A literary miscellany

K S SIVAKUMARAN

I would like to share with you some enjoyable passages in poetry, fiction, drama and literary criticism from literature in English.

These I trust teenagers and adolescents learning English Literature might benefit in learning and enjoying and even prompted to write better creative writing.

Before that let us remind ourselves what the examiners expect as answers to questions put in the contemporary literary contexts.

If you are studying a particular text you must be able to comment on the text. This should be written in a coherent manner. Your responses should have fresh insights. Based on those you must draw your conclusions.

Your answers are your own personal opinions. This will be convincing if you could substantiate with relevant quotations from the text.

The main thing is to understand the language used and the structure and the form that befits the writer’s intentions.

The theme, plot and most of all understanding the characters with their strengths and weaknesses should be thoroughly understood.

In the same way as for the study of fiction, we could follow some of the aspects mentioned above to analyze a play.

We must first determine what kind of a play we are studying. We must then place the text in a background of social, cultural and historical context.

In poetry in addition we look into the style and imagery used and the originality of the thought of the poet. Awareness of comparisons and complexities too should be understood.

In other words critical awareness should be the key in understanding and enjoying a work of literature.

Let us now note some memorable quotations of some of the masters who handled the English language in their creative works.

Here are some taken at random for your own understanding and interpretations:

Emily Dickinson, an American poet once wrote these lines.

There’s a certain slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral tunes.

Please see how metaphors are used by these two poets.

Dylan Thomas wrote Old age should burn and rave at close of day.

Marianne Moore’s metaphor is refreshingly quaint or picturesque -- The Sea is a collector, quick, to return that rapacious look.

The Metaphysical poet Andrew Marvel wrote My vegetable love should grow.

Here is one comparison that may be called a Personification – white poems are daggers, guns, cops piercing hearts in weird designs.

Black poems are beautiful Egyptian princesses. This is by Ahmed Alhamisi

Sylvia Plath, the American poet who was married infamously to the British poet Ted Hughes wrote

Even the sun clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts

Nor the woman in the ambulance

Whose red heart blooms through her Coat so astonishingly.

Let us conclude this week’s column wit a few hints about two aspects in poetry –namely Rhyme and Rhythm.

Contemporary poetry does not pay much attention to Rhyme as it did for several centuries ago. In fact rhyme was absolutely then.

But now many poets all over the world have chosen to write in unrhymed verse.

If you are studying poetry written up to the 19th century, we must be familiar to rhymed verse so that we can appreciate it fittingly.

However Rhythm is still observed by many poets. Rhythm is really a sense of movement in the verse. When the rhythm is strong and regular, like a beat, it is called a metre.

People write Free Verse these days and contemporary poetry generally has no metre and rhyme.

Although there may not be a fixed metre in such poetry there could be rhythm and internal rhythm.

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