2nd Year Poetry: John keats

John Keats: Odes

In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring poems in the English language. Among his greatest achievements is his sequence of six lyric odes, written between March and September 1819—astonishingly, when Keats was only twenty-four years old. Keats’s poetic achievement is made all the more miraculous by the age at which it ended: He died barely a year after finishing the ode “To Autumn,” in February 1821.

Keats was born in 1795 to a lower-middle-class family in London. When he was still young, he lost both his parents. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis, the disease that eventually killed Keats himself. When he was fifteen, Keats entered into a medical apprenticeship, and eventually he went to medical school. But by the time he turned twenty, he abandoned his medical training to devote himself wholly to poetry. He published his first book of poems in 1817; they drew savage critical attacks from an influential magazine, and his second book attracted comparatively little notice when it appeared the next year. Keats’s brother Tom died of tuberculosis in December 1818, and Keats moved in with a friend in Hampstead.

In Hampstead, he fell in love with a young girl named Fanny Brawne. During this time, Keats began to experience the extraordinary creative inspiration that enabled him to write, at a frantic rate, all his best poems in the time before he died. His health and his finances declined sharply, and he set off for Italy in the summer of1820, hoping the warmer climate might restore his health. He never returned home. His death brought to an untimely end one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of the nineteenth century—indeed, one of the most extraordinary poetic careers of all time. Keats never achieved widespread recognition for his work in his own life (his bitter request for his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ on water”), but he was sustained by a deep inner confidence in his own ability. Shortly before his death, he remarked that he believed he would be among “the English poets” when he had died.

Keats was one of the most important figures of early nineteenth-century Romanticism, a movement that espoused the sanctity of emotion and imagination, and privileged the beauty of the natural world. Many of the ideas and themes evident in Keats’s great odes are quintessentially Romantic concerns: the beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of death are all Romantic preoccupations—though at the same time, they are all uniquely Keats’s.

Taken together, the odes do not exactly tell a story—there is no unifying “plot” and no recurring characters—and there is little evidence that Keats intended them to stand together as a single work of art. Nevertheless, the extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore. The odes explore and develop the same themes, partake of many of the same approaches and images, and, ordered in a certain way, exhibit an unmistakable psychological development. This is not to say that the poems do not stand on their own—they do, magnificently; one of the greatest felicities of the sequence is that it can be entered at any point, viewed wholly or partially from any perspective, and still prove moving and rewarding to read. There has been a great deal of critical debate over how to treat the voices that speak the poems—are they meant to be read as though a single person speaks them all, or did Keats invent a different persona for each ode?

There is no right answer to the question, but it is possible that the question itself is wrong: The consciousness at work in each of the odes is unmistakably Keats’s own. Of course, the poems are not explicitly autobiographical (it is unlikely that all the events really happened to Keats), but given their sincerity and their shared frame of thematic reference, there is no reason to think that they do not come from the same part of Keats’s mind—that is to say, that they are not all told by the same part of Keats’s reflected self. In that sense, there is no harm in treating the odes a sequence of utterances told in the same voice. The psychological progress from “Ode on Indolence” to “To Autumn” is intimately personal, and a great deal of that intimacy is lost if one begins to imagine that the odes are spoken by a sequence of fictional characters. When you think of “the speaker” of these poems, think of Keats as he would have imagined himself while writing them. As you trace the speaker’s trajectory from the numb drowsiness of “Indolence” to the quiet wisdom of “Autumn,” try to hear the voice develop and change under the guidance of Keats’s extraordinary language.

Ode to a Nightingale

The speaker opens with a declaration of his own heartache. He feels numb, as though he had taken a drug only a moment ago. He is addressing a nightingale he hears singing somewhere in the forest and says that his “drowsy numbness” is not from envy of the nightingale’s happiness, but rather from sharing it too completely; he is “too happy” that the nightingale sings the music of summer from amid some unseen plot of green trees and shadows.

In the second stanza, the speaker longs for the oblivion of alcohol, expressing his wish for wine, “a draught of vintage,” that would taste like the country and like peasant dances, and let him “leave the world unseen” and disappear into the dim forest with the nightingale. In the third stanza, he explains his desire to fade away, saying he would like to forget the troubles the nightingale has never known: “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human life, with its consciousness that everything is mortal and nothing lasts. Youth “grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,” and “beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.”

