Extracts from Poetry
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Poetry’
Shylock is savouring revenge on Antonio for years of disgusting mistreatment, but the judge warns him to temper his demands.
In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio has helped his friend Bassanio by borrowing from a Jewish moneylender named Shylock. Antonio has always treated Shylock with disgusting scorn, so when he defaults on his bond Shylock goes gleefully to court to enforce the grisly penalty agreed: a pound of flesh — unaware that Bassanio’s wife Portia has pulled some strings and will judge the case herself, in disguise of course.
William Wordsworth looks back on a life of disappointments and regrets, and finds in them reasons to be thankful.
William Wordsworth wrote The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind to account for his decision in 1799 to bury himself in Cumbria’s Lake District and devote himself to poetry. Here, Wordsworth reflects on the way that the disharmonies of our past life — our regrets and pains and disappointments — form a melody that would be less beautiful without them.
After the devastation of the Great War, calls rose for a new economic and social system, and to put the wisdom of our forebears behind us.
After the Great War of 1914-1918, a consensus grew that the world had changed and there must now be a new global economy, a new kind of society, even a new morality. Socio-economic experts — the gods of the market place — declared their laws, and the public worshipped at their shrines; but Rudyard Kipling believed that older gods, the wise maxims of our forebears, would have the last word.
Standing on the dockside with Laertes, who is eager to board ship for Paris, Polonius takes a moment to share some fatherly wisdom.
Early in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, probably written around 1599-1601, Laertes is due to leave Denmark for France; he had returned home only briefly for the coronation of King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and step-father. As Laertes goes aboard, his father Polonius gives him his affectionate blessing, and with it a generous helping of common sense.
William Cowper’s peace was shattered by the arrival of a Parliamentary candidate doorstepping his Buckinghamshire constituents.
In December 1783, after losing the American colonies to independence, King George III sacked the Government and appointed 24-year-old William Pitt as Prime Minister; on March 25th, a Parliament in uproar was dissolved in readiness for a general election. Just days later, William Grenville MP came calling on William Cowper — somewhat uncomfortably, as Grenville supported Pitt and Cowper did not.
In ‘Familiarity Dangerous,’ poet William Cowper tells a little tale warning that if you join in the game you play by the rules.
William Cowper was very much a cat person, so naturally these lines from the Latin of Vincent Bourne (1695-1747), who had been on the staff at Westminster School when Cowper was a pupil there, appealed to him. A kitten reminds us that if you want to be one of the gang it has got to be on their terms.