2009

BRITISH LITERATURE

Nagendra rao
KAVITHA TUTORIALS
5/27/2009
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BRITISH LITERATURE
Q.1. Critically examine man’s nature with reference to the character of Dr.Faustus, as a .
Renaissance hero

Dr.Faustus is the most important character in the Renaissance drama. Christopher Marlowe
was born in 1564 at Canterbury. He was the son of a shoemaker. He was educated at
Cambridge. He wrote Tamburlaine the Great in 1587. He wrote Dr.Faustus in 1588, and
Edward the Second in 1590.
Marlowe was of rebellious mind. He showed interest in atheism. “Tamburlaine” brought him
great fame. But Doctor Faustus brought him greater fame. Dr.Faustus was a man who had
endless lust for great fame. He was a man who had endless lust for power. He wanted to reach
the world’s topmost point. He wanted to have “the perfect bliss”. He wanted to occupy the
mightiest throne. He wanted to lead the life of an extraordinary man. He had a great and
passionate interest in all kinds of knowledge. He was a medieval magician. He sold his soul to
the Devil for 24 years of pleasure and the of all knowledge. His struggle for perfection is a
symbol of man’s struggle for perfection. He wanted to reach the stars. But underlying this
aspiration, there is also the sin of acquiring power.
The play has a very loose plot. Faustus is the central figure. All the dramatic action centers
on him. It is a conflict in Faustus’ mind. It is a highly dramatized conflict between the Good
and Evil in man. It is the ready temptation of Faustus to Evil that is the story of the play. The
plot briefly introduces Faustus’s life. He was born in the town of Rhodes in Germany. His
father was a poor man. He studied at the Wittenberg. He studied for the Doctor of Divinity. He
was widely read in many branches of learning. He was read in the Greek, Arabian; Hebrew
and Persian literatures. He also became mathematician and a physician. He studied Holy
Scriptures. In the second scene, he began to practise his devilish art. He wanted to study the
arts of necromancy and conjuration. He wanted to know the secrets of heaven and earth. At
the beginning of the play, the chorus tells us the life of Dr.Faustus. He wants “to command
that move between the quiet poles”. He wants all the emperors and kings obey him. He wants
“to rend the clouds”. He wants to become “amighty god”.
In the third scene, he is tempted by Mephistopheles. He becomes active during the
night. Mephistophiles tempts Faustus. He wants to pray to “the prince the hell,” that is Satan.
Thus, Faustus becomes tempted. For him, only Belzebub becomes very important. He is not
afraid of “damnation”. He wants to give all his soul to Mephistopheles. He will become the
great emperor of the world. He will command all the kings in the world. He thus writes the
deed of gift of his soul with Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles brings to Faustus all the rarest
elements of Nature. The mind of Faustus becomes the battle ground of Evil and Good.
The Good Angel constantly discourages Faustus from falling prey to Mephistophiles’
temptation. He tells Faustus that the power is only an illusion and mere madness. Faustus is
afraid of the suffering after he sells his soul. For him, all places are hell which are heaven till
then. The Good Angel asks Faustus to repent. But he is constantly tempted by the Evil angel.
His mind becomes “hardened”. He will never repent. He is damned. So, he cannot utter the
name of God, He cannot repent. His spiritual agony increases. He becomes a victim of the
Seven Deadly Sins. He becomes proud. He is filled with greed, Envy and wrath. His limitless
power is infinitely misused. He commands every king and
Emperor in this world.
In any case in the midst of his limitless power and enjoyment, his spiritual anguish
increases. His spiritual conflict is endless. He is afraid of his damnation. He is now starting to
repent. He slowly realizes that his spiritual redemption is impossible. In the final moments of
his damnation, there is on chance but redemption. He pleads for last moment of life. For him,
Time does not stop. He commands Time to stop. But his command is not heeded to. He
desperately pleads for one minute. He pleads to Nature to make it “ a perpetual day”. He wants
one hour to become a year, a month a week or at least a natural day. He commands the stars
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not to move. He prays to Christ to save one drop for his sake. He prays to Christ to save his
soul. He prays to Christ not to rend his soul. In a desperate moment, he wants the mountains,
and hills to fall on him. He wants them to hide him from the damnation. Finally, when he can
no longer with the pain, he wants to be damned for ever. He prefers even hell to this endless
pain and suffering. He wants to be finally saved after al this suffering. He finds that all the
world is happy. He wants his soul to be changed into “little water drops” and disappear into
the ocean.
Thus, Dr.Faustus is damned for ever. His “heavenly power” damns him. He committed
all unlawful things. He is a learned man. He is a typical Renaissance man. For him, knowledge
and humanism are very important.