In the fourth stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale to fly away, and he will follow, not through alcohol (“Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards”), but through poetry, which will give him “viewless wings.” He says he is already with the nightingale and describes the forest glade, where even the moonlight is hidden by the trees, except the light that breaks through when the breezes blow the branches. In the fifth stanza, the speaker says that he cannot see the flowers in the glade, but can guess them “in embalmed darkness”: white hawthorne, eglantine, violets, and the musk-rose, “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” In the sixth stanza, the speaker listens in the dark to the nightingale, saying that he has often been “half in love” with the idea of dying and called Death soft names in many rhymes. Surrounded by the nightingale’s song, the speaker thinks that the idea of death seems richer than ever, and he longs to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” while the nightingale pours its soul ecstatically forth. If he were to die, the nightingale would continue to sing, he says, but he would “have ears in vain” and be no longer able to hear.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker tells the nightingale that it is immortal, that it was not “born for death.” He says that the voice he hears singing has always been heard, by ancient emperors and clowns, by homesick Ruth; he even says the song has often charmed open magic windows looking out over “the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” In the eighth stanza, the word forlorn tolls like a bell to restore the speaker from his preoccupation with the nightingale and back into himself. As the nightingale flies farther away from him, he laments that his imagination has failed him and says that he can no longer recall whether the nightingale’s music was “a vision, or a waking dream.” Now that the music is gone, the speaker cannot recall whether he himself is awake or asleep.

Form

Like most of the other odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” is written in ten-line stanzas. However, unlike most of the other poems, it is metrically variable—though not so much as “Ode to Psyche.” The first seven and last two lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter; the eighth line of each stanza is written in trimeter, with only three accented syllables instead of five. “Nightingale” also differs from the other odes in that its rhyme scheme is the same in every stanza (every other ode varies the order of rhyme in the final three or four lines except “To Psyche,” which has the loosest structure of all the odes). Each stanza in “Nightingale” is rhymed ABABCDECDE, Keats’s most basic scheme throughout the odes.

Themes

With “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats’s speaker begins his fullest and deepest exploration of the themes of creative expression and the mortality of human life. In this ode, the transience of life and the tragedy of old age (“where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”) is set against the eternal renewal of the nightingale’s fluid music (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”). The speaker reprises the “drowsy numbness” he experienced in “Ode on Indolence,” but where in “Indolence” that numbness was a sign of disconnection from experience, in “Nightingale” it is a sign of too full a connection: “being too happy in thine happiness,” as the speaker tells the nightingale. Hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird. His first thought is to reach the bird’s state through alcohol—in the second stanza, he longs for a “draught of vintage” to transport him out of himself. But after his meditation in the third stanza on the transience of life, he rejects the idea of being “charioted by Bacchus and his pards” (Bacchus was the Roman god of wine and was supposed to have been carried by a chariot pulled by leopards) and chooses instead to embrace, for the first time since he refused to follow the figures in “Indolence,” “the viewless wings of Poesy.”

The rapture of poetic inspiration matches the endless creative rapture of the nightingale’s music and lets the speaker, in stanzas five through seven, imagine himself with the bird in the darkened forest. The ecstatic music even encourages the speaker to embrace the idea of dying, of painlessly succumbing to death while enraptured by the nightingale’s music and never experiencing any further pain or disappointment. But when his meditation causes him to utter the word “forlorn,” he comes back to himself, recognizing his fancy for what it is—an imagined escape from the inescapable (“Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf”). As the nightingale flies away, the intensity of the speaker’s experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake or asleep.

In “Indolence,” the speaker rejected all artistic effort. In “Psyche,” he was willing to embrace the creative imagination, but only for its own internal pleasures. But in the nightingale’s song, he finds a form of outward expression that translates the work of the imagination into the outside world, and this is the discovery that compels him to embrace Poesy’s “viewless wings” at last. The “art” of the nightingale is endlessly changeable and renewable; it is music without record, existing only in a perpetual present. As befits his celebration of music, the speaker’s language, sensually rich though it is, serves to suppress the sense of sight in favor of the other senses. He can imagine the light of the moon, “But here there is no light”; he knows he is surrounded by flowers, but he “cannot see what flowers” are at his feet. This suppression will find its match in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which is in many ways a companion poem to “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the later poem, the speaker will finally confront a created art-object not subject to any of the limitations of time; in “Nightingale,” he has achieved creative expression and has placed his faith in it, but that expression—the nightingale’s song—is spontaneous and without physical manifestation.

Ode on a Grecian Urn 

In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going (“To what green altar, O mysterious priest...”) and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know.

