In Nature’s temple living pillars rise,
And words are murmured none have understood.
And man must wander through a tangled wood
Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.
As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim
Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;
Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,
Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.
Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,
Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;
Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,
Have all the expansion of things infinite:
As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,
Which sing the sense’s and the soul’s delight.
The Corpse
License: Public Domain
Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met
By the roadside on that sweet summer day;
There on a grassy couch with pebbles set,
A loathsome body lay.
The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air,
Steaming with exhalations vile and dank,
In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare
The swollen side and flank.
On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven
As though with chemic heat to broil and burn,
And unto Nature all that she had given
A hundredfold return.
The sky smiled down upon the horror there
As on a flower that opens to the day;
So awful an infection smote the air,
Almost you swooned away.
The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side,
Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream,
That ran along these tatters of life’s pride
With a liquescent gleam.
And like a wave the maggots rose and fell,
The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife:
It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell
And multiply with life
The hideous corpse. From all this living world
A music as of wind and water ran,
Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled
By the swift winnower’s fan.
And then the vague forms like a dream died out,
Or like some distant scene that slowly falls
Upon the artist’s canvas, that with doubt
He only half recalls.
A homeless dog behind the boulders lay
And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn,
Waiting a chance to come and take away
The morsel she had torn.
And you, even you, will be like this drear thing,
A vile infection man may not endure;
Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring!
O passionate and pure!
Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace!
When the last sacramental words are said;
And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face
Moulders among the dead.
Then, O Beloved, whisper to the worm
That crawls up to devour you with a kiss,
That I still guard in memory the dear form
Of love that comes to this!
Spleen
License: Public Domain
The rainy moon of all the world is weary,
And from its urn a gloomy cold pours down,
Upon the pallid inmates of the mortuary,
And on the neighbouring outskirts of the town.
My wasted cat, in searching for a litter,
Bestirs its mangy paws from post to post;
(A poet’s soul that wanders in the gutter,
With the jaded voice of a shiv’ring ghost).
The smoking pine-log, while the drone laments,
Accompanies the wheezy pendulum,
The while amidst a haze of dirty scents,
—Those fatal remnants of a sick man’s room—
The gallant knave of hearts and queen of spades
Relate their ancient amorous escapades.
Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was born on Dec. 12, 1821 in Rouen, France. He grew up in an affluent middle class family; his father was a respected surgeon. As a young man, Flaubert became friends in college with other students who despised the bourgeoisie, and began writing short stories and, eventually, novels that were critical of middle class values. Flaubert’s health problems (he suffered from epilepsy) forced him to give up plans to study the law, so he devoted his energies to writing literature. After his father died, he retired to a country house near Rouen, where he would spend the rest of his life. His masterpiece, Madame Bovary, is a psychological study of a woman desperate to escape a banal middle-class life. Flaubert is considered to be one of the greatest practitioners of literary realism in France. “A Simple Soul” is the study of the life of Felicite, a servant of Madame Aubain. Over the course of 50 years, she loses many people for whom she cares, and she ends her life caring for a rather difficult parrot named Loulou.
Consider while reading:
- What characteristics of realism do you see in this story?
- Analyze the character of Felicite. What kind of suffering and loss does she undergo in her life?
- What do you think Flaubert is saying about life through this character. How do you respond to her?
- What is the significance of the title of the short story?
Read an excerpt of “A Simple Soul” here: A Simple Soul – Gustave Flaubert – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Christina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti was born the youngest child in a famous and accomplished family of artists, poets and scholars. Educated at home, she was by nature reserved and pious, like her mother. A devout evangelical Christian, she rejected suitors she considered not sufficiently serious in their faith. She suffered from neuralgia and angina for much of her life and lived very quietly, working for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and writing mostly devotional poetry. The long poem “Goblin Market” (1862) is Rossetti’s best known work and is markedly different in style and content from any of her other poems. Published in 1862 and illustrated by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the well-known Pre-Raphael poet, the poem was controversial from the first. While she informed her publisher that the poem was not intended for children, Rossetti often insisted in public that it was intended for children. The plot of the long narrative poem is very similar to a fairy tale: the brave and steadfast sister, Lizzie, saves her impulsive sister Laura from a deadly enchantment that has resulted from Laura succumbing to the temptation of eating goblin fruit. The poem’s dark undertones of sexuality, commodification, and religious ritual have fascinated readers since its publication.
After Death
License: Public Domain
The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.