Q.2. Write a critical essay on the Epic qualities of PARADISE LOST-Book I.

A:
Introduction:
There are three divisions in Milton’s life;(1) the period of his education and preparation
for his great poetic achievement, (2) the period of his active participation in religious and
political movements in England of his time,(3) the last and most glorious of his great poetical
achievement.
Milton was born on December 9, 1608. His father was a highly enlightened and
cultivated man. He studied at St.Paul’s and at Christ ‘s College, Cambridge. He started on a
very hard path of poetic achievement since his childhood education at St.Paul’s. When he left
the University in 1632, he got his M.A., degree. By then, he has already acquired a great
proficiency in most of the great European languages. He also inherited the musical sense of
his father. He also mastered Mathematics. He originally planned to take the orders in service
of God. But he later gave up that idea. He read very deeply and widely in the Greek, Latin and
English literature of his time.
His Poetical works:
From 1632 to 1638, he was deeply devoted to his studies. He got himself ready to start
his great poetic career. In 1634, he wrote Comus. In 1637, he wrote I’l Penseroso, and
L’Allegro. In 1638, he started on the traditional continrntal tour. He particularly travelled in
Italy where he met. Then he returned to England in 1639, in response to the changed political
and religious conditions. In the second phase, he wrote, “Of Reformation Teaching Church
Disicipline in England (1641). He explained the puritanical point of view in this work.
When he wrote Paradise Lost the theme of the fall of man did not come as his first
choice. First he wanted to write an Arthurian legend. Then he wanted to write a drama called
Adam Unparadised, on the lines of Greek tragic drama. Finally, he wanted to write on a deeply
and profoundly theological subject. Thus, he worte Paradise Lost, It is a long poem in twelve
books. He wrote this epic in the midst of many personal and political problems. It was
published in 1667. It was immediately recognized for its greatness. It was followed by
Paradise Regained in 1667. It is in four books. It is the story of the descent of “one greater
man” redeeming us to our lost Paradise. Milton wrote Samson Agonistes, in the model of
sophiclean tragedy. He thus handled all forms of poetic expressions-such as lyric, elegy, epic
and tragedy with great success and achievement. He is among the world’s greatest poets. He
passed away in 1674.
Paradise Lost:
Paradise Lost has a profound theme of justifying God’s ways towards Man. It is a
serious, theological poem. It is also a heroie poem. It uses verse and has the dignity of
classical majesty. And self-restraint. He used the “grand style”. The central action of the poem,
namely the Fall of Man, has universal, cosmic significance.
Paradise Lost is the greatest epic in English language. It is a true epic. Like a true epic,
it has the following qualities.
1. Lofty theme
2. Universal in appeal and execution

