himself. The narrator tells us that Charlie is a handsome thirty-five-year-old. Charlie goes to
his brother-in-law’s house, where his daughter, Honoria, jumps into his arms. Marion Peters, his
sister-in-law, greets him without warmth, although his brother-in-law, Lincoln Peters, is friendlier. In a
calculated remark, Charlie boasts about how good his finances are these days. Lincoln looks restless,
so Charlie changes the subject. Marion says she’s glad there aren’t many Americans left in Paris, and
it’s clear that she doesn’t like Charlie.
After eating dinner with the Peters family, Charlie goes to see a famous dancer named Josephine
Baker, then to Montmartre, where he passes nightclubs that he recognizes. He sees a few scared
tourists go into one club. He thinks about the meaning of dissipation and remembers the vast sums of
money he threw away. After ignoring a woman’s advances, he goes home.
Part II begins the following morning. Charlie takes Honoria to lunch. He suggests going to a toy store
and then to a vaudeville show. Honoria doesn’t want to go to the toy store because she’s worried
they’re no longer rich. Charlie playfully introduces himself to her as if they are strangers. He pretends
that her doll is her child, and she goes along with the joke. She says she prefers Lincoln to Marion and
asks why she can’t live with Charlie.
Leaving the restaurant, they run into Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles, two of Charlie’s friends
from the old days. Lorraine says she and her husband are poor now and that she is alone in Paris. They
ask Charlie to join them for dinner, but he brushes them off and refuses to tell them where he’s
staying. They see each other again at the vaudeville, and he has a drink with them. In the cab on the
way home, Honoria says she wants to live with him, which thrills Charlie. She blows him a kiss when
she is safely inside the house.
In Part III, Charlie meets with Marion and Lincoln. He says that he wants Honoria to live with him
and that he has changed. He says he drinks one drink per day on purpose so that he doesn’t obsess
about it ever again. Marion doesn’t understand this, but Lincoln claims that he understands Charlie.
Charlie settles in for a long fight, reminding himself that his objective isn’t to justify his behavior but
to win Honoria back. Marion says that Charlie hasn’t existed for her since he locked Helen, her sister
and Charlie’s wife, out of their apartment. Charlie says Marion can trust him. As it becomes
increasingly clear that Marion simply doesn’t like Charlie, he begins to worry that she will turn
Honoria against him. He stresses that he will be able to give Honoria a good life and then realizes that
Marion and Lincoln don’t want to hear about how much wealthier he is than they are. He craves a
drink.
The narrator says that Marion understands Charlie’s wish to be with his daughter but needs to see him
as the villain. She implies that Charlie was responsible for Helen’s death. Lincoln objects. Charlie says
that heart trouble killed Helen, and Marion sarcastically agrees with him. Suddenly giving up the fight,
she leaves the room. Lincoln tells Charlie that he can take Honoria. Back in his hotel room, Charlie
thinks of the way he and Helen destroyed their love for no good reason. He remembers the night they
fought and she kissed another man; he got home before her and locked her out. There was a
snowstorm later, and Helen wandered around in the cold. The incident marked the “beginning of the
end.” Charlie falls asleep and dreams of Helen, who says that she wants him and Honoria to be
together.
Part IV begins the next morning. Charlie interviews two potential governesses and then eats lunch
with Lincoln. He says Marion resents the fact that Charlie and Helen were spending a fortune while
she and Lincoln were just scraping along. In his hotel room, Charlie gets a pneumatique (a letter
delivered by pneumatic tube) from Lorraine, who reminisces about their drunken pranks and asks to
see him at the Ritz bar. The adventures that Lorraine looks back on with fondness strike Charlie as
nightmarish.
Charlie goes to Marion and Lincoln’s house in the afternoon. Honoria has been told of the decision
and is delighted. The room feels safe and warm. The doorbell rings—it is Lorraine and Duncan, who
are drunk. Slurring their words, they ask Charlie to dinner. He refuses twice and they leave angry.
Furious, Marion leaves the room. The children eat dinner, and Lincoln goes to check on Marion. When
he comes back, he tells Charlie that the plans have changed.
In Part V, Charlie goes to the Ritz bar. He sees Paul, a bartender he knew in the old days. He thinks of
the fights that he and Helen had, the people out of their minds on alcohol and drugs, and the way he
locked Helen out in the snow. He calls Lincoln, who says that for six months, they have to drop the
question of Honoria living with Charlie. Charlie goes back to the bar. He realizes that the only thing he
can do for Honoria is buy her things, which he knows is inadequate. He plans to come back and try
again.