Up-Hill
License: Public Domain
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Leo Tolstoy
This Russian writer was born in a privileged class and chose to abandon his privilege for a simple life. Beloved for the radical transformation in his work and in his life, he has become one of the most famous writers in literature. His writing reflects his life, in fact, in its simplicity and realism. As a young man in school, Tolstoy excelled in linguistics, and he master several languages. When he traveled through Europe, therefore, he was able to absorb the political and social climate through conversations with the common people he met. At home in Russia, Tolstoy sympathized with the serfs, who bore the brunt of fierce poverty brought about by war and famine. His experience in the Crimean War led to his great novel War and Peace (1869), a realistic and gruesome account of battle. Another of his great novels, Anna Karenina (1873-77), introduces the audience to the reality of relationship among corrupt human beings. Tolstoy continually treats realism as a means of admonishing others to moral righteousness.
In his mid-50’s, Tolstoy experienced a religious conversion that led to his abandoning the Russian Orthodox Church in favor of the simple faith and a purer form of Christianity. Instead of living in his estate house, he lived and worked alongside the peasants, worshipping with them instead of observing religious ritual. Of course, he was consequently excommunicated from the Orthodox Church. His change of lifestyle, however, endeared him to a wide audience in both Russia and Europe. He professed a religious system in which human beings are born pure, but are eventually and inevitably corrupted by society. His characters search for happiness in social success, but they only find peace in an objective and realistic acceptance of life. Tolstoy also became interested in educational theory; subsequently, he opened a school in his family manor house for the children of the country peasants who worked the land. He taught a method of inspiration that influenced educators in Europe and America, who modeled Tolstoy’s approach to learning in the early stages of public educational.
Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) demonstrates the self-centeredness and shallowness of people in high society. Ilyich makes all the right moves to gain wealth and social acceptance: he marries a well-connected woman he does not really love; he neglects his wife and children in favor of his career; and, as a judge, he treats the prisoners in his court with disdain and indifference. When Ilyich must come to terms with the reality of death, he learns that the only comfort he receives is from a servant who represents the naturalness of the common people.
Consider while reading:
- Describe Ivan Ilyich’s wife’s reaction to his illness and death.
- Describe his associates’ reactions to his death.
- What is the significance of the black bag?
- How does Ilyich finally let go of life and embrace death?
Read The Death of Ivan Ilyich here: The Death of Ivan Ilych – Leo Tolstoy – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s life was every bit as eventful as the stories that he wrote. As a young man, he was sentenced to be executed by a firing squad for being part of a group that was considered subversive. He received a last-minute reprieve from the tsar, and Dostoyevsky instead spent four years doing hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. Those experiences informed his works; in addition to characters who face imminent death or time in Siberia, there are characters with epilepsy, gambling problems, bad luck in love, and ongoing poverty—all conditions that he faced. His fame began with his first novella, Poor Folk (1845), but he never made enough money from his writings to support his family in comfort. Despite all of these hardships, Dostoyevsky managed to become one of Russia’s greatest writers. Leo Tolstoy praised Dostoyevsky as the better writer, and his works influenced writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William Faulkner, among many others (including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud). Dostoyevsky is considered the first existentialist novelist; for him, the psychology of the characters is the basis for realism (their experience of the world is the world). In novels such as Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), characters range from murderers to devout followers of the Russian Orthodox Church (Dostoyevsky’s own religious preference), all portrayed with psychological clarity. In Notes from Underground (1864), Dostoyevsky satirizes (among other things) the idea that scientific progress will create a utopian society. In Part One, the unnamed narrator, or Underground Man, may seem crazy at first, with what appear to be random and contradictory thoughts. In fact, the argument is constructed very carefully to demonstrate that human beings demand free will—and that they will give up everything to get it. In Part Two, which is an extended flashback, the Underground Man offers a practical demonstration of his theories in his own past. Of particular interest is his love-hate relationship with Romanticism; the narrator ultimately argues that all of us prefer Romanticism to real life (or Realism), simply because real life is not as satisfying as escapism.