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3. Portrayal of a great hero
4. A didactic moral purpose
5. Source of knowledge from many branches of learning
6. Profitable use of supernatural machinery
7. Highly serious in purpose, atmosphere and mood and tone
8. Use of Epic Similies
Miltonin his Invocation to the heavenly muse announces his purpose in Paradise Lost. He
wants to attempt “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”. He believes in “nomiddle
flight”. He intends to soar above the “Aonian mount”. His imagination seeks to fly with
“mighty wing out-spread dove like”. Milton’s aim is clear and unmistakable. It has been his
dream and commitment since his childhood, to write poetry on a great object. He had plan to
write a play called “Adam unparadised”. In the year 1646,it was on the Greek tragic drama.
He was a puritan. For him, the unquestioned acceptance of God’s will became the natural
theme. Therefore, the selection of the theological purpose necame his natural theme for
Paradise Lost. His inspiration comes from the Parnassus. He invokes the heavenly Muse in
singing this “adventurous song”. He writes about the most universal event on human history
namely “Man’s first disobedience and that forbidden tree “whose mortal taste, brought death
into the world and all over woe”.
“Paradise Lost”is universal in appeal and execution. Milton tells us the story of Man’s
fall. He takes this story of Man’s fall from the Genesis in Bible. The story of the Lord’s
Creation of Man, the sinful acts of Satan, thereby leading to the fall of man and the final
redemption by the Son of God are the four ideas of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The
universal human interest centres around he anatomy of Evil in Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is
our own story os Evil and Virtue in our own minds and behaviour that is a source of
permanent appeal of this great epic. It is a cosmic universal drama. Evil and Virtue are not
mere abstract ideas but they are realized as real life struggles. Satan is a part of our own
unpurgated self. Divinity and its values are our for redemption.
An epic has a great hero. A hero symbolizes all the virtues of an epic. He delivers the
ultimate meaning of the epoc. In Paradise Lost, the question, who is the hero of Paradise Lost
is an enigmatic one. There is always an uncertain definiteness between Satan and God in
becoming the hero of Paradise Lost. It is indeed a very complex problem. In aesthetic terms,
Satan is certainly a tragic hero. But, in theological terms, God is the hero. Satan arrests our
attention by his adventurism and the great qualities of leadership. He is a complete hero with a
moral flaw. Therefore, in theological terms, he is a sinner. God makes an invisible presence
throughout Paradise Lost. God is not drawn as an anthropomorphic figure. But his presence is
severely felt by us. God is the opposite of Evil. He is virtue. He is our goal and the meaningof
our life. Therefore, Milton strikes a very interesting position in portrying his hero in this epoc.
In theological terms. God is the hero of Paradise Lost. But Adam appears to us in a curious
predicament. He is in the first part drawn in the image of God himself. Hence, his fall by
Satan’s guile is the second part of the story. In both these cases, he appears to be a man
without free will. But God has sanctioned him enough moral and spiritual autonomy to choose
his life and destiny. But God implied in that free will of man that he must not lose sight of the
world of Divinity. Adam’s heroism is also another undecided issue in Paradise Lost. In the
beginning, as found in the Genesis , he had, “dominion over the fish of sea and over the foul
of the air and over all the earth”. God created man “in his own image”. God has given them
everything. God has made everything that is divinely good and beautiful foe the use of man.
This happened on the sixth day of God’s creation.This Divinity is the quintessential aspect of
the other side of man. The other side of Man is his original Sin. Man disobeyed God’s will by
yielding himself to the temptation of Satan. This yielding is the Evil side of Man. But man’s
struggle to redeem himself from the original sin is at one level the theme of a Paradise Lost.
Thus Adam is, in a sence a hero in search of perfection.To this extent , this is our own
predicament. On the whole, there are three positions of heroism in Paradise Lost from a

