The Lake Isle of Inisfree

The Lake Isle of Inisfree

W.B Yeats (1865 - 1939)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

---

Summary

This is a poem by WB Yeats in which he dreams of escaping the busy streets of London. He remembers Inisfree as a perfect little island that would supply all his needs. His memory tricks him into thinking it had a beautiful summer climate all year round.

In the first stanza Yeats imagines building a tiny hut on the little island of Inisfree. He dreams of living on beans and honey which he will cultivate himself. Obviously he is unrealistic. He also wants to get away from people: ‘live alone’.

In the second stanza Yeats imagines finding harmony on the island:
‘And I shall have some peace there’.
He dreams further of living in a delightful climate there:
‘noon a purple glow’.
He also dreams of listening to songbirds at dusk:
‘evening full of the linnet's wings’.

In the third stanza the thought and action develops. Yeats states his decision to leave the ‘pavements grey’ of London. He is obsessed with or crazed by the sound of lake water and has to leave the city. Finally he admits that he has a deep need to live in a beautiful place encircled by the sound of water:
‘I hear it in the deep heart's core’.

Themes

The poet dreams of moving away from the city to live alone on an island:
‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’.
Note how the repetition of ‘go’ emphasises his wish to travel away from the city.

The poet wishes to escape to a beautiful place with wonderful light and colours:
‘There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow’.
Note how the repeated ‘i’ and ‘o’ sounds make it seem like a musical place.

The poet celebrates the beauty of a private place on a country lake:
‘I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.’
Note how the repeated ‘l’ sound adds to the beauty of the situation.

Tones

Sometimes the tone is determined:
‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’.
Note how the repetition of ‘go’ emphasises his wish to depart.

Sometimes the tone is dreamy:
‘And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made’.
The clay and wattles show that he is unrealistic about his comfort and therefore a dreamer.

Sometimes the tone is soft and warm [mellow]:
‘for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings’.
This image of peace pouring from the morning mist and lasting till dusk when the cricket sings is very mellow. The repetition of ‘dropping’ makes it very mellow.

Sometimes the tone is bleak and sad:
‘the pavements grey’.
By placing ‘grey’ after ‘pavement’ Yeats is emphasising how much it depresses him. He reveals a lonesome tone as he refers to the streets and pavements.

Sound effects

This poem in particular contains repetition for musical effect. This music enhances [meaning that it adds to] the beauty of Inisfree.

Alliteration [the repetition of first letters]:
‘lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore’.
The ‘l’ and ‘s’ sounds here show alliteration and create music.
Note the 4 ‘l’ sounds also in this quote:
‘live alone in the bee-loud glade’
You can find more examples yourself.

Assonance [repetition of vowels]:
Note the ‘ea' and ‘ee’ sounds in ‘I hear it in the deep heart's core.’
These sounds reveal a tone or mood of longing in the poet.
Can you spot the long ‘o’ sounds in the second and third stanzas?

Rhyming [The words of the first and third lines rhyme and the words of the second and fourth lines rhyme in each stanza]:
The end sounds in the first stanza are as follows:
‘ee’, ‘ade’, ‘ee’, ‘ade’.
This is a regular pattern and is found in all the stanzas.

Internal Rhyme [rhyming inside one line]:
‘go’ in the first line: ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’.
Can you find the internal rhyme in this example?
‘And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings’.

Did you also see in this quote the other unusual rhyme created by the repetition of ‘dropping’ in two lines? That is called Cross Rhyme.

Rhythm:
The rhythm is soft, dreamy and hypnotic.
The repetition of ‘go’ in the first line, other internal rhymes, the cross rhyme, the end of line rhyming pattern, the alliteration, and assonance all contribute to this rhythm.
The nine words of two syllables [like ‘glimmer’] in the second stanza increase the slow, dreamy atmosphere. By contrast the words are more often of one-syllable in the first and third stanzas, apart from about five words of two syllables in both. This creates a faster rhythm, which matches the poet’s urgent desire to leave the ‘grey’ city.

8:19 AM - By midilk 1

EVERYMAN

EVERYMAN

(“Everyman is late- 15th –century English morality play. Called by Death,
Everyman can persuade none of his friends-Beauty, Kindred, Worldly
Goods- to go with him, except Good Deeds”)

Messenger: Listen to this moral play about the summoning of Everyman. It
shows how, at the end of our lives, we are shown to be transitory. You will
see how Friendship, Kin, Worldly Goods and Possessions, Strength and
Beauty will fade from you as a flower in May. You will see how our
heavenly King calls Everyman to a general reckoning. Listen to what he
says:

God: Everyman lives only for their own pleasure, and yet their own life is
Not assured. The more patient I am, the worse they are from year to year.
Therefore I will have a reckoning of Everyman’s person. If I leave the
people alone, they will become worse then beasts. They devour one
another with jealousy, forget charity to their fellow men, and become
preoccupied with material possessions. Therefore I must do justice on
Everyman. Death, my Mighty Messenger, where are you?

Death: I am here; ready to do your bidding.

God: Go to Everyman and tell him in my name that he must take a journey
That he cannot escape and he’d better bring a reckoning without delay.

Death: Ah, I see Everyman walking over there; meeting me is the last thing
on his mind, for he is preoccupied with his own self and possessions. He
will dread standing before the Lord, heaven’s king Everyman, stand still,
where are you going so cheerfully? Have you forgotten your maker?

Everyman : Who wants to know ?

Death : I have been sent to you from heaven by God.

Everyman : What does God want from me ?

Death: He must have a reckoning from you right away.

Everyman : O Death ,you’ve come when I least expected you. Save me –I’ll
give you whatever you want if you’ll be kind to me –a thousand dollars if
you’ll leave me alone and come bask another day.

Death: Everyman , that may not be .I stop not for gold, riches, pope nor
emperor, many have offered me gifts, but that is not my way. Come, be quick.

Everyman: what? not even a warning? To even think of you makes my Heart sick. I’m not ready to give a reckoning! Come back in a few years
and I might be more prepared. Please spare me unit I’m better prepared.

Death: It’s no use to cry, weep or pray. But see if any of your friends might
accompany you. For death waits for no man. All living creatures must die
For Adam’s sin.

Everyman : O God in heaven, have mercy on me! Shall I have no company
To join me on this journey?

Death: See if any are so darling as to accompany you on this journey.

Everyman : I have no one to help me on my journey! I wish I’d never been
born ! I fear great pain, and I don’t know what to do ! who might come with
me? Maybe Friendship; we’ve been close for years. Surely he’ll help me
I’ll speak to him right away.