Form

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” follows the same ode-stanza structure as the “Ode on Melancholy,” though it varies more the rhyme scheme of the last three lines of each stanza. Each of the five stanzas in “Grecian Urn” is ten lines long, metered in a relatively precise iambic pentameter, and divided into a two part rhyme scheme, the last three lines of which are variable. The first seven lines of each stanza follow an ABABCDE rhyme scheme, but the second occurrences of the CDE sounds do not follow the same order. In stanza one, lines seven through ten are rhymed DCE; in stanza two, CED; in stanzas three and four, CDE; and in stanza five, DCE, just as in stanza one. As in other odes (especially “Autumn” and “Melancholy”), the two-part rhyme scheme (the first part made of AB rhymes, the second of CDE rhymes) creates the sense of a two-part thematic structure as well. The first four lines of each stanza roughly define the subject of the stanza, and the last six roughly explicate or develop it. (As in other odes, this is only a general rule, true of some stanzas more than others; stanzas such as the fifth do not connect rhyme scheme and thematic structure closely at all.)

Themes

If the “Ode to a Nightingale” portrays Keats’s speaker’s engagement with the fluid expressiveness of music, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” portrays his attempt to engage with the static immobility of sculpture. The Grecian urn, passed down through countless centuries to the time of the speaker’s viewing, exists outside of time in the human sense—it does not age, it does not die, and indeed it is alien to all such concepts. In the speaker’s meditation, this creates an intriguing paradox for the human figures carved into the side of the urn: They are free from time, but they are simultaneously frozen in time. They do not have to confront aging and death (their love is “for ever young”), but neither can they have experience (the youth can never kiss the maiden; the figures in the procession can never return to their homes).

The speaker attempts three times to engage with scenes carved into the urn; each time he asks different questions of it. In the first stanza, he examines the picture of the “mad pursuit” and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?” Of course, the urn can never tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts, and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.

In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of his lover. He thinks that their love is “far above” all transient human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads to an abatement of intensity—when passion is satisfied, all that remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a “burning forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” His recollection of these conditions seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them, and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the urn.

In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the “little town”) and a destination (the “green altar”). But all he can think is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people have left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible to learn from the urn the whos and wheres of the “real story” in the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the fourth.

It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns behind and thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking of the “little town” with a real and generous feeling. But each attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply because there is nothing more to say—once the speaker confronts the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing more the urn can tell him.

In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to “tease” him “out of thought / As doth eternity.” If human life is a succession of “hungry generations,” as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,” the urn is a separate and self-contained world. It can be a “friend to man,” as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is ultimately insufficient to human life.

The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” no one can say for sure who “speaks” the conclusion, “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It could be the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express sufficiently anything about necessary human knowledge. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson, as though beyond all the complications of human life, all human beings need to know on earth is that beauty and truth are one and the same. It is largely a matter of personal interpretation which reading to accept.

M.H

Hons First Yr. (NEW) Prose

Describe the use of irony and humor in "The Luncheon" by Somerset Maugham.

In his story "The Luncheon" Maugham focuses on depicting a single character, as he does so often in his short stories. The woman the narrator takes to luncheon at one of the most expensive restaurants in Paris is exploiting him mercilessly by pretending an interest in his writing which she probably doesn't really feel. At the same time, Maugham, who was twenty years younger at the time of the luncheon he is describing, is pretending to be urbane, gallant, and sophisticated. He has to keep up a smiling, insouciant facade while inwardly he is suffering agonies when his guest, who claims she never eats anything for luncheon, orders some of the most expensive things Foyot's has to offer, including salmon, caviare, and champagne. The fact that she orders everything a la carte probably makes her feel she is just nibbling tidbits.

Part of the irony derives from the fact that the narrator has never dared to go to Foyot's by himself because he is living on a very small income; and further, he has to watch his voracious guest devouring gourmet comestibles while he has to pretend he only wants a mutton chop and a glass of water.

No doubt Maugham is writing about a real-life incident that occurred many years earlier when he was a struggling writer. As he says in his story:

I had a tiny apartment in the Latin Quarter overlooking a cemetery and I was earning barely enough money to keep body and soul together. She had read a book of mine and had written to me about it.

He must have realized, after the fact, that he had been "taken" by this greedy woman who completely understood his financial circumstances. He concludes his tale by saying:

But I have had my revenge at last. I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the result with complacency. Today she weighs twenty-one stone.

A "stone" is fourteen pounds, so the woman would weigh 294 pounds--which is not surprising, considering her appetite and what she regarded as "never eating anything for luncheon."

Maugham actually did become a man of the world. He traveled all over the globe looking for interesting characters and picturesque settings. In his day he was the world's most successful writer. His fans enjoyed his writings because he shares his curiosity about human nature and his love for far-away places. In "The Luncheon," the reader has the feeling of having visited one of the best Parisian restaurants and perhaps even having sampled some of the best French cuisine.

 M.H

Hons First yr. writing skill

What is Story?

