Poets and Poetry
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Poets and Poetry’
With King John dead and the threat of invasion fading, Philip Faulconbridge reflects that the danger within is always greater than the danger without.
At the end of William Shakespeare’s play The Life and Death of King John, written in about 1594-96, the King has just died an untimely death; with him has died the threat of a French invasion, and John’s heir Henry has returned home to England to assume the crown. Henry’s cousin Philip Faulconbridge heaves a sigh of relief, and draws an optimistic moral from all that has gone before.
On his way to war-torn France, William Wordsworth passed through London and was overwhelmed by the quiet of the early morning.
The following Sonnet was written, William Wordsworth recalled, “on the roof of a coach, on my way to France.” It was July 1802, and he was off with his sister Dorothy to visit his old flame Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline; he had not seen Annette since the French Revolution had so cruelly parted them nearly ten years before. His journey from London took him across Westminster Bridge at dawn.
Seventeenth-century poet and statesman Edmund Waller reflects on the benefits of advancing years.
A great deal is made today of the advantages of youth in benefiting society. Edmund Waller, a poet who sat in the Commons for over fifty years, was no less impressed by the advantages of old age — which not only renew our usefulness for this world, but also ready us for a better one.
Vice is a fact of life, wrote Pope, and God can even bring good out of it; but vice is never a virtue and in tackling vice together we make our society stronger.
In his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope has been reflecting on the part played in society by folly and vice. There is vice and virtue in every man, he says, and human life is like a canvas of blended light and shade: but if vice ought to excite pity and friendship rather than judgment and anger, that should not dupe us into thinking that society can survive if we turn vices into virtues, and virtue into a vice.
Though Arthur Clough had discovered that to be your own man was a long and toilsome path, it was not a path without hope.
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned a desirable Fellowship at Oxford owing to his doubts about the Church of England. Shortly afterwards he was appointed Principal of University Hall in London, an ecumenical and supposedly more open-minded institution, but here too Clough found he was expected to think as his new colleagues did. Lonely, silent and depressed, he nevertheless clung on to hope.
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.