Friendship: Hello, Everyman, why do you look so sad? If something is Wrong, please tell me that I may help you.

Everyman : Yes, dear Friendship, yes I am in real trouble!

Friendship : My true friend , tell me what’s wrong ; I will never forsake you,
through thick and through thin, you can count on me.

Everyman : Then you truly are friend indeed; you have never
disappointed me before.

Friendship ; And I never will; I swear ,even if you were to go to hell, I would
stay with you

Everyman : I have been commanded to go on a journey- a hard, dangerous journey to give a reckoning before God, the high judge. Please come with me as you promised.

Friendship : That’s tough luck. But if I were to accompany you, it would be painful to me
and the very thought scares me.

Everyman : Indeed, Death was with me here

Friendship : If Death were the messenger, then I will not go with you. I would not go on that journey even for my own father!

Everyman : But ,my friend , you promised !

Friendship : Not even our friendship can persuade me to go.

Everyman : You won’t come, Friendship ? You’re forsaking me?

Friendship : Yes , I’m sorry, but I leave you in God’s hands.


Everyman : Where else have I to turn for help if even Friendship fails me ?I know – I’ll go to my family. My kinsmen will help me for blood is thicker than water.
Kindred, are you there?

Kindred :In riches or poverty, you can always depend on kin.

Everyman : God has called me to give account for my life, how I’ve lived and spent my
days , and my ill deeds. Please come and help me give account.

Kindred : What !But you’re so young and merry ! Take heart ! But, no, I won’t go with you.

Everyman : My Cousin, will you go with me ?

Cousin : No . I have a cramp in my toe.

Everyman : Tell me the truth- will you go with me, or stay behind ?

Kindred : Stay behind ? You’d better believe it! Farewell, I’ll see you later.

Everyman : All my life I have loved riches; may be now they’ll help me. My goods and possessions have made my heart light before ; I’ll speak to them in this
distress. Where are you, my goods and riches?

Goods : Here sir ; if you have any trouble or adversity in the world, I can help.

Everyman: It is something else that grieves me; I am sent to give an account before the highest judge of all. All my life you’ve given me pleasure, therefore, come with me and speak to God for me. They say that money can make all wrongs right.

Goods : No, Everyman, I sing another song , I follow no man in such voyages. If I did go with you, it would go worse for you because you set your hope on me. I have made you forget that this day of reckoning would come. Your love for me will be your undoing.

Everyman: Yes, I have loved you, and had great pleasure in the good things your treasures have provided for me.

Goods : That is to your damnation, for love of money goes against eternal love. If you had loved me more moderately and shared some of me with the poor, you would not be in
this trouble and sorrow.

Everyman: Curse you, false hope! You deceived me, you traitor, and caught me in your trap! Oh, who shall go with me on my journey? Friendship, though he promised to be
true, left me alone. Kindred, though he spoke pleasantly, also refused to go with me. Then I went to the possessions that meanst the most to me and they said that my love for them may send me to hell! It’s my own fault, I alone am to blame. Who might help me
now ? I can ask Good Deeds, but she is so weak that she hasn’t the strength to speak much less accompany me. Yet I have nothing to lose by asking. Good Deeds, where are you ? Please say you’ll go with me or else I’m forever damned. Help me to make a
reckoning before the redeemer and king.

Good –Deeds : Everyman , I am sorry for your fall , and I would help you if I were stronger and more able

Everyman : Good – Deeds , at least give me some advice.
Good –Deeds : I’ll be happy to, although I’m not able to get on my feet; I have a sister named Knowledge who will go with you in your dreadful reckoning.

Knowledge : Everyman , I will go with you, and be your guide. in your need, I’ll stay by your side. We’ll go together to the cleansing river of confession.

Everyman : Oh, glorious river that cleans all filth, wash me so that no sin is seen on me. I come with Knowledge for my redemption, I repent with hearty and full contrition. I am commanded to make a journey and give account to God. Oh, Please Mother of Salvation,
I beg of you to help my Good Deeds.

Confession : I know your sorrow well, Everyman; since you have come to me with knowledge, I will comfort you as best I can . I will give you a precious jewel called Penance; it shall punish your body and cancel out your adversity.

Everyman : Oh, God, heavenly Figure, good right Vision, who descended in a pure virgin to redeem Everyman who was forfeited by Adam’s disobedience- Oh, blessed God, forgive my great offence and have mercy on me !

Knowledge : Everyman, I leave you in the hands of our Savior to ensure your reckoning.

Good – Deeds : I thank God, now I can turn and do; I am delivered from my sickness and sorrow and now I am able to go with Everyman and help him declare his good deeds.

Everyman : Welcome, my Good- Deeds; now I hear your voice and I weep for the very sweetness of your love.

Knowledge : Don’t be sad anymore, but be glad. God has seen your confession from his throne. Put on this garment which is wet with your tears of repentance that he may remember your tears when you come to your journey’s end. Now you must lead three
more mighty persons on your journey.

Everyman : Who are they ?

Good-Deeds : Discretion , Strength and Beauty.

Knowledge : Also you must call your Five Senses as your counselors.


Good –Deeds : You must have them always ready at all hours
Everyman : My friends, come here and be present- Discretion, Strength, my Five Senses and Beauty.

Strength : We will bring him all here, to help and comfort, believe me.

Discretion : So we will go with him all together.


Strength : And I, Strength , will by you stand in distress, and help you in any fight.

Five Senses : Through thick and through thin, we will not depart from you in good times or bad.

Beauty : Even to death I will stay with you, whatever may happen.

Knowledge : Everyman , listen to me : Go to Priesthood, I advise you, he will give you the holy sacrament and ointment, then return here to us. We will wait for you here.

Five Senses : Yes, Everyman, there is no emperor, king, duke, nor baron, that is greater in importance than the least priest, for he bears the keys and therefore has the cure for man’s redemption. God gave that cure out of his own heart with great pain. In this earthly life there are seven sacraments.

Everyman : I will receive holy communion.

Five Senses : Everyman, that is the best that you can do : God will bring you to salvation, for Priesthood exceeds all other things : he teaches us the Holy Scriptures.

Knowledge : When priests are good then it is true : when Jesus hung on the cross with great pain, he gave, out of his blessed heart, that same sacrament in great torment. But that sacrament. But that sacrament is not for sale and those priests who take money for giving the sacraments have God’s curse on them for being such a sinful example.

Everyman : Now may Jesus help me. I have received the sacrament for my redemption, blessed be you who gave me the suggestion! And now, friends, let us go on without further delay. I thank you for waiting for me so patiently. Oh, dear, my legs are so tired I can barely stand! I’m sorry, but I can’t go a step further. I must creep into this cave and rest.