Story is a particular kind of narrative that produces a particular kind of pleasure in the listener or reader. Aristotle listed its essential components over 2000 years ago: an interesting character with weaknesses and strengths confronts a problem that tests the character's ability to recognize and overcome his limitations, and his efforts to do so create new problems. If he fails, it's a tragedy; if he succeeds, it's a eucatastrophe. In either case, the ending feels "just" to the listener/reader, in terms of the character's own qualities or lack of them...it is the character and the character's actions (not mere coincidence or divine intervention) that brings about the final result.

The pleasure listeners/readers receive comes from the tickling of some of our hard-wiring in the brain. First, the "interesting character" engages our innate interest in people--most of us are endlessly curious about at least some of our acquaintances. We want to know what they're doing and why they're doing it. We make up our own narratives about them, about their motivations. In a story, we're allowed inside someone else's head, to see things from their perspective. Second, we have an innate sense of justice, and the intellectual capacity to connect action and consequence. The outcome of Story satisfies both the ethical sense of justice, and the intellectual grasp of causality. Third, we have an innate interest in the unexpected--in surprises--and a well-constructed Story provides them in both characterization and action, in order to produce that desirable combination of pleasures at the end.

Some people thinking Story is "mere entertainment" and that fiction, properly, should be "more than just entertainment." They don't think readers/listeners should be entertained. They devalue Story and would uncouple character and incident from the plot structure of Story. I think they're wrong...because Story contains more than "mere" entertainment along with a satisfaction that nothing else can provide. Because Story, by its nature (and our nature) is not boring--entertains the reader/listener--it can carry--does carry--other things along with it. It is a way of experiencing the other (place, time, person) and making sense of it; it is a way of asking questions and suggesting answers but leaving the reader/listener free to keep asking, keep thinking, keep feeling.

M.H

an essay on Facebook for the students of Hons First year

The advantages and disadvantages of using Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social networking site of all time. The popularity of Facebook has increased drastically. Within 6 years Facebook has reached more than 1 billion users and still growing rapidly. Nowadays Facebook has become very important part of our life. It is helping us in many ways and also harming us in some other ways. The use of Facebook could be very useful if any kind of addiction is avoided. This article contains full details about the pros and cons of Facebook in our daily life.

Advantages of Using Facebook

# Facebook is free and it's one of the best medium for communication. You can send message , start a video call, upload photos and videos for free.

# Facebook lets us connect to different people from anywhere in the world, because almost every people these days are familiar with Facebook .This gives us the opportunity to know more about their culture, values, custom and tradition.There is something called "pen pal" where motivated people used to make relationships with other foreign people, by writing regularly to each other via post mail. Time has changed and now people can contact with their "Facebook Pal" instantly, and more frequently. These relationships sometime gets serious and might end up in Marriage also.

# Facebook is the most appropriate tool for finding Old friends. When friends go away to any other place, we often don't get the chance to communicate with them. But now Facebook gives us the opportunity to communicate with our Old friend very easily without any cost. Surely, it is going to make you feel happy to see your old friend sharing some happy photos from another part of the World.

# We can share our feelings and what's happening around in our daily life through Facebook. We can also get feedback from our friends about their reaction toward our feelings. It is the best medium to share your feelings and thoughts with others. You can share your achievements to get some appreciation, or you can share your sorrows to get support from the generous friends.

# Facebook has good privacy setting which gives you the option to maintain privacy according to your wish.

# Facebook Fan pages , groups , events etc are getting popular day by day. Facebook Fan pages & groups are very handy for promotional activities. This is why almost each and every well known Brands has a Facebook Fan page and they are investing lot of money to get more exposure to their core Business

# You can use Facebook groups to connect all your close friends together. You can also maintain the privacy of the group by making it private. It also has new features like group chatting, notification, file sharing etc. These features would help the members of the group to stay connected.

# Facebook email is very useful too. Facebook now offers us an email address to receive email outside of Facebook such as, Yahoo, Gmail, outlook and Hotmail. The email address is given based on the user name of your Facebook ID. For example, if your username is "DingDONG" , you Facebook email address shall be "DingDOng @ Facebook.com". You can also receive files attachment through Facebook email.

# Facebook plays a very important role in getting latest valuable information. Facebook fan pages and users are constantly sharing many valuable news and information.

# Facebook advertising and Fan pages are very helpful for a successful marketing campaign to many business organization.

# You can chat with friends by using Facebook. The Facebook messenger application is very handy for chatting online.

# Many popular celebrity and organization are using Facebook to give regular updates to their fans. So, through Facebook you stay closer to any famous person or organization.

# Students can use Facebook for group study by creating a group only for studying. There you can share any information about your projects , homework , assignments , exams , due date etc.

