英国文学赏析整理

Alexander Pope

An Essay on Man （know then thyself）

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, every two line have the same thyme at the last word.

The poem is important in the sense that it embodies the 18th century concepts of the universe and man’s place in it, that is man is made in the shape of God, and occupies a middle position in the Great Chain of Being. As the poet says sometimes we have too much knowledge and feel suspect about everything, but sometimes we have too much weakness and can not be as pride as Stotic, sometimes we seem to have the power to rule all things but sometimes we seem prey to all. We are in the middle place and sometimes we are confused about whether to act or rest. The poet perfectly describes man’s feeling about ourselves and about the world.

Although Pope is never profound in thought but he is very adapt in voicing the idea of his contemporaries in a beautiful and clever way.

Robert Burns

A Red, Red, Rose

The metrical pattern of the poem is basically in the ballad form, i.e. each stanza consisting of four lines, with four stressed syllables in the odd-numbered lines and three stressed syllables in the even-numbered lines, and with rhymes occurring on the even-numbered lines.

The image of rose evokes traditional associations of beauty, love and romance. Its simple lyrics and straight form and expression of feeling make it a favorite choice for poetry anthologies and a most appreciated poem for readers. Incorporating various elements from folk songs, the poem is supposed to be a song sung by an Irish sailor to his sweet heart before his ship sailed off to sea, the exaggerated declaration of love “till the seas are gone dry and till the rock melts” can remind us of a well known Chinese oath. There is no tearful parting. But determined hope of reunion: the sailor will come back to his sweet heart” though it were ten thousand miles.”

William Blake

The Lame

The poem is written in rhyming couplets with alternating iambic and anapestic feet. it’s one of the poems that collected in Songs of Innocence which express the poet’s delight in life, even in the face of sorrow and suffering.

The poem is a child song, in the form of a question and answer. The first stanza is rural and descriptive, while the second focuses on abstract spiritual matters and contains explanation and analogy. The child’s question is both na?ve and profound. “who made thee” is a simple question, but the child is also tapping into the deep and timeless questions that all human beings have, about their own origins and the nature of creation. The situation of a child talking to an animal is a believable one. Yet by answering his own question the child coverts it into a rhetorical one, thus counteraction the initial spontaneous sense of the poem, and also reveals his confidence in his simple Christian faith and his innocent acceptance of its teachings.

The lamb symbolizes Jesus, as Jesus has a traditional image as a lamb. The image of the child is also associated with Jesus: in the Gospel, Jesus displays a special concern for children. This poem, like many of the poems in Songs of Innocence, accepts that Blake saw as the most positive aspects of conventional Christian belief.

William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud(四步抑扬)

The form of the poem: it consists of four six-line stanzas following the rhyme scheme: ababcc. Each line is metered (音步) in iambic tetrameter.

One of the themes of the poem is about the soothing effect of memories on human thoughts, as we know the song was written 2 years later when Wordsworth saw the flowers, so memories are really important.

It’s a typical poem of Romanticism; it incorporates the ideas and aspects that are essential in romantic poetry. This simple poem also revisits the familiar subject of the unity between human and nature in a simple style and musical eloquence.

The poem’s main brilliance lies in the reverse personification in its early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural subject—a cloud, and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, dancing and tossing their heads. This technique is a very effective method for instilling in the reader the similar feeling, by which words worth implies an inherent unity between man and nature and signs of the harmony between things in nature and the harmony between nature and the poet himself.

The Solitary Reaper(四步抑扬)

The four eight-line stanzas of this poem are written in a tight iambic tetrameter. Each follows a rhyme scheme of ababccdd.

In this poem, the beauty of the song is presented to the reader through two

well organized comparisons in the second stanza.

The poem’s structure: the first stanza sets the scene, the second offers two bird comparisons for the music, the third wonders about the content of the songs, and the fourth describes the effect of the songs on the speaker. The final two lines of the poem return its focus to the familiar theme of memory and the soothing effect of beautiful memories on human thoughts and feelings

To an extent, this poem ponders the limitations of language, as it does in the third stanza, but the ultimate intention of the poem is to praise the beauty of music and its fluid expressive beauty.

George Gordon Byron

She Walks in Beauty (四步抑扬)

The poem contains three stanzas of iambic tetrameter, with an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. Its rhyme scheme: ababab

Byron wrote the poem for his young cousin when they first met at a party, at that time she was wearing a black gown and Byron was struck by her beauty.

In the poem, the first two lines demonstrate both the opposing qualities of darkness and light that pass through the three verses[（诗或歌的）句, 节.].

