8 tone and speaker 北京外國語大學(xué) 文學(xué)概論 教學(xué)課件

1、Poetry,Tone and Speaker,Prose Fiction vs. Poetry,All that applies to prose more or less applies to poetry;Difference between prose fiction and poetry:Form: most poems are in the form of separate lines and stanzaRhyme

2、and rhythm: most traditional poems have rhymes and rhythms, with a set number of syllables arranged in feet in each line and with words that end each line patterned in a certain rhyme schemeReading/reading aloud: poems

3、are to be read aloudPoems appeal very much to emotionsPoems use language in a special way that requires careful reading to figure out the intended logic, meaning, reason, emotion,What is poetry?,Poetry is indefinable:

4、There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets.Wordsworth: "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. " Emily Dickenson : "If

5、 I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry;" Dylan Thomas: "Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to

6、 do this or that or nothing.“Robert Frost: “A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; ... A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its

7、 thought and the thought has found the words.",Usual way of defining poetry,A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines A poem is a written expression of emotion or ideas in an

8、arrangement of words/verse most often rhythmically On the appearance, a poem consists of words arranged in lines of verse. Poetry is a kind of “saying,” which many people, until they are well acquainted with it, feel r

9、ather peculiar and even useless. Poetry is a response to, and an evaluation of, our experience of the objective, bustling world and of our ideas about it. Poetry is concerned with the world as responded to sensorially,

10、emotionally, and intellectually.,How to read poems,Poetry is written to be heard. Poems can be broken down into 3 parts.The Stanza: a group of lines set off from the other lines in a poem. The poetic equivalent of a par

11、agraph. In traditional poems, the stanza usually contains a unit of thought, much like a paragraph. The line: a single line of poetry. The foot: a syllable or a group of 2 or 3 syllables. Typically a foot will contain

12、a stressed and an unstressed syllable.,Basic steps to reading a poem,Step 1: Read through the poem to get a sense of it. Step 2: Identify the sentences and independent clauses (circle the periods, exclamation points, qu

13、estion marks, and semicolons). For some reason, people always forget that poetry is made up of complete sentences.Step 3: Read a few lines to figure out the meter (figure out how many stresses there are in a typical lin

14、e).Step 4: Note the rhyme scheme (look for a pattern).Step 5: Read the poem out loud. Try to follow the rhythm. If you do this you'll hear where the poet plays with the rhythm. And you'll hear the rhyme scheme.

15、,,Step 6: Look up any words you don't understand.Step 7: Re-read the poem out loud.Step 8: Mark off any sections in the poem. These sections may be speeches given by a character, discussions of a particular topic,

16、changes in mood, or a new stage of an argument.Step 9: Re-read the poem.Step 10: Figure out the tone—the emotion—of the poem.Step 11: Re-read the poem.Step 12: Analysis,I. Tone and Speaker,The tone of a poem indicate

17、s the speaker’s attitude toward his theme or his subject, toward his audience, and sometimes toward himself. How would you describe the poet's "voice" in the poem? Is the poet speaking in a character? In a

18、 sense, all writers speak in a character; yet we must not (always) identify the writer with the speaker of the poem. Irony,A. E. Housman and “The Loveliest of Trees”,About the poet: Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), Br

19、itish poet and scholar whose works appeared in A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922).His poems are lyrical and almost epigrammatic in formOften about wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countrysid

20、e, in spare language and distinctive imageryThere is a deep pervading pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation in his poems presented in an idealized pastoral light.,,The main theme of A Shr

21、opshire Lad, from which “The Loveliest of Trees” (No. 2 of 63 poems) is taken, is mortality, and so living life to its fullest, since death can strike at any time. Form: three four-line stanzas (quatrains) with the rime

22、 scheme AABB CCDD EEFF, essentially iambicThe poem appears to be in the tradition of carpe diem, but it goes beyond the limitation of the philosophy of merely “seizing the day.”Who is the speaker? Is he the poet?,The F

23、irst Stanza,the speaker describes a beautiful scene that he is obviously enjoying as he speaks. He is riding through a wooded area and observes that the beauty of the blossoms on the cherry trees makes them the “Lovelies

24、t of trees.” The time of the year is spring; the speaker says describing the blossoms that they are “Wearing white for Eastertide.”,The Second Stanza,the speaker reveals that he is twenty years old as he calculates, acco

25、rding to the biblical claim that a lifespan is “threescore years and ten,” that he has only fifty more years to enjoy such beauty in spring. The speaker’s emphasis throughout the poem is on the intensity of the beauty an

26、d brevity of the time he will have to enjoy that beauty.,The Third Stanza,the speaker claims that because fifty more opportunities to enjoy these lovely trees with their luscious blossoms is not enough, he will go observ

27、e the same trees also in winter, when they are “hung with snow.” That way the speaker doubles his opportunities to enjoy the cherry trees “wearing white.”,,The poem suggests a progression from youth to old age, from cher

28、ry trees hang with bloom in spring to cherry trees hung with snow in winter.The cherry trees are symbolic of human lifeYouth just as lovely as cherry bloomsLife is as transient as the beauty of flowersDoes it mean th

29、at human life is essentially beautiful yet short and doomed to end in death/winter/white, as the cherry blooms are anyway white, though lovely? Are they really the lovelies in this sense?,Theodore Roethke and “My Papa’s

30、Waltz”,Theodore Huebner Roethke (1908–1963), an American poet, whose poetry is characterized by its rhythm and natural imagery, the result of his childhood spent in a greenhouse owned by his father and uncle. awarded th

31、e Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking.,,a tidy little poem that does a particularly good job of replicating the cadence of a waltz in the meter of its stanzas.a hardworking man who danced awkwardl