# Many people are making relationship in Facebook and tying the knot eventually.

# Facebook online games are really popular and addicting. There are millions of Facebook users enjoying Facebook games and cannot pass a day without playing them.

# Facebook has thousands of application, quiz, games etc which keeps the user addicted with the site.

# We can also use Facebook as social bookmarking site. We can share our article, blogs , photo's etc to thousands of people.

# Facebook like button is connecting their user to every other website. With single like button now you can bring everything inside Facebook.

# If you have a Facebook login ID than you don't need to waste your time for registering other site. Most of the site now allows us to register instantly by integrating our Facebook account.

# Facebook is well designed! There is no fancy color or design available which distracts people. The simplicity in design and efficiency in the performance made Facebook the best Social site in the World.

What else? In a nutshell, Facebook is a full package of communication, education, entertainment and addiction!

Disadvantages of Facebook

Now it's time to talk about some disadvantages of Facebook. There are some Disadvantages of Facebook beside all these advantages. Some of the main disadvantages are :

#. Facebook is Addicting! For some people Facebook could be more addicting than Cigarette!Using Facebook for your need is actually good for us but when we waste most of our valuable time then it becomes harmful. The biggest disadvantages of Facebook is it's addiction which causes many problems, mostly because it kills our precious time.

# Fake profile and ID! Fake profile is one of the biggest disadvantage of Facebook. Now it is easier to create fake profile with a stolen picture. People often use fake profile to insult or harass someone they don't like.Teen girls are more vulnerable to these activities. There are news found that many girls are mentally depressed or committed suicide after being harassed in Facebook.

# There are plenty of groups and Fan pages out there which are being created to abuse or violate other religion , personalities , nation etc. This kind of racist disgusting activities is not acceptable in a global site like Facebook. Facebook administrator should take necessary steps against all of these abusing groups & pages.

# Many Facebook addicted couples are facing conflicts with their Facebook activities and later files for a divorce. According to a recent study, around a third of divorce filing in recent years contained the word "Facebook". The extra informations found in the Facebook are used as evidence to complete the divorce process.

# Facebook often brings bad effects on students results. Badly Facebook addicted students do not get good marks in their exams unless they cheat or way too smart for the class!

# People can stalk you and get your personal information by using Facebook. It is highly recommended not to share your personal information publicly.

# Beside students, people who works in offices wastes their time in browsing Facebook. That's why many offices have decided to block Facebook completely from their network.

# False report! Many people lost their precious Facebook ID because of false report. Facebook administrator should be careful on that.

# Facebook chat doesn't work properly. User often face trouble while chatting in Facebook.

# From different sources it is found that, Facebook can be life threatening sometimes. Many unknown people can track your activities and where you are going. As a result you can face trouble. So people should be careful in choosing friends and should try to keep their activities private.

# News also found that one mother killed her child because it was crying in hunger while she was browsing Facebook, and a husband killed her wife because she changed her relationship status. These acts are rare but could happen in extreme cases.

So from the above statement it is clear that Facebook has many disadvantages and could be dangerous at times. Every Facebook users should use Facebook carefully to minimize the effect of these disadvantages.

M.H

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Princess "Sweet and Low"

This poem is a lyric written by Tennyson as a kind of children's song. He tries to employ nature in order to symbolize death. This poem is sung by a mother to her baby during his sleep. It is about the departure or death of the father. The tone has a sense of melancholy and regret for the loss of the father. Moreover, it may have a sense of hope that the father may be back one day. Tennyson wrote about political reference as the Victorian Age was characterized with colonization and discovery. 

In this poem, Tennyson employs a mother as the persona of the poem. She is talking to her young baby to calm him down in order to sleep. She describes the sweet wind of the western sea to remind her of the memory of her husband. Her addressing the child may be a kind of consolation for herself. The word "west" is repeated to symbolize death as it is the location of sunset. Furthermore, at the end of the poem, the word "silver" may refer to the coffins that are made of silver.

Tennyson uses some imagery to generate a sense of pathetic fallacy in the poem. The sadness of the persona is reflected in the description of nature. There is a personification in "the dying moon" as it anticipates the father's death. There is a sensory image as there are some words that appeal to the sense of sight such as "sea", "silver" and "moon". The word "blow" connotes the sense of touch. It shows the mother's nostalgia to her husband.

Tennyson uses evocative language to express the feelings of the persona. The vocabulary is so simple to suit a child's song and the tenderness of emotions. Furthermore, he uses blank verse to show the spontaneity of his ideas. The word "rest" is repeated to show the maternal emotions and feelings. Tennyson is pro-feminist, so he tries to highlight the role of women in his poems to call for the change of the Victorian society. The sentence "father will come to thee soon" may be repeated to show the inner feelings of the mother that the father will never be back.