THE MAGIC BARREL BY BERNARD MALAMUD

The title story starts as the about-to-be rabbi Leo Finkle has been urged by his teachers to find a wife
before he actually becomes a rabbi; he gets a bigger congregation that way, they say. Because he is
quite incapable (he recognizes this later on in the story and presumes his study stole his social life) and
has almost finished his study (and thus has to hurry), he answers an ad of a marriage counselor.
Unhappy and terribly sorry about a meeting with one of the proposed women, he retreats back again to
his study. The marriage counselor suddenly turns up delivering him photographs of women, which he
initially ignores. However, something draws him to them and after viewing several of them he
discovers another one in the envelope. He instantly falls in love with that picture and yearns to meet
her. After he's found the marriage counselor (who left him immediately after delivering the
photographs) the girl turns out to be the counselor's daughter (though at first the counselor states it's
one of the photographs that should have been in the barrel; hence Finkle thinks of the barrel as magic).
He gets to meet her anyway; the marriage counselor (her father) hiding around the corner, "chanting
prayers for the dead."

A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND BY FLANNERY O’CONNOR

The grandmother tries to convince her son, Bailey, and his wife to take the family to east Tennessee
for vacation instead of Florida. She points out an article about the Misfit, an escaped convict heading
toward Florida, and adds that the children have already been there. John Wesley, eight years old,
suggests that the grandmother stay home, and his sister, June Star, says nastily that his grandmother
would never do that.
On the day of the trip, the grandmother hides her cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket in the car. She wears a
dress and hat with flowers on it so that people will know she is “a lady” if there’s an accident. In the
car, John Wesley says he doesn’t like Georgia, and the grandmother chastises him for not respecting
his home state. When they pass a cotton field, she says there are graves in the middle of it that
belonged to the plantation and jokes that the plantation has “Gone with the Wind.” Later, she tells a
story about an old suitor, Edgar Atkins Teagarden. Edgar brought her a watermelon every week, into
which he carved his initials, E. A. T. Once he left it on the porch and a black child ate it because he
thought it said eat.
The family stops at a restaurant called the Tower, owned by Red Sammy Butts. Red Sammy
complains that people are untrustworthy, explaining that he recently let two men buy gasoline on
credit. The grandmother tells him he’s a good man for doing it. Red Sam’s wife says she doesn’t trust
anyone, including Red Sam. The grandmother asks her if she’s heard about the Misfit, and the woman
worries that he’ll rob them. Red Sam says, “A good man is hard to find.” He and the grandmother
lament the state of the world.
Back in the car, the grandmother wakes from a nap and realizes that a plantation she once visited is
nearby. She says that the house had six white columns and was at the end of an oak tree–lined
driveway. She lies that the house had a secret panel to make the house seem more interesting. Excited,
the children beg to go to the house until Bailey angrily gives in. The grandmother points him to a dirt
road.
The family drives deep into the woods. The grandmother suddenly remembers that the house was in
Tennessee, not in Georgia. Horrified at her mistake, she jerks her feet. Pitty Sing escapes from the
basket and startles Bailey, who wrecks the car. The children’s mother breaks her shoulder, but no one
else is hurt. The grandmother decides not to tell Bailey about her mistake.
A passing car stops, and three men get out, carrying guns. The grandmother thinks she recognizes one
of them. One of the men, wearing glasses and no shirt, descends into the ditch. He tells the children’s
mother to make the children sit down because they make him nervous. The grandmother suddenly
screams because she realizes that he’s the Misfit. The man says it’s not good that she recognized him.
Bailey curses violently, upsetting the grandmother. The grandmother asks the Misfit whether he’d
shoot a lady, and the Misfit says he wouldn’t like to. The grandmother claims that she can tell he’s a
good man and that he comes from “nice people.” The Misfit agrees and praises his parents.
The grandmother continues telling him he’s a good man. The Misfit tells the other two men, Hiram
and Bobby Lee, to take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods. The grandmother adjusts her hat, but
the brim breaks off. The Misfit says he knows he isn’t good but that he isn’t the worst man either. He
apologizes to the grandmother and the children’s mother for not wearing a shirt and says that he and
the other men had to bury their clothes after they escaped. He says they borrowed the clothes they’re
wearing from some people they met.
The grandmother asks the Misfit whether he ever prays. Just as he says no, she hears two gunshots.
The Misfit says he used to be a gospel singer, and the grandmother chants, “pray, pray.” He says he
wasn’t a bad child but that at one point he went to prison for a crime he can’t remember committing.
He says a psychiatrist told him he’d killed his father. The grandmother tells the Misfit to pray so that
Jesus will help him. The Misfit says he’s fine on his own.
Bobby Lee and Hiram come back from the woods, and Bobby Lee gives the Misfit the shirt Bailey had
been wearing, but the grandmother doesn’t realize it’s Bailey’s. The Misfit tells the children’s mother
to take the baby and June Star and go with Bobby Lee and Hiram into the woods. Bobby Lee tries to
hold June Star’s hand, but she says he looks like a pig.
The grandmother starts chanting, “Jesus, Jesus.” The Misfit says he’s like Jesus, except Jesus hadn’t
committed a crime. He says he gave himself this name because his punishment doesn’t seem to fit the
crime people said he committed. A gunshot comes from the woods. The grandmother begs the Misfit
not to shoot a lady. Two more gunshots come from the woods, and the grandmother cries out for
Bailey.
The Misfit says that Jesus confused everything by raising the dead. He says that if what Jesus did is
true, then everyone must follow him. But if he didn’t actually raise the dead, then all anyone can do is
enjoy their time on earth by indulging in “meanness.” The grandmother agrees that perhaps Jesus
didn’t raise the dead. The Misfit says he wishes he had been there so he could know for sure. The
grandmother calls the Misfit “one of my own children,” and the Misfit shoots her in the chest three
times.
Bobby Lee and Hiram return, and they all look at the grandmother. The Misfit observes that the
grandmother could have been a good woman if someone had been around “to shoot her every minute
of her life.” The Misfit says life has no true pleasure.

