Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Great Regulars: The drunken portrayal of the street lamps


offers further evidence that the speaker is possibly so drunk that his thoughts and memories are misaligned: "Every street lamp that I pass/Beats like a fatalistic drum." It's no doubt the speaker's head that is beating like the "fatalistic drum."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Eliot's Rhapsody on a Windy Night

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The main theme in Larkin's "Here" is suggested in the last three lines of the third stanza and the first line and a half in the fourth stanza: "And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges/Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,/Isolate villages, where removed lives//Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands/Like heat."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Philip Larkin's 'Here'

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This distinction indicates that the speaker is not referring to physical distance; he is not on a journey and separated from another person. He is separated from his God-given talent by writer's block. As day and night conspire to keep him tired and his creative juices blocked, he feels each day adds an additional weight of separation from his beloved duty of writing.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 28

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Those victors do not understand victory as well as the defeated understand it.

The speaker here exaggerates the notion of the defeated by saying they lay "dying"--this exaggeration is one of the reasons that readers may misunderstand and claim that the speaker is referring to a Civil War battle.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: 'Success is counted sweetest'

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