Tennyson portrays this lyric very melodious. The rhyme scheme is regular in the first part of each stanza as it goes as ABAB. However, it is a broken rhyme as the second part of each stanza goes as AA BC. This confusion of the rhyme states the melancholy and frustration of the mother. The rhyme is quick as he uses short monosyllabic words to show her stress and anxiety. There is an alliteration of the /s/ sound in "silver sails". It is also stated in the repetition of the words "sleep" and "sweet". This soft sound indicates a state of monotony that is related to death. It also suits the mother's singing to her baby to sleep.

The speaker is talking to a child (or just perhaps addressing someone who has died and whom he wishes to be happy in the afterlife--depending on whether "father" and "mother's breast" are literal). The speaker urges upon the child that all will be well soon--to sleep therefore. It's a lullaby. The tone is sweet and sad, very low keyed, and so insistent on being reassuring that one feels something must be wrong, even if the poem does not say what that might be.

Ozymandias

Summary of Ozymandias

The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well the emotions (or "passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though both the sculptor and his subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue appear the words, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and level sands,” which stretch out around it.

Form

“Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era; it does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave (a term for the first eight lines of a sonnet) with the sestet (a term for the last six lines), by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF.

Commentary

This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819” for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.

Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,” then the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king’s people in the line, “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: “ ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Summary

A traveler tells the poet that two huge stone legs stand in the desert. Near them on the sand lies a damaged stone head. The face is distinguished by a frown and a sneer which the sculptor carved on the features. On the pedestal are inscribed the words "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Around the huge fragments stretches the empty desert.

Analysis

Shelley's irregular sonnet on the fragments of a huge statue of an Egyptian pharaoh begins with a statement that arouses the interest of the reader at once:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.

The mention of a traveler is a promise of a story. The story is a characteristically Shelleyan one about tyranny and how time makes a mockery of the boastfulness of even the most powerful kings. The story is over and Shelley's point is made before the reader realizes that he has been subjected to a moral lesson.

The fine beginning is followed by a condensed and vigorous account of what the traveler saw in addition to the two huge legs standing in the desert: a shattered visage, a pedestal, and on it a boastful inscription. Nothing more except the empty desert. Shelley puts the words of the inscription in effectively ironic contrast with the surroundings. The rulers of the world, "ye Mighty," are told by Ozymandias, "king of kings," to look upon his works and despair of emulating them. Now one looks and sees nothing whatsoever. Instead of the architectural marvels promised by the inscription, "the lone and level sands stretch far away." Just as the sculptor mocked Ozymandias by putting on the face of the colossal monument a "frown / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command," so time has also mocked him by reducing his vain boast to nothingness. The works that were to be the despair of other pharaohs have completely disappeared. Even the gigantic statue of himself that he had commissioned has been reduced to two legs, a shattered face, and a pedestal.

"Ozymandias" was written by Shelley in competition with his friend Horace Smith. The superiority of Shelley's choice of details and of the vigor of his diction are splendidly illustrated by a comparison with the octave of his friend's sonnet:

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone
Stands a gigantic leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the desert knows.
"I am Great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The king of kings; this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Nought but the leg remaining to disclose
The site of that forgotten Babylon.

Both poets remove the city of Thebes, the site of the statue, from their poems for artistic purposes.

Ozymandias was the name by which Ramses II, a pharaoh famous for the number of architectural structures he caused to be erected, was known to the Greeks. Shelley had read of the statue in Diodorus Siculus, a Roman writer, who had described it as intact. He had obviously read about it in some other source also since he knew that the statue was no longer intact. The problem of Shelley's sources is discussed in an interesting, illustrated article by Johnstone Parr, "Shelley's 'Ozymandias,'" Keats-Shelley Journal Vol. VI (1957).

M.H

Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Wordsworth: Ode: Intimations of Immortality

In the first stanza, the speaker says wistfully that there was a time when all of nature seemed dreamlike to him, “apparelled in celestial light,” and that that time is past; “the things I have seen I can see no more.” In the second stanza, he says that he still sees the rainbow, and that the rose is still lovely; the moon looks around the sky with delight, and starlight and sunshine are each beautiful. Nonetheless the speaker feels that a glory has passed away from the earth.