Beauty : But, alas! This is a grave !

Everyman : Yes, there shall you consume more and less.

Beauty : And what, should I smother here ? I’m out of here, goodbye, I’m taking my thinks and leaving.

Strength : Everyman, this is no longer any fun, I’m leaving as well.

Everyman : He that trusts in his strength will find that it deceives him in the end . Both Strength and Beauty have forsaken me, although they promised me so faithfully.

Discretion : Everyman, I will also be leaving you alone now that Strength has gone.

Everyman : Why, Discretion, why must you abandon me, too ?

Discretion : When Strength goes, I follow him.

Everyman : Everything fails except God alone: Beauty, Strength, and 

Discretion : for when Death blows his blast, they all run from me as fast as they can.

Five Senses : Everyman , I must be going, too: I am following the others. Here I leave you .


Everyman : Oh Jesus, help, all have forsaken me!

Good –Deeds : Not all , Everyman I will stay with you. I will never abandon you. You will find me a good friend when you need one.

Everyman : Thank you, Good – Deeds: now I see who my real friends are : the rest have forsaken me, every one , although I loved them better than my Good –Deeds. Knowledge, will you forsake me too ?

Knowledge : Yes , Everyman, I will leave when you go to death : but not until I see what happens to you .

Everyman : I think it’s time for me to go, to make my reckoning and pay my debts , I see my time is up. Heed my example, everyone , how those I loved best left me, every one
except my Good- Deeds who stayed till the end .
Good – Deeds : Don’t be afraid, I will speak for you
.
Everyman : Here I plead, Oh God, have mercy !into your hands I commend my soul. Receive it, Lord, that it may not be lost, As you bought me , so defend me and save me from the fiend so that I may appear with the angels and be saved on the day of doom.

Knowledge: Now he has suffered so that we all shall endure; Good-Deeds shall make all certain. Now he has ended , I think I hear angels singing and making great joy and melody where Everyman’s soul shall be received.

Angel : Come ,beloved of Jesus : Hereabove you shall go.

Doctor : You who hear , this is the moral : Forsake pride, for he deceives you in the end. And remember Beauty, Five Senses, Strength, and

Direction : they all abandoned Everyman in the end, except his Good- Deeds. But beware, if your Good Deeds are small before God , you will have no help at all. No excuse will be found there for Everyman, and what shall he do then ? For after death no man may make amends, for then even mercy and pity will forsake him if his reckoning is not clear when he comes.

This ends the moral play of Everyman.

10:11 PM - By midilk 0

Wilfred Owen 1893–1918

 Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Shortly after his death, seven more of his poems appeared in the 1919 volume of Edith Sitwell's annual anthology, Wheels, a volume dedicated to his memory, and in 1919 and 1920 seven other poems appeared in periodicals. Almost all of Owen’s poems, therefore, appeared posthumously: Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell, contains twenty-three poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund Blunden, adds nineteen poems to this number; and The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), edited by C. Day Lewis, contains eighty poems, adding some juvenilia, minor poems, and fragments but omitting a few of the poems from Blunden’s edition.
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893, in Oswestry, on the Welsh border of Shropshire, in the beautiful and spacious home of his maternal grandfather. Wilfred’s father, Thomas, a former seaman, had returned from India to marry Susan Shaw; throughout the rest of his life Thomas felt constrained by his somewhat dull and low-paid position as a railway station master. Owen’s mother felt that her marriage limited her intellectual, musical, and economic ambitions. Both parents seem to have been of Welsh descent, and Susan’s family had been relatively affluent during her childhood but had lost ground economically. As the oldest of four children born in rapid succession, Wilfred developed a protective attitude toward the others and an especially close relationship with his mother. After he turned four, the family moved from the grandfather’s home to a modest house in Birkenhead, where Owen attended Birkenhead Institute from 1900 to 1907. The family then moved to another modest house, in Shrewsbury, where Owen attended Shrewsbury Technical School and graduated in 1911 at the age of 18. Having attempted unsuccessfully to win a scholarship to attend London University, he tried to measure his aptitude for a religious vocation by becoming an unpaid lay assistant to the Reverend Herbert Wigan, a vicar of evangelical inclinations in the Church of England, at Dunsden, Oxfordshire. In return for the tutorial instruction he was to receive, but which did not significantly materialize, Owen agreed to assist with the care of the poor and sick in the parish and to decide within two years whether he should commit himself to further training as a clergyman. At Dunsden he achieved a fuller understanding of social and economic issues and developed his humanitarian propensities, but as a consequence of this heightened sensitivity, he became disillusioned with the inadequate response of the Church of England to the sufferings of the underprivileged and the dispossessed. In his spare time, he read widely and began to write poetry. In his initial verses he wrote on the conventional subjects of the time, but his work also manifested some stylistic qualities that even then tended to set him apart, especially his keen ear for sound and his instinct for the modulating of rhythm, talents related perhaps to the musical ability that he shared with both of his parents.

In 1913 he returned home, seriously ill with a respiratory infection that his living in a damp, unheated room at the vicarage had exacerbated. He talked of poetry, music, or graphic art as possible vocational choices, but his father urged him to seek employment that would result in a steady income. After eight months of convalescence at home, Owen taught for one year in Bordeaux at the Berlitz School of Languages, and he spent a second year in France with a Catholic family, tutoring their two boys. As a result of these experiences, he became a Francophile. Later these years undoubtedly heightened his sense of the degree to which the war disrupted the life of the French populace and caused widespread suffering among civilians as the Allies pursued the retreating Germans through French villages in the summer and fall of 1918.

