Poems by Julia Ward Howe and William Shakespear - Book Report/Review Example

Julia Ward Howe was a prominent poet and social activist born in New York on May 1786. She was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Some of her works include Passion Flowers, Later Lyrics, At Sunset, Words for the Hour and From Sunset Ridge: Poems Old and New. Her book ‘Passion Flowers’ is a collection of extremely personal poems that she wrote with the consent of her husband. She was a social activist who also focused on the causes of women’s suffrage and pacifism. She wrote the poem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in November 1861 in a flash of inspiration during the American Civil War after she had visited a Union Army camp where she heard soldiers singing ‘John Brown’s body’. Her companion James Freeman Clarke suggested Howe to write something to raise the morale of the troops. The next morning, she reminisced, the poem started taking shape in her mind. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. However, "Battle Hymn" was popularized as a song by Union chaplain Charles Cardwell McCabe, who often included it in his lectures and sang it on important occasions. The hymn was also a favorite of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and remains a staple of American patriotic and religious music. William Shakespeare was a legendary English playwright and poet widely acclaimed to be the greatest author that ever existed in the history of English language. He was baptized on 26 April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616. Popularly known as ‘Bard of Avon’ and anointed as England’s national poet, his literary works include thirty eight plays, two long narrative poems, and one hundred and fifty four sonnets. His plays are often performed on stage and translations are available in almost every living language. Shakespeare wrote the sonnet ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’ keeping in mind the fact that youth fades away and is overshadowed by grey lines. This poem represents the poet’s plea to a young man to get married. He pleads the young man to think twice before the beauty of his countenance fades away. The structure of the poem and the tenor of the language enable the reader to realize even more clearly the nuances of the text. The need to convey the meaning clearly prompts the poet to opt for various techniques and parts of speech that are available at their disposal. It is a symbiotic relation between meaning and structure as meaning gives shape to the structure and the structure promotes the meaning (Mary E. Mills). The various parts of speech evoke vivid sensory images and result in a better elucidation of the meaning. Comparison of unlike things through metaphors or similes further explicitly clarifies the meaning conveyed in the poems or sonnets. The sonnet ‘When thirty winters shall besiege thy brow’ consists of three regular stanzas where each stanza is a quintet. The rhyme scheme adhered to right through the poem is ABAB, CDCD, EFEF and GG where the last two lines are for the rhyming couplet (Eliopulos & Moffett 75). The poem opens in future tense and consists of small sentences and is a narrative told in first person. There are fourteen lines and they are written in iambic pentameter. The twist comes in line number nine where the theme and tone of the poem change. Here the poet switches from scary thoughts of old age to the more amiable ambience of having own children. In this poem, Shakespeare wants to convey to his lover that superficial beauty will not last forever and will fade away with time. He says it is selfish for a person to not prepare for the eventual loss of beauty by planning to have a child so that unsurpassed beauty can be passed on the generation and it remains unblemished forever. From a more cynical perspective it might be said that this sonnet is an attempt by Shakespeare to convince his lover to sleep with him. Various figures of speech have been liberally used throughout the poem and the first among those that catch the attention is the use of alliteration in the second line where the poet says ‘dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field’. While ‘dig’ and ‘deep’ start with ‘d’, ‘trenches’ and ‘thy’ start with ‘t’. We also locate ‘when’ and ‘winters’ in the first line and ‘will’, ‘worth’ and ‘weed’ in the fourth line. The metaphor in ‘deep trenches in thy beauty’s field’ is also personified as ‘deep trenches’ actually refer to the wrinkles on human face while ‘thy beauty’s field’ refers to the face itself. The poet has also used lots of similes as ‘deep-sunken eyes’, ‘all eating shame’, ‘sum my count’ and others to effectively and rather tellingly convey how advancing age gradually robs an youthful face of its glow and glamour. The use of metaphor is also evident when the poet conveys the relentless adverse impact of age on beauty when he alludes to a siege laid by an army around a castle. The poet carries on with the metaphor as he states since the siege is a long one, for about forty years, the army need some comforts and hence digs a few trenches. Another metaphor used is ‘proud livery’ where good looks are compared with glittering and ceremonious costume that attracts immediate attention and admiration. This sonnet can be also considered as an ironic love poem owing to its bizarre ending that shatters the expectation of a beautiful person that their beauty will last forever. The irony is evident in the rude realization of inescapable eventuality. The poem ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ by Julia Ward Howe explicitly alludes to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was the son of God and the embodiment of every virtue. The poem attributes a similar hue to the Northern Army as being the flag bearer of virtue and patriotism as they are engaged in the virtuous act of ridding the Unites States of the scourge of slavery while retaining the ‘united’ structure of the country. And, as Jesus rose from the dead, so would the Northern Army finally achieve victory through innumerable trials and tribulations. Poets have the liberty to use figures of speech as and when they like as those are indeed the most potent ammunition