In the third stanza, the speaker says that, while listening to the birds sing in springtime and watching the young lambs leap and play, he was stricken with a thought of grief; but the sound of nearby waterfalls, the echoes of the mountains, and the gusting of the winds restored him to strength. He declares that his grief will no longer wrong the joy of the season, and that all the earth is happy. He exhorts a shepherd boy to shout and play around him. In the fourth stanza, he addresses nature’s creatures, and says that his heart participates in their joyful festival. He says that it would be wrong to feel sad on such a beautiful May morning, while children play and laugh among the flowers. Nevertheless, a tree and a field that he looks upon make him think of “something that is gone,” and a pansy at his feet does the same. He asks what has happened to “the visionary gleam”: “Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

In the fifth stanza, he proclaims that human life is merely “a sleep and a forgetting”—that human beings dwell in a purer, more glorious realm before they enter the earth. “Heaven,” he says, “lies about us in our infancy!” As children, we still retain some memory of that place, which causes our experience of the earth to be suffused with its magic—but as the baby passes through boyhood and young adulthood and into manhood, he sees that magic die. In the sixth stanza, the speaker says that the pleasures unique to earth conspire to help the man forget the “glories” whence he came.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker beholds a six-year-old boy and imagines his life, and the love his mother and father feel for him. He sees the boy playing with some imitated fragment of adult life, “some little plan or chart,” imitating “a wedding or a festival” or “a mourning or a funeral.” The speaker imagines that all human life is a similar imitation. In the eighth stanza, the speaker addresses the child as though he were a mighty prophet of a lost truth, and rhetorically asks him why, when he has access to the glories of his origins, and to the pure experience of nature, he still hurries toward an adult life of custom and “earthly freight.”

In the ninth stanza, the speaker experiences a surge of joy at the thought that his memories of childhood will always grant him a kind of access to that lost world of instinct, innocence , and exploration. In the tenth stanza, bolstered by this joy, he urges the birds to sing, and urges all creatures to participate in “the gladness of the May.” He says that though he has lost some part of the glory of nature and of experience, he will take solace in “primal sympathy,” in memory, and in the fact that the years bring a mature consciousness—“a philosophic mind.” In the final stanza, the speaker says that this mind—which stems from a consciousness of mortality, as opposed to the child’s feeling of immortality—enables him to love nature and natural beauty all the more, for each of nature’s objects can stir him to thought, and even the simplest flower blowing in the wind can raise in him “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

Form

Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode, as it is often called, is written in eleven variable ode stanzas with variable rhyme schemes, in iambic lines with anything from two to five stressed syllables. The rhymes occasionally alternate lines, occasionally fall in couplets, and occasionally occur within a single line (as in “But yet I know,where’er I go” in the second stanza).

Commentary

If “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s first great statement about the action of childhood memories of nature upon the adult mind, the “Intimations of Immortality” ode is his mature masterpiece on the subject. The poem, whose full title is “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” makes explicit Wordsworth’s belief that life on earth is a dim shadow of an earlier, purer existence, dimly recalled in childhood and then forgotten in the process of growing up. (In the fifth stanza, he writes, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.../Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, /But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home....”)

While one might disagree with the poem’s metaphysical hypotheses, there is no arguing with the genius of language at work in this Ode. Wordsworth consciously sets his speaker’s mind at odds with the atmosphere of joyous nature all around him, a rare move by a poet whose consciousness is so habitually in unity with nature. Understanding that his grief stems from his inability to experience the May morning as he would have in childhood, the speaker attempts to enter willfully into a state of cheerfulness; but he is able to find real happiness only when he realizes that “the philosophic mind” has given him the ability to understand nature in deeper, more human terms—as a source of metaphor and guidance for human life. This is very much the same pattern as “Tintern Abbey” ’s, but whereas in the earlier poem Wordsworth made himself joyful, and referred to the “music of humanity” only briefly, in the later poem he explicitly proposes that this music is the remedy for his mature grief.

The structure of the Immortality Ode is also unique in Wordsworth’s work; unlike his characteristically fluid, naturally spoken monologues, the Ode is written in a lilting, songlike cadence with frequent shifts in rhyme scheme and rhythm. Further, rather than progressively exploring a single idea from start to finish, the Ode jumps from idea to idea, always sticking close to the central scene, but frequently making surprising moves, as when the speaker begins to address the “Mighty Prophet” in the eighth stanza—only to reveal midway through his address that the mighty prophet is a six-year-old boy.

Wordsworth’s linguistic strategies are extraordinarily sophisticated and complex in this Ode, as the poem’s use of metaphor and image shifts from the register of lost childhood to the register of the philosophic mind. When the speaker is grieving, the main tactic of the poem is to offer joyous, pastoral nature images, frequently personified—the lambs dancing as to the tabor, the moon looking about her in the sky. But when the poet attains the philosophic mind and his fullest realization about memory and imagination, he begins to employ far more subtle descriptions of nature that, rather than jauntily imposing humanity upon natural objects, simply draw human characteristics out of their natural presences, referring back to human qualities from earlier in the poem.