In September 1915, nearly a year after England and Germany had gone to war, Owen returned to England, uncertain as to whether he should enlist. By October he had enlisted and was at first in the Artists’ Rifles. In June 1916 he received a commission as lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, and on 29 December 1916 he left for France with the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Judging by his first letters to his mother from France, one might have anticipated that Owen would write poetry in the idealistic vein of Rupert Brooke: “There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France....” But by 6 January 1917 he wrote of the marching, “The awful state of the roads, and the enormous weight carried was too much for scores of men.” Outfitted in hip-length rubber waders, on 8 January he had waded through two and a half miles of trenches with “a mean depth of two feet of water.” By 9 January he was housed in a hut where only seventy yards away a howitzer fired every minute day and night. On 12 January occurred the march and attack of poison gas he later reported in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” They marched three miles over a shelled road and three more along a flooded trench, where those who got stuck in the heavy mud had to leave their waders, as well as some clothing and equipment, and move ahead on bleeding and freezing feet. They were under machine-gun fire, shelled by heavy explosives throughout the cold march, and were almost unconscious from fatigue when the poison-gas attack occurred. Another incident that month, in which one of Owen’s men was blown from a ladder in their trench and blinded, forms the basis of “The Sentry.” In February Owen attended an infantry school at Amiens. On 19 March he was hospitalized for a brain concussion suffered six nights earlier, when he fell into a fifteen-foot-deep shell hole while searching in the dark for a soldier overcome by fatigue. Blunden dates the writing of Owen’s sonnet “To A Friend (With an Identity Disc)” to these few days in the hospital. Throughout April the battalion suffered incredible physical privations caused by the record-breaking cold and snow and by the heavy shelling. For four days and nights Owen and his men remained in an open field in the snow, with no support forces arriving to relieve them and with no chance to change wet, frozen clothes or to sleep: “I kept alive on brandy, the fear of death, and the glorious prospect of the cathedral town just below us, glittering with the morning.” Three weeks later on 25 April he continued to write his mother of the intense shelling: “For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might put us out.” One wet night during this time he was blown into the air while he slept. For the next several days he hid in a hole too small for his body, with the body of a friend, now dead, huddled in a similar hole opposite him, and less than six feet away. In these letters to his mother he directed his bitterness not at the enemy but at the people back in England “who might relieve us and will not.”

Having endured such experiences in January, March, and April, Owen was sent to a series of hospitals between 1 May and 26 June 1917 because of severe headaches. He thought them related to his brain concussion, but they were eventually diagnosed as symptoms of shell shock, and he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to become a patient of Dr. A. Brock, the associate of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, the noted neurologist and psychologist to whom Siegfried Sassoon was assigned when he arrived six weeks later.

Owen’s annus mirabilis as a poet apparently began in the summer of 1917, but he had, in fact, been preparing himself haphazardly but determinedly for a career as poet throughout the preceding five or six years. He had worshipped Keats and later Shelley during adolescence; during his two years at Dunsden he had read and written poetry in the isolated evenings at the vicarage; in Bordeaux, the elderly symbolist poet and pacifist writer Laurent Tailhade had encouraged him in his ambition to become a poet. Also in France in 1913 and 1914 he probably read and studied the works of novelist and poet Jules Romains, who was experimenting with pararhyme and assonance, although Romains’s treatise on half-rhyme or accords (Petit Traite de Versification, written with G. Chenneviere) which describes several devices that Owen himself used, was not published until after Owen’s death. While he was stationed in London in 1915 and 1916, he found stimulation in discussions with another older poet, Harold Monro, who ran the Poetry Bookshop, a meeting place for poets; and in 1916, he read Rupert Brooke, William Butler Yeats, and A.E. Housman. In the fall and winter of 1916, Owen, his cousin Leslie Gunston, and a friend of Gunston’s engaged in an extended literary game in which the three decided upon a topic and then mailed to one another the verses they wrote on that topic. Owen was developing his skill in versification, his technique as a poet, and his appreciation for the poetry of others, especially that of his more important contemporaries, but until 1917 he was not expressing his own significant experiences and convictions except in letters to his mother and brother. This preparation, the three bitter months of suffering, the warmth of the people of Edinburgh who “adopted” the patients, the insight of Dr. Brock, and the coincidental arrival of Siegfried Sassoon brought forth the poet and the creative outpouring of his single year of maturity.

Before Sassoon arrived at Craiglockhart in mid-August, Dr. Brock encouraged Owen to edit the hospital journal, the Hydra, which went through twelve issues before Owen left. Later in Owen’s stay Brock also arranged for him to play in a community orchestra, to renew his interests in biology and archaeology, to participate in a debating society, to give lectures at Tynecastle School, and to do historical research at the Edinburgh Advocates Library.

It seems likely that this sensitive psychologist and enthusiastic friend assisted Owen in confronting the furthermost ramifications of his violent experiences in France so that he could write of the terrifying experiences in poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “The Sentry,” and “The Show.” He may also have helped him confront his shyness; his apparently excessive involvement with his mother and his attempt, at the same time, to become more independent; his resentment of his father’s disapproval of his ambition for a career as a poet; his ambivalence about Christianity and his disillusionment with Christian religion in the practices of the contemporary church; his expressed annoyance with all women except his mother and his attraction to other men; and his decision to return to his comrades in the trenches rather than to stay in England to protest the continuation of the war.

When Sassoon arrived, it took Owen two weeks to get the courage to knock on his door and identify himself as a poet. At that time Owen, like many others in the hospital, was speaking with a stammer. By autumn he was not only articulate with his new friends and lecturing in the community but was able to use his terrifying experiences in France, and his conflicts about returning, as the subject of poems expressing his own deepest feelings. He experienced an astonishing period of creative energy that lasted through several months, until he returned to France and the heavy fighting in the fall of 1918.

By the time they met, Owen and Sassoon shared the conviction that the war ought to be ended, since the total defeat of the Central Powers would entail additional destruction, casualties, and suffering of staggering magnitude. In 1917 and 1918 both found their creative stimulus in a compassionate identification with soldiers in combat and in the hospital. In spite of their strong desire to remain in England to protest the continuation of the war, both finally returned to their comrades in the trenches. Whatever the exact causes of Owen’s sudden emergence as “true poet” in the summer of 1917, he himself thought that Sassoon had “fixed” him in place as poet. By the time Sassoon arrived, his first volume of poetry, The Old Huntsman (1917), which includes some war poems, had gained wide attention, and he was already preparing Counter-Attack (1918), which was to have an even stronger impact on the English public. In the weeks immediately before he was sent to Craiglockhart under military orders, Sassoon had been the center of public attention for risking the possibility of court martial by mailing a formal protest against the war to the War Department. Further publicity resulted when he dramatized his protest by throwing his Military Cross into the River Mersey and when a member of the House of Commons read the letter of protest before the hostile members of the House, an incident instigated by Bertrand Russell in order to further the pacifist cause. Sassoon came from a wealthy and famous family. He had been to Cambridge, he was seven years older than Owen, and he had many friends among the London literati. Both pride and humility in having acquired Sassoon as friend characterized Owen’s report to his mother of his visits to Sassoon’s room in September. He remarked that he had not yet told his new friend “that I am not worthy to light his pipe. I simply sit tight and tell him where I think he goes wrong.”