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theological point of view, God’, from a humanistic point of view, Satan, where as Adam and
Evil both the qualities of Divinity and the Evil of Satan.
An epic has on unambiguous moral purpose. Milton’s moral purpose in clear.He
wants“tojustify the ways of God to men”.
This moral purpose is the soul of Paradise Lost. At a deeper level, it is the conflict ofvirtue and
Evil, which is the intended meaning of this epic. There is this implicit battle between Virtue
and Evil. In particular, Book-IX is nithing but the moral debate between Eve and Satan. The
fact that Evil wins over virtue ultimately in Paradise Lost is a reminded to us to avoid Evil.
This moral purpose is built into our wakeful consciousness in Paradise Lost.Ultimately, it is
the triumph of Virtue in the meaning of Paradise Lost. The ultimate moral and spiritual Hell is
our own ignorance and Evil. We have to live upto our essential goodness. It is thus craving for
the ultimate virtue in us, that becomes the moral, ethical and spiritual invitation to us, to
overcome the infinite forms of Evil in our own self.
This is the implicit didactic purpose. Milton is a poet, but not a preacher of morality. This is
the greatness of Paradise Lost. Where the aesthtic and dedactic purposes are creatively fused.
An epic is a great source of wisdom and knowledge. Here Milton also draws quite extensively
from all science, thelogy, logic and philosophy. Ultimately, a lofty theme is realized on a
cosmic scale. He draws extensively from Geology, Astronomy (in the conceptions of Hell and
Pandemonium in Book-I); from Botany and the Animal World in Book-IV and Criminal
Knowledge in Book-IV. In any case, his knowledge of the Bible and all the sources of classical
literature and also the English literature at that time are unquestionable. Thus, Paradise Lost is
a veritable compedium of knowledge.
Every epic uses the supernatural machinery. In fact, one of the purposes of any epic
is relate the finite man to the infinite Divinity. In Paradise Lost also, God is the invisible
presence. If God is one source of sanctioning grace, all other forms of Evil represented by
Satan, form the other half of the supernatural machinery. In fact, the whole of Paradise Lost is
relized on a cosmic scale. Milton invokes all the Olympian Gods and divinities. He invokes
the Heavenly muse of Orab Sinai. All the divine presences, Big or small, contripute to the
mood and atmosphere of the poem. The gods may be heathen gods or Christian gods. They
elevate the poetic world of Man’s fall to the lofty, cosmic system of thinking and imagination.
Paradise Lost is drawn with a cosmic seriousness. The purpose of Milton is to make us
aware of our predicament. He tells us in his invocation, thus:
“What is in the dark Illumine, what is low and support That to the bright of this great
argument”
Man’s fall is certainly a serious theme. It is our own agony and our own sinful suffering.
The seriousness is necause from the very beginning. Milton thus invokes the Heavenly Muse.
“I thence invoke thy aid to the adventurous song”. Milton fraws Hell with unmitigated
gloom. “Dark” becomes both the symbol and metaphor. Everything in Hell is dark. Darkness
is a metaphor is a metaphor of Hell. It is also a symbol of sin.In contrast, Light and
bBrightness become the enjoyable source of wisdom in Heaven and in th Garden of Eden, till
Man’s Fall. It is “darkness visible”in Hell, it is nothing but divine light in Heaven.
Q.3. Critically examine “Ode to Autumn “ and describe the features of Romanticism in
Keats’s art.
A. John Keats is one of the greatest Romantic poets. He is at his best in his odes. “Ode to
Autumn” describes the beauty and benevolence of Nature. Throughout the poem, Autumn is
personified. It is called the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Autumn is the season
when the atmosphere is covered with mist and the fruits ripen into mellow sweetness. The
Autumn and the sun are partners in the process of loding the vinces and trees with fruits, and
filling them with ripeness to the core. The grape, the apple, the gourd, the hazel nut are there.
Flowers are there in profusion.
The landscape is scented with the fragrance of the ripening fruit and honey-flowers.
Keats’s sensuous imagery re-creates the atmosphere with wonderful vividness. Autumn is the
harvester sitting careless on a granary floor. The soft wind of Autumn lifs his hair as he

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winnows the gathered grain. Sometimes he is seen resting on a half-reaped field, drowsy with
the perfume of the poppy. The fields are filled with ‘twined flowers’. Autumn is a gleaner who
carries sheaves of corn on the head across a brook. He is watching the cyderpress, patiently
observing the juice of the apples flow out from the press. These personifications of Autumn in
the resting figures make the whole picture human and universal.
Keats asks himself: “Where arethe songs of songs of spring” He consoles himself by
thinking of the charms of Autumn.Autumn too has its music. When the clouds illumine the
harvested fields in the evening, and touch the fields and plains with the soft colours of the
sunset, the atmosphere is filled with a symphony of natural sounds.
The “soft-dying day “ is mourned by the melancholy choir of small gnats among the
willows that grow in the river. They are borne aloft or sink as the wind lives or dies. The full-
grown lambs bleat from the hill-side. These hedgecrickets sing and the robin red-nreast
whistles softly from the enclosed garden and the swallows twitter in the sky. “The whole
atmosphere of the season is expressed, in words so transparent and direct that we almost forget
they are words at all. Nature herself and the season seem speaking to us”-says Sidney Colvin,
the famous and authentic critic on John Keats..3
The poem gives us the message that everything in life is short lived. The inagery and the
figures of speech used are appropriate. They ahow the romantic element in Keats. Keats’s
autumn is a verbal drowsy and fertile sonata. The poet praises the season in vivid and lovely
terms. The season of autumn induces the thought that one is closer to theend to the end of that
year. That is how keats felt while adminring the season. But he cleverly understood that he
himself was ageing, resulting in a fear of the future.