32、y but enthusiastically, creating a moment of intimacy with his child. The poem’s tone was one of fond recollection: that the adult speaker still remembers small details of this waltzing suggested that the child thoroughl

33、y enjoyed this danceChild abuse?,The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,T. S. Eliot,The author (1888-1965),T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England roots. Eliot largely

34、abandoned his Midwestern roots and chose to ally himself with both New and old England throughout his life.,,,1906: attended Harvard, was accepted into the literary circles, and had a predilection for 16th- and 17th-cent

35、ury poetry, the Italian Renaissance (particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest influence on him, however, were the 19th-century French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimba

36、ud, Stephene Mallarme, and Eliot's favorite, Jules Laforgue.,,1910: earned a master's degree from Harvard 1914: settled in England in at the outbreak of World War I, studying at Oxford, teaching, and working at

37、a bank. 1915: he married British writer Vivienne Haigh-Wood (they would divorce in 1933), a woman prone to poor physical and mental health.,,1917: achieved great success with his first book of poems, Prufrock and Other

38、Observations (which included “The Love Song of J. Alfred," a work begun in his days at Harvard). November of 1921: Eliot had a nervous breakdown.,,1922: Eliot's reputation was bolstered by the admiration and ai

39、d of esteemed contemporary poet Ezra Pound, the other tower of Modernist poetry. During Eliot's recuperation from his breakdown in a Swiss sanitarium, he wrote “The Waste Land." A couple of months later he gave

40、Pound the manuscript in Paris. Thanks to Pound's heavy editing, as well as suggestions (specifically about scenes relevant to their stormy, hostile marriage) from Haigh-Wood, "The Waste Land," published in

41、1922, defined Modernist poetry and became possibly the most influential poem of the century.,,,1927 joined the Church of England, and his work afterward reflects his Anglican attitudes. 1935 his first play, verse dra

42、ma, "Murder in the Cathedral" "The Family Reunion" (1939), "The Cocktail Party" (1949), "The Confidential Clerk" (1953), and "The Elder Statesman" (1959).,,As one might

43、expect from his work, Eliot was unhappy for most of his life, but his second marriage in 1957 proved fruitful. When he died in 1965, he was the recipient of a Nobel Prize (1948), author of the century's most influent

44、ial poem, and arguably the century's most important poet. Perhaps due to the large shadow he casts, relatively few poets have tried to ape his style; others simply find him cold. Still, no one can escape the authorit

45、y of Eliot's Modernism, one as relevant today as it was in 1922. While Eliot may not have as much influence on poets today as some of his contemporaries, he has had a far greater impact on poetry.,A Quiz,1. Who is th

46、e speaker in the epigraph?     Guido da Montefeltro     Dante     Michelangelo     Prufrock2. Who is the listener in the epigraph?

47、60;   Guido da Montefeltro     Dante     Michelangelo     Prufrock,,3. What was the original title of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufroc

48、k"?     "What Do Prufrocks Want?"     "Prufrock And the Women"     "The Love Song of Johannes A. Prufrock"   &#

49、160; "Prufrock Among the Women“4. What subliminal meaning did Eliot want the name "Prufrock" to contain?     "Prior futility"     A "prude&quo

50、t; in a "frock"     "Prudential framing"     A "proof" that is "frail",Summary: Lines 1-36,J. Alfred Prufrock, a presumably middle-aged, i

51、ntellectual, indecisive man, invites the reader along with him through the modern city. He describes the street scene and notes a social gathering of women discussing Renaissance artist Michelangelo. He describes yellow

52、smoke and fog outside the house of the gathering, and keeps insisting that there will be time to do many things in the social world.,Summary: Lines 37-86,Prufrock agonizes over his social actions, worrying over how other

53、s will see him. He thinks about women's arms and perfume, but does not know how to act. He walks through the streets and watches lonely men leaning out their windows. The day passes at a social engagement but he cann

54、ot muster the strength to act, and he admits that he is afraid.,Summary: Lines 87-131,Prufrock wonders if, after various social gestures, it would have been worthwhile to act decisively if it resulted in a woman's re

55、jection of him. He thinks he is not a Prince Hamlet figure, but a secondary character in life. Worried over growing old, he adopts the fashions of youth. By the beach, he sees images of mermaids singing and swimming.,The

56、me,Prufrockian paralysis: Paralysis, the incapacity to act, has been the Achilles heel of many famous, mostly male, literary characters. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the paragon of paralysis; unable to sort through his w

57、affling, anxious mind, Hamlet makes a decisive action only at the end of "Hamlet." Eliot parodically updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Parodi

58、cally, because Prufrock's paralysis is not over murder and the state of a corrupt kingdom, but whether he should "dare to eat a peach" (122) in front of high-society women.,,Indeed, Prufrock's paralysis

59、 revolves around his social and sexual anxieties, the two usually tied together. Eliot intended Prufrock's name to resound of a "prude" in a "frock," and the hero's emasculation shows up in a

60、number of physical areas: "his arms and legs are thin" (44) and, notably, "his hair is growing thin" (41). The rest of the poem is a catalogue of Prufrock's inability to act; he does not, "af

61、ter tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis" (79-80).,,Yet Prufrock admits he is not even "Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lords / Almost, at times, t

62、he Fool" (111-112, 119). At best he is the doddering Polonius from "Hamlet," or a generic clown. He is a modern tragic hero, which is to say he is a mock-hero whose concerns are pathetic yet still real.,Pr

63、ufrock as modern,For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment. Such phrases as &qu

64、ot;I have measured out my life in coffee spoons" (line 51) capture the sense of the unheroic nature of life in the twentieth century. Prufrock's weaknesses could be mocked, but he is a pathetic figure, not grand