If their views on the war and their motivations in writing about it were similar, significant differences appear when one compares their work. In the poems written after he went to France in 1916 Sassoon consistently used a direct style with regular and exact rhyme, pronounced rhythms, colloquial language, a strongly satiric mode; and he also tended to present men and women in a stereotypical manner. After meeting Sassoon, Owen wrote several poems in Sassoon’s drily satirical mode, but he soon rejected Sassoon’s terseness or epigrammatic concision. Consequently, Owen created soldier figures who often express a fuller humanity and emotional range than those in Sassoon’s more cryptic poems. In his war poems, whether ideological, meditative, or lyrical, Owen achieved greater breadth than Sassoon did in his war poetry. Even in some of the works that Owen wrote before he left Craiglockhart in the fall of 1917, he revealed a technical versatility and a mastery of sound through complex patterns of assonance, alliteration, dissonance, consonance, and various other kinds of slant rhyme—an experimental method of composition which went beyond any innovative versification that Sassoon achieved during his long career.

While Owen wrote to Sassoon of his gratitude for his help in attaining a new birth as poet, Sassoon did not believe he had influenced Owen as radically and as dramatically as Owen maintained. Sassoon regarded his “touch of guidance” and his encouragement as fortunately coming at the moment when Owen most needed them, and he later maintained in Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920 that his “only claimable influence was that I stimulated him towards writing with compassionate and challenging realism.... My encouragement was opportune, and can claim to have given him a lively incentive during his rapid advance to self-revelation.” Sassoon also saw what Owen may never have recognized—that Sassoon’s technique “was almost elementary compared with his [Owen’s] innovating experiments.” Sassoon thought it important, however, that he had given Owen a copy of Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, from which he planned to quote in his introduction to Counter-Attack, and he appreciated the benefits of their “eager discussion of contemporary poets and the technical dodges which we were ourselves devising.” Perhaps Sassoon’s statement in late 1945 summarizes best the reciprocal influence the two poets had exerted upon one another: “imperceptible effects are obtained by people mingling their minds at a favorable moment.”

Sassoon helped Owen by arranging for him, upon his discharge from the hospital, to meet Robert Ross, a London editor who was Sassoon’s friend and the former publishing agent of Oscar Wilde. Ross, in turn, introduced Owen—then and in May 1918—to other literary figures, such as Robert Graves, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, and Captain Charles Scott Moncrieff, who later translated Proust. Knowing these important writers made Owen feel part of a community of literary people—one of the initiated. Accordingly, on New Year’s Eve 1917, Owen wrote exuberantly to his mother of his poetic ambitions: “I am started. The tugs have left me. I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon.” At the same time, association with other writers made him feel a sense of urgency—a sense that he must make up for lost time in his development as a poet. In May 1918, on leave in London, he wrote his mother: I am old already for a poet, and so little is yet achieved.” But he added with his wry humor, “celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.”

By May 1918 Owen regarded his poems not only as individual expressions of intense experience but also as part of a book that would give the reader a wide perspective on World War I. In spring 1918 it appeared that William Heinemann (in spite of the paper shortage that his publishing company faced) would assign Robert Ross to read Owen’s manuscript when he submitted it to them. In a table of contents compiled before the end of July 1918 Owen followed a loosely thematic arrangement. Next to each title he wrote a brief description of the poem, and he also prepared in rough draft a brief, but eloquent, preface, in which he expresses his belief in the cathartic function of poetry. For a man who had written sentimental or decorative verse before his war poems of 1917 and 1918, Owen’s preface reveals an unexpected strength of commitment and purpose as a writer, a commitment understandable enough in view of the overwhelming effects of the war upon him. In this preface Owen said the poetry in his book would express “the pity of War,” rather than the “glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power,” which war had acquired in the popular mind. He distinguished also between the pity he sought to awaken by his poems (“The Poetry is in the Pity”) and that conventionally expressed by writers who felt less intensely opposed to war by this time than he did. As they wrote their historically oriented laments or elegies for those fallen in wars, they sought to comfort and inspire readers by placing the deaths and war itself in the context of sacrifice for a significant cause. But Owen’s message for his generation, he said, must be one of warning rather than of consolation. In his last declaration he appears to have heeded Sassoon’s advice to him that he begin to use an unmitigated realism in his description of events: “the true poet must be truthful.”

Owen’s identification of himself as a poet, affirmed by his new literary friends, must have been especially important in the last few months of his life. Even the officer with whom he led the remnant of the company to safety on a night in October 1918 and with whom he won the Military Cross for his action later wrote to Blunden that neither he nor the rest of the men ever dreamed that Owen wrote poems.

When Owen first returned to the battlefields of France on 1 September 1918, after several months of limited service in England, he seemed confident about his decision: “I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part.” Once overseas, however, he wrote to Sassoon chiding him for having urged him to return to France, for having alleged that further exposure to combat would provide him with experience that he could transmute into poetry: “That is my consolation for feeling a fool,” he wrote on 22 September 1918. He was bitterly angry at Clemenceau for expecting the war to be continued and for disregarding casualties even among children in the villages as the Allied troops pursued the German forces. He did not live long enough for this indignation or the war experiences of September and October to become part of his poetry, although both are vividly expressed in his letters.

In October Owen wrote of his satisfaction at being nominated for the Military Cross because receiving the award would give him more credibility at home, especially in his efforts to bring the war to an end. Lieutenant J. Foulkes, who shared command with him the night in October 1918 that all other officers were killed, described to Edmund Blunden the details of Owen’s acts of “conspicuous gallantry.” His company had successfully attacked what was considered a “second Hindenburg Line” in territory that was “well-wired.” Losses were so heavy that among the commissioned officers only Foulkes and Owen survived. Owen took command and led the men to a place where he held the line for several hours from a captured German pill box, the only cover available. The pill box was, however, a potential death trap upon which the enemy concentrated its fire. By morning the few who survived were at last relieved by the Lancashire Fusiliers. Foulkes told Blunden, “This is where I admired his work—in leading his remnant, in the middle of the night, back to safety.... I was content to follow him with the utmost confidence.” Early in his army career Owen wrote to his brother Harold that he knew he could not change his inward self in order to become a self-assured soldier, but that he might still be able to change his appearance and behavior so that others would get the impression he was a “good soldier.” Such determination and conscientiousness account for the trust in his leadership that Foulkes expressed. (Harold Owen in his biography of his brother gives a more heroic version of the acts of valor that night, but Foulkes’s emphasis on Owen’s efforts to get the remaining troops back to safety seems in keeping with Owen’s own account and his attitude toward the war and toward his men.) Owen was again moving among his men and offering encouragement when he was killed the next month.