Read “Notes From Underground” here: Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen is called both “the father of Realism” and “the father of modern theater” in Europe, which is to say that he was the first playwright to use Realism on stage. Ibsen’s impact on theater makes him the most influential European playwright since Shakespeare. For Ibsen, art should be both challenging and a force for social change; his plays often expose what he saw as the moral hypocrisy of society. In particular, Ibsen’s plays peel back the veneer of respectability of the Norwegian middle class, revealing what happens when people only pretend to be moral. No group or ideology was safe from his criticism, and often there are no characters in a play who are completely without blame. For example, in An Enemy of the People (1882), the outright villains may be the businessmen who are poisoning the local water source, but the locals are equally at fault for refusing to believe the truth for selfish reasons, and the supposed hero of the story makes matters worse with his stubborn temper. In Ghosts (1881), Ibsen broke several taboos in his depiction of how a husband’s repeated infidelities lead to passing on syphilis to his unborn son. As guilty as the husband was, everyone from the pastor to the wife bear some responsibility for looking the other way, even after the husband’s death. Ibsen’s goals for A Doll’s House (1879) are every bit as broad as his other works. Nora and Torvald try to live up to their society’s ideals for how men and women should behave, but both of them become victims to society’s unrealistic expectations. The truth in this case is a lit match that leads to a metaphorical explosion. The fact that Nora and Torvald do not agree on the definition of what is right appears to be a product of which gender holds the power in society, rather than an actual gender issue. A Doll’s House does not offer a conventional happy ending, which so shocked audiences that some theaters actually rewrote the ending when staging it. The ending is also complicated by the fact that Nora’s rebellion against expectations has no guarantee of success in a society where women could not even borrow money without a man’s signature. A common theme in Ibsen’s plays, therefore, is that truth does not always set you free; in fact, sometimes the very best intentions are doomed to failure if society refuses to listen or change. It is a problem that Ibsen faced himself, since his efforts to influence change were invariably seen as shocking and controversial. It is a testament to his persistence and talent that audiences now expect the theater to address social issues.
Read A Doll’s House here: #10 – A doll’s house : Ghosts / With an introd. by William Archer – Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library
H.G. Wells
Herbert George Wells, generally referred to as H.G. Wells, was a prolific 19th-century British writer best known for his science fiction novels. He is often referred to, in fact, as the father of science fiction. Born into a lower middle class family, after his father’s shop failed and the family went bankrupt, Wells held a variety of jobs as an adolescent, including working as a teaching assistant, apprentice draper, and pharmacy clerk. He would later use these experiences in his novels as the basis for social satire. After eventually winning a scholarship to Imperial College, Wells trained as a scientist; he was particularly interested in Darwinian theory. Wells was also an avid Socialist and an active member of the Fabian Society, an organization that advocated a long-term approach to the eventual Socialist revolution. Throughout his life, Wells suffered from various physical ailments, including diabetes, and his life was further complicated by a series of romantic affairs and two failed marriages. Wells, who published 51 novels as well as dozens of stories, story collections, works of non-fiction, and essays, is also best known for his novels The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and When the Sleeper Awakes. An early science fiction novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) dramatizes the practice of vivisection, the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of scientific research. Vivisection was a controversial topic in fin de siècle England, with a number of organizations formed to fight the practice as cruel and unethical. As the novel examines the ethics of vivisection, it also illustrates the possibility that civilization was spiraling downward into an increasingly degenerate state. Although Wells was an educated man and a scientist, he appears to be warning of the dangers that unregulated science can pose to the larger community.
Read The Island of Dr. Moreau here: The Island of Doctor Moreau – H.G. Wells – World Literature (nvcc.edu)
W.B. Yeats
The poetry of William Butler Yeats does not fit easily into any literary movement. He admired the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites, who embraced a combination of realistic techniques and symbolic meanings. Yeats’ poetry is full of myths and symbols, and his belief in a type of mysticism or spiritualism underlies much of his work (for Yeats, mysticism and the occult were real, not metaphorical). His earlier poems, such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890), could be straight out of Victorianism, but over time, Yeats began to incorporate more realistic elements into his poetry. In “Easter, 1916″—written right after the failed Easter Uprising for Irish independence—Yeats offers a critical (and mostly unflattering) view of the individuals who were executed, but recognizes how their deaths for the cause have transformed them into something greater than themselves (a new mythology). Despite that transformation, the narrator worries about whether it was a worthwhile sacrifice (in fact, by 1922, Yeats would be elected a senator in the new Republic of Ireland). Even though his poetry in later years would contain elements of Modernism, such as in the poem “The Second Coming” (1921), Yeats never abandoned the mystical and symbolic in his poetry, becoming a modern poet who disliked Modernism and refused to give up traditional elements (Albrecht; Longley). In his life, Yeats had the same tendency to be caught between (or among) movements. Although he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant born in Dublin, who was expected to support the English presence in Ireland, Yeats became an Irish Nationalist: partly out of patriotism, and partly because he fell in love with the actress Maud Gonne, a beautiful Nationalist. Yeats proposed to Gonne at least four times, and his (bitter) reaction to her rejection of him can be found in many poems, including some of those written after he married Georgiana Hyde-Lees, with whom he had two children. The poem “When You Are Old” (1895) is an early example of his obsession with Gonne. Besides writing poetry, Yeats was one of the founders of the Irish (now Abbey) Theater, for which he wrote many plays. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, it was mostly for his plays, which the Nobel organization noted in 1969 is doubly ironic: not only are his poems more famous now, but also “Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize” (Frenz).
Easter 1916
License: Public Domain
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashed within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
When You Are Old
License: Public Domain
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty will love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
License: Public Domain
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.