WWTAWWTAL BY RAYMOND CARVER

The narrator says that his cardiologist friend, Mel McGinnis, is talking. The narrator and Mel are
sitting around Mel’s kitchen table in Albuquerque, New Mexico, drinking gin with their wives, Laura
and Terri. They begin talking about love. Mel thinks love is spiritual and says he used to be in the
seminary. Terri says that before she lived with Mel, she lived with a man named Ed who tried to kill
her because he loved her so much. Mel disagrees that Ed felt any love for her, but Terri says that he
did. Mel tells the narrator and Laura that Ed had also threatened him and Terri. The narrator holds
Laura’s hand and says that he doesn’t really know whether that’s love, while Laura says that you can
never know about other people’s situations.
Terri says Ed took rat poison when she left him but that he survived. Mel says he’s dead now. Terri
says he shot himself, but he “bungled it.”
The narrator describes Mel. He’s forty-five, and his movements are usually precise when he hasn’t
been drinking. The narrator asks how Ed bungled his suicide, but Mel merely replies that Ed was
always threatening him and Terri. Laura asks again what happened with the suicide, and Mel says that
when Ed shot himself, someone heard it and called an ambulance, and Ed lived for three days. Terri
says she was with him when he died and that Ed died for love. But she admits that she and Mel were
scared when Ed was threatening them and that Mel had even made a will. Mel opens another bottle of
gin.
The narrator, meanwhile, describes his wife, Laura. She’s a legal secretary, younger than the narrator,
and seemingly very compatible with him. Laura says that she and the narrator, whose name is Nick,
know all about love. Nick kisses her hand. Terri asks them how long they’ve been together, and Laura
tells her that they’ve been together for about eighteen months. They all toast to love.
A dog barks outside, and the sun is bright in the kitchen. Mel says he’ll give them an example of love
but then says that no one knows anything about love. He says he loves Terri, but he knows he loved
his first wife, Marjorie, too, even though he hates her now. He wants to know what happened to the
love he felt for his first wife. He points out that Nick and Laura love each other but loved other people
before they met and were each married to someone else before as well. Mel says that if something
happened to him or Terri, he knows that whoever remained would find someone else to love. He
admits that that’s a horrible thing to say but asks the others to tell him if he’s wrong. Terri asks Mel
whether he’s drunk, and he says he can say what he’s thinking without being drunk. He says they’re
all just talking, and that he’s not on call. He tells Laura and Nick that he loves them.
Mel says that he was trying to make a point. He tells them about an elderly couple who were nearly
killed when a drunk teenager hit their camper with his car. Both of them survived but were badly
injured. Mel describes how he and other surgeons operated almost all night and that afterward the
couple was transferred to a private room. Mel interrupts himself to tell everyone to drink more gin so
that they can all go to dinner at a new place he and Terri know about. Mel says that if he could come
back in another life, he’d be a chef or a knight. Terri and Mel debate whether the correct word is
vessel or vassal. Nick says that being a knight could be dangerous because of all the heavy armor.
Laura asks what happened to the old couple, then struggles to light a cigarette. Nick notes that the sun
in the kitchen has changed. Mel tells Laura that if their situations were different, he’d fall in love with
her. Resuming the story, Mel says that he kept checking in on the old couple, both of whom were in
full-body casts. The husband was okay, and the wife was going to be okay, but the husband was
depressed because he couldn’t see his wife through the eyeholes in his cast. Mel says that he couldn’t
believe the man was depressed because he couldn’t see his wife. He asks everyone whether they see
the point.
Nick says they’re all drunk and that the light is leaving the room. Terri says Mel is depressed and tells
him to take a pill, but Mel says he’s already taken everything possible. Mel says he wants to call his
kids, but Terri says he’ll only feel worse if Marjorie answers the phone. Terri says that Mel wishes
Marjorie would remarry or die. Mel says Marjorie is allergic to bees and that he wishes he could
release bees in her house to kill her. He suggests they all go out to eat, but Nick suggests they should
just keep drinking. Laura remarks that she’s starving, and Terri says she’ll serve a snack, but she stays
in her seat. Mel notices that the gin is gone, and Terri asks what they should do now. Nick says he can
hear everyone’s heart beating. The four friends just sit in their seats until the room is dark.