In the last weeks of his life Owen seems to have coped with the stress of the heavy casualties among his battalion by “insensibility,” much like that of soldiers he forgives in his poem of the same title, but condemns among civilians: “Happy are men who yet before they are killed / Can let their veins run cold.” These men have walked “on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.” “Alive, he is not vital overmuch; / Dying, not mortal overmuch.” Owen wrote to Sassoon, after reading Counter-Attack , that Sassoon’s war poems frightened him more than the actual experience of holding a soldier shot through the head and having the man’s blood soak hot against his shoulder for a half hour. Two weeks before his death he wrote both to his mother and to Sassoon that his nerves were “in perfect order.” But in the letter to Sassoon he explained, “I cannot say I suffered anything, having let my brain grow dull.... I shall feel anger again as soon as I dare, but now I must not. I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters. But one day I will write Deceased over many books.”

After Wilfred Owen’s death his mother attempted to present him as a more pious figure than he was. For his tombstone, she selected two lines from “The End”—”Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth / All death will he annul, all tears assuage?”—but omitted the question mark at the close of the quotation. His grave thus memorializes a faith that he did not hold and ignores the doubt he expressed. In 1931 Blunden wrote Sassoon, with irritation, because Susan Owen had insisted that the collected edition of Owen’s poems celebrate her son as a majestic and tall heroic figure: “Mrs. Owen has had her way, with a purple binding and a photograph Wh makes W look like a 6 foot Major who had been in East Africa or so for several years.” (Owen was about a foot shorter than Sassoon.)

If, in October 1918, Owen coped with his anguishing experiences by imitating his mother’s refusal to see reality, the difference is notable. He clearly recognized that he was temporarily refusing to grieve—an act of carefully practiced discipline—but that in a quieter time he would recall those moments and create the “pity” in his poetry, as he had already done with the experience of January 1917 in “The Sentry” and “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In “Insensibility” he condemns those who, away from the field of battle, refuse to share “the eternal reciprocity of tears.”

Harold Owen succeeded in removing a reference to his brother as “an idealistic homosexual” from Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and specifically addressed in volume three of his biography the questions that had been raised about his brother’s disinterest in women. Harold Owen insisted that his brother had been so dedicated to poetry that he had chosen, at least temporarily, the life of a celibate. He also explains, what was undoubtedly true, that Owen expressed himself impulsively and emotionally, that he was naive, and that he was given to hero worship of other men.

Owen’s presentation of “boys” and “lads”—beautiful young men with golden hair, shining eyes, strong brown hands, white teeth—has homoerotic elements. One must recognize, however, such references had become stock literary devices in war poetry. The one poem which can clearly be called a love poem, “To A Friend (With an Identity Disc),” carefully avoids the use of either specifically masculine or feminine terms in addressing the friend. Eroticism in Owen’s poems seems idealized, romantic, and platonic and is used frequently to contrast the ugly and horrible aspects of warfare. Of more consequence in considering Owen’s sexual attitudes in relation to his poetry is the harshness in reference to wives, mothers, or sweethearts of the wounded or disabled soldiers. The fullness of his insight into “the pity of war” seems incomprehensibly limited in the presentation of women in “The Dead-Beat,” “Disabled,” “The Send-Off,” and “S.I.W.”

In several of his most effective war poems, Owen suggests that the experience of war for him was surrealistic, as when the infantrymen dream, hallucinate, begin freezing to death, continue to march after several nights without sleep, lose consciousness from loss of blood, or enter a hypnotic state from fear or excessive guilt. The resulting disconnected sensory perceptions and the speaker’s confusion about his identity suggest that not only the speaker, but the whole humanity, has lost its moorings. The horror of war, then, becomes more universal, the tragedy more overwhelming, and the pity evoked more profound, because there is no rational explanation to account for the cataclysm.

In “Conscious” a wounded soldier, moving in and out of consciousness, cannot place in perspective the yellow flowers beside his hospital bed, nor can he recall blue sky. The soldiers in “Mental Cases” suffer hallucinations in which they observe everything through a haze of blood: “Sunlight becomes a blood-smear; dawn comes blood-black.” In “Exposure,” which displays Owen’s mastery of assonance and alliteration, soldiers in merciless wind and snow find themselves overwhelmed by nature’s hostility and unpredictability. They even lose hope that spring will arrive: “For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid.” Anticipating the search that night for the bodies of fallen soldiers in noman’s-land, the speaker predicts that soon all of his comrades will be found as corpses with their eyes turned to ice. Ironically, as they begin freezing to death, their pain becomes numbness and then pleasurable warmth. As the snow gently fingers their cheeks, the freezing soldiers dream of summer: “so we drowse, sun-dozed / Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.” Dreaming of warm hearths as “our ghosts drag home,” they quietly “turn back to our dying.” The speaker in “Asleep” envies the comfort of one who can sleep, even though the sleep is that of death: “He sleeps less tremulous, less cold / Than we who must awake, and waking, say Alas!” All these “dream poems” suggest that life is a nightmare in which the violence of war is an accepted norm. The cosmos seems either cruelly indifferent or else malignant, certainly incapable of being explained in any rational manner. A loving Christian God is nonexistent. The poem’s surface incoherence suggests the utter irrationality of life. Even a retreat to the comfort of the unconscious state is vulnerable to sudden invasion from the hell of waking life.

One of Owen’s most moving poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which had its origins in Owen’s experiences of January 1917, describes explicitly the horror of the gas attack and the death of a wounded man who has been flung into a wagon. The horror intensifies, becoming a waking nightmare experienced by the exhausted viewer, who stares hypnotically at his comrade in the wagon ahead of him as he must continue to march.

The nightmare aspect reaches its apogee in “The Show.” As the speaker gazes upon a desolate, war-ravaged landscape, it changes gradually to the magnified portion of a dead soldier’s face, infested by thousands of caterpillars. The barbed wire of no-man’s-land becomes the scraggly beard on the face; the shell holes become pockmarked skin. Only at the end does the poet’s personal conflict become clear. Owen identifies himself as the severed head of a caterpillar and the many legs, still moving blindly, as the men of his command from whom he has been separated. The putrefying face, the sickening voraciousness of the caterpillars, and the utter desolation of the ruined landscape become symbolic of the lost hopes for humanity.