Q.4. What is the theme of the poem”The love soag of .J. Alfred Pruffrock”
A. T.S. Eliot is one of the famous poets of modern times who established a novel poetic
tradition. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Pruffrock” is neither a song nor a conventional
expression of love. The poem begind with an epigraph-the motto of the work.It is from
Dante’s “Inferno”. “If I thought that my reply would be to one who would ever reurn to the
world this fame would stay without further movement; but since none has been returned alive
from this depth, if what Ihear is true, I answer you without frar of infamy.”
Guido da Mamfeltro tells Dante the shame of his evil life. He bellieves that Dante will
not return to earth to report it. Pruffrock is also speaking from the hell of his own insecurities
and fears. So, the poem is a dramatic monologue in which the speaker builds up a mood of
social futility and inadequacy. The poem is not a dialogue between two persons. It is an
internal dialogue in the mind of Pruffrock between the two different facets of his personality.
It is evening. Evening is compared to a patient etherised upon the table. Pruffrock too is
mentally paraysed.
He is conscious but conscious of nothing. There are half-deserted streets with cheap
one-night hotels and sawdust restaurants suggesting urban decay. The tedious argument leads
us to an overwhelming question-“oh, do not ask, what is it” In the restaurants the fashionable
women with their intellectual pretensions talk of Michalangelo-the symbol of Renaissance art
and culture. There is dullness everywhere. The yellow fog outside is comparable to the frog in
Pruffock’s mind. Ir is compared to a cat which represents Proffock’s inertia and mental
dullness. In this world of hypocrasy, one can never be one’s real self. We decide and revise our
decisions.
Eliot emphasizes the triviality and superficiality of modern civilization. This
meaninfless preoccupation with the petty matters of ordinary life undermine Pruffrocks
comfidence in himself. He becomes marally incapable of taking any decisions. He becines
conscious of his opld age, his baldness and of his thin body, His physical decay appears to be
an extension of his mental degradation. Pruffrock dresses like a fashionable man. Even this
fails to add tio his sekf-esteem. He realises the fact that people are not frank in their
utterances. His life has been wasted in this unreal world of tea-parties and socialn gatherings.

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He has not lived intensely and passionately. His life has been measured, dull and boring. His
life seems to be just an accumulation of worthless moments.
The women who come to the room that Pruffrock is in, are incapable of evoking any
such emotion. In the drawing room there is only brittle politeness and shallow conversation.
He loves a woman or a fashionable lady, but unable to reveal it to her. He says: “Do I dare?
And how should I presume? And how should I begin?” These questions reveal his indecisive
mind. They exemplify his contemptuous attitude towards his own life. His life is full of fear,
anxiety and boredom. He compares his self-paralysing indecisiveness and timidity to the
timidity of a crab that hides itself in dark and hidden corners. The peaceful afternoon brings
with it more inertia and passivity. Pruffrock is not a prophet life John, the Baptist, or Lazarus
from the dead. He has no vision. There is no one who could redeem him from the failure of
his life.
His unasked question may be to invite a declaration of love or a proposal of marriage.
Language continaully fails him. He is incapable of expressing his thoughts. He is not prince
Hamlet whose indecisiveness has noble dimensions. He can only be the fool-polite cautious,
meticulous and ridiculous. Thus, Pruffrock symbolizes the frustration and the neurosis of
modern man. Through appropriate images, Eliot dramatizes the hallowness, barreness and
triviality of modern urban life.

5.How does John Donne deal with the theme of love in his poem “GOOD MORROW”?

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