LOLITA BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV

In the novel’s foreword, the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., explains the strange story that will follow.
According to Ray, he received the manuscript, entitled Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed
Male, from the author’s lawyer. The author himself, known by the pseudonym of Humbert Humbert
(or H. H.), died in jail of coronary thrombosis while awaiting a trial. Ray asserts that while the
author’s actions are despicable, his writing remains beautiful and persuasive. He also indicates that the
novel will become a favorite in psychiatric circles as well as encourage parents to raise better children
in a better world.
In the manuscript, Humbert relates his peaceful upbringing on the Riviera, where he encounters his
first love, the twelve-year-old Annabel Leigh. Annabel and the thirteen-year-old Humbert never
consummate their love, and Annabel’s death from typhus four months later haunts Humbert. Although
Humbert goes on to a career as a teacher of English literature, he spends time in a mental institution
and works a succession of odd jobs. Despite his marriage to an adult woman, which eventually fails,
Humbert remains obsessed with sexually desirable and sexually aware young girls. These nymphets,
as he calls them, remind him of Annabel, though he fails to find another like her. Eventually, Humbert
comes to the United States and takes a room in the house of widow Charlotte Haze in a sleepy,
suburban New England town. He becomes instantly infatuated with her twelve-year-old daughter
Dolores, also known as Lolita. Humbert follows Lolita’s moves constantly, occasionally flirts with
her, and confides his pedophiliac longings to a journal. Meanwhile, Charlotte Haze, whom Humbert
loathes, has fallen in love with him. When Charlotte sends Lolita off to summer camp, Humbert
marries Charlotte in order to stay near his true love. Humbert wants to be alone with Lolita and even
toys with the idea of killing Charlotte, but he can’t go through with it. However, Charlotte finds his
diary and, after learning that he hates her but loves her daughter, confronts him. Humbert denies
everything, but Charlotte tells him she is leaving him and storms out of the house. At that moment, a
car hits her and she dies instantly.
Humbert goes to the summer camp and picks up Lolita. Only when they arrive at a motel does he tell
her that Charlotte has died. In his account of events, Humbert claims that Lolita seduces him, rather
than the other way around. The two drive across the country for nearly a year, during which time
Humbert becomes increasingly obsessed with Lolita and she learns to manipulate him. When she
engages in tantrums or refuses his advances, Humbert threatens to put her in an orphanage. At the
same time, a strange man seems to take an interest in Humbert and Lolita and appears to be following
them in their travels.
Humbert eventually gets a job at Beardsley College somewhere in the Northeast, and Lolita enrolls in
school. Her wish to socialize with boys her own age causes a strain in their relationship, and Humbert
becomes more restrictive in his rules. Nonetheless, he allows her to appear in a school play. Lolita
begins to behave secretively around Humbert, and he accuses her of being unfaithful and takes her
away on another road trip. On the road, Humbert suspects that they are being followed. Lolita doesn’t
notice anything, and Humbert accuses her of conspiring with their stalker.
Lolita becomes ill, and Humbert must take her to the hospital. However, when Humbert returns to get
her, the nurses tell him that her uncle has already picked her up. Humbert flies into a rage, but then he
calms himself and leaves the hospital, heartbroken and angry.
For the next two years, Humbert searches for Lolita, unearthing clues about her kidnapper in order to
exact his revenge. He halfheartedly takes up with a woman named Rita, but then he receives a note
from Lolita, now married and pregnant, asking for money. Assuming that Lolita has married the man
who had followed them on their travels, Humbert becomes determined to kill him. He finds Lolita,
poor and pregnant at seventeen. Humbert realizes that Lolita’s husband is not the man who kidnapped
her from the hospital. When pressed, Lolita admits that Clare Quilty, a playwright whose presence has
been felt from the beginning of the book, had taken her from the hospital. Lolita loved Quilty, but he
kicked her out when she refused to participate in a child pornography orgy. Still devoted to Lolita,
Humbert begs her to return to him. Lolita gently refuses. Humbert gives her 4,000 dollars and then
departs. He tracks down Quilty at his house and shoots him multiple times, killing him. Humbert is
arrested and put in jail, where he continues to write his memoir, stipulating that it can only be
published upon Lolita’s death. After Lolita dies in childbirth, Humbert dies of heart failure, and the
manuscript is sent to John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.