“Strange Meeting,” another poem with a dreamlike frame, differs from those just described in its meditative tone and its less—concentrated use of figurative language. Two figures—the poet and the man he killed—gradually recognize each other and their similarity when they meet in the shadows of hell. In the background one becomes aware of multitudes of huddled sleepers, slightly moaning in their “encumbered” sleep—all men killed in “titanic wars.” Because the second man speaks almost exclusively of death’s thwarting of his purpose and ambition as a poet, he probably represents Owen’s alter ego. Neither figure is differentiated by earthly association, and the “strange friend” may also represent an Everyman figure, suggesting the universality of the tragedy of war. The poem closes as the second speaker stops halfway through the last line to return to his eternal sleep. The abrupt halt drives home the point that killing a poet cuts off the promise of the one more line of poetry he might have written. The last line extends “the Pity of war” to a universal pity for all those who have been diminished through the ages by art which might have been created and was not.

Sassoon called “Strange Meeting” Owen’s masterpiece, the finest elegy by a soldier who fought in World War I. T.S. Eliot, who praised it as “one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war,” recognized that its emotional power lies in Owen’s “technical achievement of great originality.” In “Strange Meeting,” Owen sustains the dreamlike quality by a complex musical pattern, which unifies the poem and leads to an overwhelming sense of war’s waste and a sense of pity that such conditions should continue to exist. John Middleton Murry in 1920 noted the extreme subtlety in Owen’s use of couplets employing assonance and dissonance. Most readers, he said, assumed the poem was in blank verse but wondered why the sound of the words produced in them a cumulative sadness and inexorable uneasiness and why such effects lingered. Owen’s use of slant-rhyme produces, in Murry’s words, a “subterranean ... forged unity, a welded, inexorable massiveness.”

Although Owen does not use the dream frame in “Futility,” this poem, like “Strange Meeting,” is also a profound meditation on the horrifying significance of war. As in “Exposure,” the elemental structure of the universe seems out of joint. Unlike the speaker in “Exposure,” however, this one does not doubt that spring will come to warm the frozen battlefield, but he wonders why it should. Even the vital force of the universe—the sun’s energy—no longer nurtures life.

One of the most perfectly structured of Owen’s poems, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” convinced Sassoon in October 1917 that Owen was not only a “promising minor poet” but a poet with “classic and imaginative serenity” who possessed “impressive affinities with Keats.” By using the fixed form of the sonnet, Owen gains compression and a close interweaving of symbols. In particular, he uses the break between octave and sestet to deepen the contrast between themes, while at the same time he minimizes that break with the use of sound patterns that continue throughout the poem and with the image of a bugle, which unifies three disparate groups of symbols. The structure depends, then, not only on the sonnet form but on a pattern of echoing sounds from the first line to the last, and upon Owen’s careful organization of groups of symbols and of two contrasting themes—in the sestet the mockery of doomed youth, “dying like cattle,” and in the octave the silent personal grief which is the acceptable response to immense tragedy. The symbols in the octave suggest cacophony; the visual images in the sestet suggest silence. The poem is unified throughout by a complex pattern of alliteration and assonance. Despite its complex structure, this sonnet achieves an effect of impressive simplicity.

Poems (1920), edited by Sassoon, established Owen as a war poet before public interest in the war had diminished in the 1920s. The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Blunden, aroused much more critical attention, especially that of W.H. Auden and the poets in his circle, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice. Blunden thought that Auden and his group were influenced primarily by three poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Wilfred Owen. The Auden group saw in Owen’s poetry the incisiveness of political protest against injustice, but their interest in Owen was less in the content of his poems than in his artistry and technique. Though they were moved by the human experience described in Owen’s best poems and understood clearly his revulsion toward war, they were appalled by the sheer waste of a great poet dying just as he had begun to realize fully his potential. Dylan Thomas, who, like Owen, possessed a brilliant metaphorical imagination, pride in Welsh ancestry, and an ability to dramatize in poetry his psychic experience, saw in Owen “a poet of all times, all places, and all wars. There is only one war, that of men against men.”

C. Day Lewis, in the introduction to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), judiciously praised Owen’s poems for “the originality and force of their language, the passionate nature of the indignation and pity they express, their blending of harsh realism with a sensuousness unatrophied by the horrors from which they flowered.” Day Lewis’s view that Owen’s poems were “certainly the finest written by any English poet of the First War” is incontestable. With general agreement critics—J. Middleton Murry, Bonamy Dobree, Hoxie Fairchild, Ifor Evans, Kenneth Muir, and T.S. Eliot, for example—have written of his work for six decades. The best of Owen’s 1917-1918 poems are great by any standard. Day Lewis’s conclusion that they also are “probably the greatest poems about the war in our literature” may, if anything, be too tentative. His work will remain central in any discussion of war poetry or of poetry employing varied kinds of slant rhyme.

12:29 PM - By midilk 0

Anthem for Doomed Youth By Wilfread Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

12:14 PM - By midilk 0

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literaturewith the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.

Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, taught him poetry, including that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own father's library. Along with spending time reading in Cockermouth, Wordsworth would also stay at his mother's parents house in Penrith, Cumberland. At Penrith, Wordsworth was exposed to the moors. Wordsworth could not get along with his grandparents and his uncle, and his hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.

After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and William would not meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was Wordsworth's first serious experience with education, he had been taught to read by his mother and had attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth. After the Cockermouth school, he was sent to a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families and taught by Ann Birkett, a woman who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future wife.

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge, and received his B.A. degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.

The Poet Laureate and other honours

Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next year. In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year. With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. He initially refused the honour, saying he was too old, but accepted when Prime Minister Robert Peel assured him "you shall have nothing required of you" (he became the only laureate to write no official poetry). When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill.

Death

William Wordsworth died by re-aggravating a case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.

Major works

• Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798)
  • "Simon Lee"
  • "We are Seven"
  • "Lines Written in Early Spring"
  • "Expostulation and Reply"
  • "The Tables Turned"
  • "The Thorn"
  • "Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
• Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800)
  • Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
  • "Strange fits of passion have I known"
  • "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"
  • "Three years she grew"
  • "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"
  • "I travelled among unknown men"
  • "Lucy Gray"
  • "The Two April Mornings"
  • "Nutting"
  • "The Ruined Cottage"
  • "Michael"
  • "The Kitten At Play"
• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
  • "Resolution and Independence"
  • "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"
  • "My Heart Leaps Up"
  • "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
  • "Ode to Duty"
  • "The Solitary Reaper"
  • "Elegiac Stanzas"
  • "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
  • "London, 1802"
  • "The World Is Too Much with Us"
• Guide to the Lakes (1810)

• The Excursion (1814)

• Laodamia (1815, 1845)

• The Prelude (1850)

9:46 AM - By midilk 0

She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways – William Wordsworth

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

                Besides the spirings of Dove,

A maid whom there were none to praise

                And very few to love;

A violet by a mossy stone

                Half hidden from eyes!

Fair as a star when only one

                is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown and few could know

                When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

                The difference to me!