in the armory of every poet. Howe effectively uses alliteration to further highlight the message she wants to convey through this poem. By using ‘trampling’ and ‘the’ in the second line and ‘circling’ and ‘camps’ further down the same line she conveys a compelling picture of the rigors faced by the Northern Army and the horrors of a battlefield. The poet also takes recourse to personification as she writes ‘His truth is marching on’ and personifies truth. Similarly, day is also personified in the line ‘His day is marching on’. There is a striking simile in second last line of the poem where the poet writes ‘As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free’. Here the poet unequivocally equates the Northern Army with Jesus Christ by comparing the manner in which Jesus gave his life in his struggle to make men follow the path of God with the struggle the Northern Army is going through in their efforts to free their dark skinned brethrens from the clutches of slavery. The irony conveyed in the poem is that irrespective of how much material wealth people may acquire during their lifetime, they will be ultimately evaluated on the final judgment day not on the basis of their earthly acquisitions but on the purity of their hearts. So, all efforts spent on garnering material wealth is in effect a sheer waste of time as it could be better utilized in acquiring purity of heart as that is what is of ultimate importance. As the poem is related to war and battlefield it is only natural that the poet would try to incorporate some sounds that would more vividly create an atmosphere of battle with soldiers marching and weapons clanging and guns booming. She succeeds stupendously in achieving this objective through such lines as ‘He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored’ where ‘trampling’ unmistakably conveys the stamp of authority and air of finality of the Northern Army. Also, the line ‘His truth is marching on’ creates an atmosphere of battlefield where soldiers are relentlessly marching on without any pause in their quest for ultimate victory. The poem consists of five stanzas of six lines each and has a rhyme scheme as ABC DEF, GHI DEF, JKL DEF, MNO DEF, PQR DEF. Any attempt to compare these two poems brings forth the first and most obvious difference between the two and that is while ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ is a thirty line poem, ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’ is a sonnet – a poem of fourteen lines. There is no doubt that both the poems are magnificent pieces of literature written by two of the most revered poets in the history of English literature. These masters of the language excelled in juggling with various parts of speech and were completely successful in their stated objectives as one poem conveyed the anguish of an individual at his inability to convince his beloved and the other tried to encapsulate the vicissitudes of a nation as it negotiated a most treacherous path in its history. The biggest difference between these two literary masterpieces is perhaps in their scope, tone and tenor. The poem by Shakespeare has a much smaller canvas and is essentially more concerned with an individual and his personal wishes, desires and anguish at not being able to fulfill his desires and alternates between stern reminders about the transient nature of superficial beauty while serenading sincere entreaties on heeding to how such a ignominious eventuality can be evaded. As is his wont, Shakespeare incomparably weaves in serious philosophy in this poem which is otherwise steeped in longings of a lovelorn youth. He reminds human beings about the ephemeral nature of life itself and highlights the feeble attempts made by human beings to evade the eventuality of death through procreation and continuing the blood line. The poem by Howe on the other hand has a much larger canvas where individual lives and deaths take a back seat in a struggle that threatens to put an entire nation in jeopardy. The backdrop is war in its full fury and there is no place for soulful pining of an unsatisfied lover in such tumultuous environment. The cause for which the Northern Army is fighting is much nobler than mere aggression and occupation of foreign territory. Neither is the Northern Army attempting to loot the wealth of a foreign land in an imperialist attempt to increase the geographical domain of its influence. Here is an army that is risking their lives and walking the thin line between life and death not for their personal gains but for the highly laudable cause of freeing others from the ignominy of slavery. The realization that slavery is an indelible blot on the entire humankind and should be obliterated once and for all and the determination to risk their lives for the benefit of mankind makes the Northern Army so noble and lends the poem a much grander scale. The poem reaches a peak as it compares the efforts of the Northern Army with that of Jesus Christ. This comparison not only vaults the Northern Army but also the poem to an altogether higher plane where everyday needs and wants of individual human beings fade into hasty oblivion as more pressing needs and wants of entire mankind are painted in vivid colors on a throbbing canvas. The enormity of the situation sweeps readers off their feet as they grapple with it. This surely does not mean that ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’ is inconsequential when compared with ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. These two poems are equally exquisite pictures painted by greatest artists of English language. While the poem by Shakespeare is an intense and intimate portrait, complete with every emotion and anguish that a human face can ever exhibit, the poem by Howe is a huge fresco covering the entire dome of a cathedral. Though at first glance one tends to be swayed by the expanse of the fresco, once the first emotions are overcome, one settles down to admire with equal enthusiasm the beauty of the portrait of an anguished young man. Works Cited Eliopulos, Tina D. & Moffett, Todd Scott (2006). The everything writing poetry book: a practical guide to style, structure, form, and expression. Avon, MA: F-W Publications, Inc. Read More