So, in the final stanza, the brooks “fret” down their channels, just as the child’s mother “fretted” him with kisses earlier in the poem; they trip lightly just as the speaker “tripped lightly” as a child; the Day is new-born, innocent, and bright, just as a child would be; the clouds “gather round the setting sun” and “take a sober coloring,” just as mourners at a funeral (recalling the child’s playing with some fragment from “a mourning or a funeral” earlier in the poem) might gather soberly around a grave. The effect is to illustrate how, in the process of imaginative creativity possible to the mature mind, the shapes of humanity can be found in nature and vice-versa. (Recall the “music of humanity” in “Tintern Abbey.”) A flower can summon thoughts too deep for tears because a flower can embody the shape of human life, and it is the mind of maturity combined with the memory of childhood that enables the poet to make that vital and moving connection.

Title Information

.......When Wordsworth completed this work in 1804, he called it simply "Ode," and the poem carried this title when it was published in 1807. In 1815, when the poem was republished, Wordsworth expanded the title to "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Intimations means hints, inklings, or indirect suggestions. Most readers and critics today use the title "Intimations of Immortality" when referring to the poem.

Type of Work

......."Intimations of Immortality" is a lyric poem in the form of an ode. A lyric poem presents deep feelings and emotions rather than telling a story; an ode uses lofty language and a dignified tone and may contain several hundred lines. 

Composition and Publication Information

.......Wordsworth completed the first four stanzas of "Intimations of Immortality" between March and April of 1802. He completed the rest of the poem by early 1804. Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme published the poem at Paternoster Row, London, in May 1807 as part of a collection of Wordsworth's works, Poems, in Two Volumes.

Summary of the Poem

.......The entire earth—all its fields and streams and trees—seemed like heaven to me when I was a child. Now, however, as spring begins to unfold its splendor, I no longer perceive the world this way. True, there is much beauty around me:rainbows, roses, moonlight, sunlight, the reflection of the stars on evening waters. But these sights, magnificent as they are, lack the full glory of what I once saw. 
.......At this moment, while the birds sing and the lambs frolic, my inability to perceive the fullness of this glory makes me sad. But the sounds of nature—the wind and the waterfalls—cheer me as I realize all the earth is happy, land and sea. Even the beasts revel in the spirit of spring. Shepherd boy, let me hear your shouts of joy!

.......You creatures of the forest, I hear the calls you make to one another, and I hear the heavens laugh with you in your joy. I feel your happiness—all of it. How could I be sullen on such a fine May morning. Children are picking fresh flowers in a thousand valleys, the sun shines brightly, and babies leap in their mother's arms. But even amid all this joy and wonder, there is a tree and there is a field that speak to me of something that is missing. So, too, does the pansy at my feet. Where is that heavenly glory I once perceived?
.......When we are born, our souls—which previously existed in the celestial realm—go to sleep momentarily. When they awake to the new world around them, they forget almost everything about their heavenly existence. But a hint of that existence remains in our souls even though the world begins to enclose us, like prison walls. Still, a growing boy can perceive heavenly light. But when he becomes a man, the light fades. Earth, without malice, further blinds him to the fullness of the glory he once knew by exhibiting its own glory. However, although the glory of nature is not equal to heavenly glory, it is a reflection of it 
.......A child of six, while enjoying the kisses of his mother and the admiring gaze of his father, already begins to plot out the life he will lead and the events he will take part in—a wedding, a festival, a funeral—and prepares himself for business, love, and strife. He may foresee himself in many roles in imitation of others, even down to the time when old age overtakes him.
.......The outward appearance of a child belies the immensity of his soul within. That soul, that inner light, still perceives something of the heavenly presence, still fathoms something of the eternal deep, even as we adults labor in darkness to discover the truths of the eternal realm. You, child, are the best seer, prophet, and philosopher. But why do you, with the memory of the glories of heaven within you, press on so urgently toward adulthood, which dims your inner light and lays its earthly burdens upon your back? 
.......But how heartening it is to know that at least a glimmer of celestial light yet lies within us as adults and manifests itself in our natural surroundings. I give thanks for my knowledge of how things are and that nothing can entirely eliminate the awareness in us of the immortal sea that brought us to the shore of life. So sing, birds, a joyous song of May. Though the time will come when the glories of spring's fields and flowers will be forever gone from us, we will not grieve; for we know that greater glories await us beyond death. 
.......I love the fountains, meadows, hills, and brooks—the brilliance of a morning sun and the beauty of a flower. But I know that the flower is only a hint of what is to come. 

Majharul Haq
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