William Wordsworth 

5:45 AM - By midilk 0

The Life and Death of Cholmondeley -Gerald Durrel

Shortly before we left our hilltop hut at Bakebe and travelled down to our last camp at Kumba*, we had with us a most unusual guest in the shape of Cholmondeley, known to his friends as Chumely.

Chumley was a full-grown chimpanzee. His owner, a District Officer, was finding the ape’s large size rather awkward and wanted to send him to London Zoo as a present, so that he could visit the animal when he was back in England on leave. He wrote asking us if we would mind taking Chumley back with us when we left and depositing him at his new home in London, and we replied that we would not mind at all. I don’t think that either John or myself had the least idea how big Chumley was. I know that I visulalized an ape about three years old, standing about three feet high. I got a rude shock when Chumeley moved in.

He arrived in the back of a small van, seated in a huge crate. When the doors of his crate were opened and Chumley stepped out with all the ease and self-confidence of a film star, I was considerably shaken. Standing on his bowlegs in a normal slouching chimp position, he came up to my waist.

He stood on the ground and surveyed his surroundings with a shrewd glance, and then he turned to me and held out one of his soft, pink-palmed hands to be shaken, with exactly that bored expression that one sees on the faces of professional hand shakers.
He seated himself in a chair, dropped his chain on the floor, and then looked hopefully at me. It was quite obvious that he expected some sort of refreshment after his tiring journey. I roared out to the kitchen for someone to make a cup of tea, for I had been warned that Chumley had a great liking for the cup that cheers.

As I poured the tea and milk into Chumeley’s mug and added three tablespoons of sugar, he watched me with a glittering eye and made soft “ ooing” noises to himself. I handed him the mug and he took it carefully in both hands. He tested the tea carefully with one lip stuck out, to see if it was too hot. As it was, he sat there and blew on it until it was the right temperature and then he drank it down.

Chumley’s crate was placed about fifty yards from the hut (next to a great gnarled tree stump to which I attached his chain) From there he could get a good view of everything that went on in and around the hut, and as we were working he would shout comments to me and I would reply.

That night, when I carried Chumley’s food and drink of tea out to him, he greeted me with loud “ hoo hoos” of delight, and jogged up and down, beating his knuckles on the ground. Before he touched his dinner, however, he seized one of my hands in his and carried it to his mouth.

With some trepidation I waited as he carefully put one of my fingers between his great teeth and very gently bit it. Then I understood: in the chimpanzee world, to place your finger between another ape’s teeth is a greeting and a sign of trust. To place a finger in such a vulnerable position shows your confidence in the other’s friendliness.

His manners were perfect. He would never grab his food and start guzzling, as the other monkeys did, without first giving you a greeting, and thanking you with a series of his most expressive “ hoo hoos.” Then he would eat delicately and slowly, pushing those pieces he did not want to the side of his plate with his fingers. His only breach of table manners came at the end of a meal, for then he would seize his empty mug and plate and hurl them as far as possible.

Not long after Chyumley’s arrival he suddenly went off his food, lost all his interest in life, and would spend all day crouched in his crate. He would refuse all drink except about half a mugful of water a day. I was away at the time, and frantic message from John brought me hurrying back. On my return I tried everything I knew to tempt Chumley to eat for he was growing visibly thinner.

One evening before I went to take Chumeley for his walk I opened a tin of Ryvita biscuits and concealed a dozen or so in my pockets. When we had walked some distance, Chumley sat down and I sat beside him. As we both examined the view I took a biscuit from my pocket and started to eat it. He watched me. I think he was rather surprised that I did not offer him any, as I usually did, but finished it up and smacked my lips appreciatively. He moved nearer, and started to go though my pockets, which was in itself a good sign. He had not done that since the first day he had been taken ill. He found a biscuit, got it out, sniffed it, and then to my delight, ate it up. I knew he was going to be all right.

The day of our departure from Bakebe dawned, and when Chumley saw the lorry arrive to load the collection he realized he was in for one of his favourite sports, a lorry ride.

It was not long after we settled in at Kumba that Sue arrived. She was the youngest chimp I had ever seen: she could not walk and was the proud possessor of four teeth only.

The only times she screamed, clenching her little fists and kicking her legs in fury were when I showed her the bottle and then discovered it was too hot for her to drink straight away. This was a crime, and Sue let you know it.

Her face, hands, and feet were pink, and she had a thick coat of wiry black hair.

Chumley was, I think, a little jealous of Sue, but he was too much of a gentleman to show it. Not long after her arrival, the London Zoo’s official collector arrived, and with great regret I handed Chumley over to be transported to England. I did not see him again for over four months, and then I went to visit him in the sanatorium at Regent’s park.

I did not think that he would recognize me. But recognize me he did, for he whirled around his room like a dervish when he saw me and then came rushing across to give me his old greeting gently biting my finger.

When the time came to go, he shook hands with me and watched my departure through the crack in the door.

I never saw Chumley again, but I know his history: he became a great television star, doing his act in front of the cameras like an old trouper. Then his teeth started to worry him, and so he was moved from the monkey house back to the sanatorium to have an operation. One day feeling bored with life, he broke out and sallied forth across Regent’s park. When he reached the main road he found a bus conveniently at hand, so he swung himself aboard. His presence caused such horror among the occupants of the bus that he got excited and forgot himself so far as to bite someone. If only people would realize that to scream and panic is the best way of provoking an attack from any wild animal! Leaving the bus and its now bloodstained passenger, Chumley walked down the road. When a member of the sanatorium staff arrived on the scene, he took his keeper’s hand and walked back home.

After this he was branded as not safe and sent back to the monkey house. But he had not yet finished with publicity, for some time later he had to go back to the sanatorium for yet more treatment on his teeth, and he decided to repeat his little escapade. He broke open his cage and set off once more across Regent’s Park. At Gloucester Gate he looked about hopefully for a bus, but there was not one in sight. But there were some cars parked there and Chumley approached them and beat on the doors vigorously, in the hope that the occupants would open up and offer him a lift. Chumley loved a ride. But the foolish humans misunderstood his actions: there he was asking for a lift, and all they could do was to wind up their windows and yell for help. Before he had time to explain his mission to the car owners, a panting posse of keepers arrived, and he was bundled back to the Zoo. Chumley had escaped twice, and they were not going to risk it happening again. From being a fine, intelligent animal, good enough to be displayed on television, he had suddenly become a fierce and untrustworthy monster, who might escape again and bite some worthy citizen. To avoid this risk, Chumley was sentenced to death and shot.

10:17 PM - By midilk 0