The Carpe Diem Prophesy of Herrick - Book Report/Review Example

Expectations have been blended into the tropes of Anglo-Saxon literature since the epic Beowulf came into existence. With the ical literatures, it streamlined itself into two major genre-the comedy and the tragedy. If comedy made nonsense out of inevitability, the ineluctable fate became the best recipe for a lasting catharsis. If expectation is about hope, love, lust and truth, then there is also a burning desire to control all of these and not quite leave it up to Fate to deliver them. But if fate must have it all, these texts must find a way to make peace with it or fight it or give it with dignity and yet give into the temptation of tricking it! The Carpe Diem prophesy of Herrick with the opening lines hide a bitter truth of death and old age that is to befall youth when he says: "GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying." (Herrick, 140) This is another way of engendering hope and celebrating life even when there are traces of warning and of darkness ahead. Man cannot but lose with death, and yet he can make most of his hay days to die without regret. And that is a cavalier's way of uttering a Donne like conceit with the lines: (from Death be not Proud; Holy Sonnets: X) "Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so, One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die". Similar threats have been mellowed down with Shakespeare's sonnets with his optimism to conquer death with truth, love and beauty. Sometimes to him Death was not a physical death but a death in life as in Sonnet 73 where he speculates his coming death and yet feels dead at the same time like "Bare ruined choirs," an escape (Sonnet 66, "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry"), or Sonnet 55 vouching an undying "living record" of his lover's memory, in the "eyes of all posterity and dwell in lovers' eyes"! This idea of cheating melancholy, and eternal note of human sadness heard from the days of "Sophocles" through what Matthew Arnold hears and concludes in his poem "Dover Beach": "Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain." This is Arnold's way of giving his fears and turmoil the only antidote, for he is helpless in a world swept by such helpless inevitable destiny of mankind. While he seeks answer in true conformity between two lovers, Eliot's poetic trances just reveal a soul damned, "trampled" and impressionistically doomed, where "His soul stretched tight across the skies" and where the only answer to metaphysical absence of a transcendental root for man anymore, he/she can only defeat the being with nothingness, for there are no routes to salvation, for God too is Dead. "You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling " (Eliot, Preludes) So Eliot concludes in his 1917 poem "Preludes" the ultimate answer lies in complete death of feeling and then life and death are the same and hence: "Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots." The second line of argument is brought by another famous poet who just finds an answer in Eternal Salvation and rides death's chariot, that was seen approaching in Marvell's poem, and now she has boarded that ride and says "Because I could not stop for Death- He kindly stopped for me-" and later in the last lines of the poem concludes: "Since then-'tis Centuries-and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity---" (Dickinson) The opening line of humour of death finding the poet out brings in another way of making fun of death to make it seem trivial and unimportant. Rather some poets have in mind to kill death with bathos. Marvell, in his Metaphysical masculine poem, "To His Coy mistress" thus is trying to make merry against death's approaching chariot. He persuades his beloved to give into merriment, before death ravishes her and the worms take that cherished virginity from her. In a morbid memento mori fashion he is at once trying to exorcize the fear of death and also trying to "rage" against it to make an impression on life and on death, like Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle", because both poets urge through their literature to reach that barrier of silent acceptance of life's inevitability. If hope is another form of encouragement to live on, as in the expression of Thomas' rage against dying of that "light" (lamp in the dust lay scattered syndrome, as in Shelley's poem), then Marvell too recommends that since there is no time for his "vegetable love" to grow (and in a way he finds it quite sterile and impotent, as indicated with his use of adjective), they must "devour" time to suit their youthful "hue" and "amorous" energy and thus ultimately suggests: "Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball; And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run." This line reminds one of Donne's famous lines "Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run"(The Sun Rising), which makes one reason why it is easy to desire control of fate by fair and foul means like Macbeth, but like Donne it is easy to question it, than to find an answer apart from what befits our dignity---simply by fighting and falling a prey to expectations. Fear is another face of expectation, when either the fear and hopelessness is confessed with bitter straightforwardness, as in Plath's "Metaphors", who plays with the "I" or the ego that must come to terms with number nine or the letters of pregnancy and nine months it takes normally, where in a strange negative metaphorical allusion to life she says: "I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off." Plath is cursing her lack of control over her pregnancy or over life's situation in general and that she has become another stranded fallen human forsaken by her human short comings and now she must bear her fate, and become a "fat-purse" for money to be minted there or a loaf "big" with "yeasty rising". There is a general anger with herself and the anger for having to fall prey to overindulgence and the fact that women are fated to fall prey to it! She is not in control of her body and she describes herself to an "Elephant" or a "ponderous house", as this echoes her disgust with her body in "Lady Lazarus" (using words like 'paperweight', 'napkin' 'sour breath' etc) and she tries to liberate herself with self-mutilation invoking the famous line: "Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real." Whereas Plath's expectations are of self-liberation from life's sorrows ('trash', as in "Lady Lazarus", line 26), hope and self-mutilation comes together in Robert Browning's endless bargain with passionate tryst with life in the form of a beloved. It may either be a Porphyria that is killed for jealousy or to avenge a "God" who never says a "word" (last line "Porphyria's lover" by Browning). But to avenge fate and to take control of situations, a Browning lover is more successful than a Plath in escaping life's sullen trials and bend fate to obey his desires. The famous lines from "The Last ride Together" stand a testimony, a quite different one, to Plath, when we try to take charge of our life, our fate and our love: "I SAID--Then, dearest, since 'tis so, Since now at length my fate I know, Take back the hope you gave,--I claim Only a memory of the same, --And this beside, if you will not blame; Your leave for one more last ride with me" This is how the deceptive lines start, when the lover requests the last ride to fill up his memory with to ease his passion and relinquish his love to the chosen fate. But can men do that really And Browning writes quite a different psychological piece of horror for us when the lines conclude with a mentally obstinate lover becomes obsessed with an eternal ride together and taking the only chance to ask the very fearful question to himself and at once committing a crime against nature and life saying, either finding solace in an act of murder or just eternalizing an instant to serve him forever and transcending life's petty worries and physical bounds with his soul surpassing the bounds of life's linearity with love's eternal magic: "What if we still ride on, we two With life for ever old yet new, Changed not in kind but in degree, The instant made eternity,-- And heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, for ever ride" PRIMARY POEMS: 1. Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" 2. Because I could not stop for death by Dickinson 3. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" 4. Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" 5. Plath "Metaphors" MY OWN REFERENCE: 6. Death Be not proud by Donne and also "The Sun Rising" 7. Shakespeare's sonnets (55, 66, 73) 8. Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold 9. Last Ride together by Robert Browning 10. T.S Eliot's "Preludes" 11. Plath "lady Lazarus" Works Cited 1. Arnold, Matthew. The Dover Beach. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/doverbeach.html The Victorian website. Extracted: 9.12.2006 2. Browning, Robert. The Last Ride Together. http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/the_last_ride_together.html ,Poetry Archive Website. Extracted: 9.12.2006 3. Dickinson, Emily. Because I could Not Stop For Death. http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/443/ , Online Literature Website. Extracted: 9.12.2006 4. Donne, John. Death Be not proud. Rice University website. Rice University Website, http://www.cs.rice.edu/ssiyer/minstrels/poems/796.html , Extracted: 9.12.2006 5. Donne, John. The Sun Rising. http://luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sunrising.htm,Lumarium Website, Extracted: 9.12.2006 6. Eliot, T.S. Preludes. http://www.wsu.edu:8080/wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/eliot_preludes.html Washington State University Website. Extracted: 9.12.2006 7. Herrick, Robert. To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/lporh10.txt, Project Gutenberg, 9.12.2006, *140*, Extracted: 9.12.2006 8. Marvell, Andrew. To his Coy Mistress. http://luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm Lumarium Org Website. Extracted: 9.12.2006 9. Plath, Sylvia. Metaphors. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/metaphors/ Poem Hunters Website. Extracted: 9.12.2006 10. Plath, Sylvia. Lady Lazarus. http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/ll.html Sylvia Plath Forum Website, Extracted: 9.12.2006 11. Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 55. http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn02.htm#anchor055 Shakespeare's-Sonnets Website, Extracted: 9.12.2006 12. Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 66. http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn02.htm#anchor066, Shakespeare's-Sonnets Website, Extracted: 9.12.2006 13. Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 73..http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn02.htm#anchor073, Shakespeare's-Sonnets Website, Extracted: 9.12.2006 14. Thomas, Dylan. Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night. http://www.bigeye.com/donotgo.htm , Big Eye Website, Extracted: 9.12.2006 Read More