By reading the poem, the reader can look deeper into the contents of Byron’s poem and discover both internal and external beauty in the lady.

Don Juan (the isles of Greece) (四步抑扬)

The poem is composed of 16stanzas, each stanza consisting of 6 lines of iambic tetrameter, with a rhyme scheme of ababcc.

It’s a satirical epic and also Byron’s masterpiece. It consists of 16 cantos(长诗中的篇章) and remains unfinished.

Don Juan was a great epic of the early 19th century, it was a time when Turkish people took control of Greece and brought the dreadful life to Greek people. European writers and scholars are mostly keen on the ancient Greek civilization, and Byron is also one of them, but he is more interested in calling upon the Greek people to rise up against their enslavement under the Turkish rule.

Byron’s poems are full of revolutionary enthusiasm. The Isles of Greece portrays perfectly this character of spirit. In the poem, he speaks in the voice of a Greek poet, as he use expressions like “my country” and he writes about the past glories of Greece with the purpose of motivating the present-day Greeks to fight for freedom.

Although the poem is about the adventures of a Spanish libertine(浪子), the real significance of the poem lies in the vivid description of the lives and manners of many lands, Byron’s fiery passions for the liberation of the Greek people and his bitter satire on the sham(假装) and hypocrisy(虚伪) in love, religion, and the social relations of his time.

唐璜是一步未完成的长篇叙事讽刺诗，是拜伦最长的作品，《哀希腊》为六行诗体，四音步抑扬格，韵式为ababcc。 在诗中，拜伦用古希腊的灿烂文明和古希腊人民反抗外来侵略的英勇史来激励希腊人民反抗土耳其统治的决心。

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ode to The West (五步抑扬格)

“风”一词在希伯来，拉丁， 希腊及其他许多语言中与呼吸，灵魂，精灵等书同义词，因此雪莱的西风是一个精灵，是一个“秋之生命的呼吸”。在诗的末尾，雪莱吟出了他的千古绝唱：“如果冬天来临，春天还会远吗？”

在形式上，《西风颂》是十四行诗与意大利三行诗相融合的结果，如同十四行诗，《西》每一诗节均为14行，最后两行为偶句诗，但前12行诗的韵式为意大利三行诗的aba bcb cdc ded，最后两行为ee.

《西》运用比喻，象征的手法，将写景与抒情，内心情感与外部气势融为一体，给读者以丰富的想象。

This ode consists of five stanzas, each is a combination of sonnet and terza rima form. The rhyme of a typical sonnet is :aba bec cdc ded ee, and in this poem we have aba bcb cdc ded ee. This linked chain gives a feeling of onward motion, the verse has a breathless quality which is in keeping with the onward motion fo the wind’s movement, the metrical pattern of each live is basically iambic pentameter.

Linguistic techniques including personification, auditory imagery, thetorical questions, metaphors and similes

In the turbulent year of 1819, Shelley wrote many political lyrics. This poem is most representative of Shelley’s feelings and thoughts at the time. It is a mixture of death and rebirth. Shelley is concerned with the regeneration of himself spiritually and poetically and of Europe politically. He is appealing to the west wind to effect this regeneration. In the first three stanzas, the dynamic force of the west wind is manifested in its power on the land, in the air, and in the sea in different seasons. It is the destroyer and preserver. It will destroy the old world and herald in a new one. In the fourth stanza Shelley wishes that he were a leaf, a cloud, and a wave, so that he could feel the power of the west wind; but he is aware of his age and his sufferings in life which have bent him down. Finally, he appeals to the wind, the wind of aspiration and change, to reinvigorate him and to give force and persuasiveness to his poetry.

The last line” if winter comes, can spring be far behind?”is the most famous.

In a word, this poem is a passionate calling to the spirit of the personified west wind. The symbolism in this poem is rich and diverse.

Song to the Man of England(四步抑扬)

The song consists of eight quatrains, the metrical pattern of each line being iambic tetrameter and the rhyme scheme of each quatrain being aabb.

On August 16, 1819, when about 60,000 people were holding a rally in St.Peter’s Field near Manchester, demanding universal suffrage, parliamentary reform, and the repeal of the Corn Law, a troop of cavalry opened fire on them, killed more than a dozen, and wounded several hundreds. The killing was ironically referred to as “Peterloo Massacre”, a combination of “Waterloo” and “ St.Peter’s”. Upon hearing the news of the massacre, Shelley, being exiled in Italy, wrote several political lyrics in protest against the government’s barbarous action and calling the working people to rise up to overthrow the rule of the idle class.

In the poem, the drones refer to the people of the exploiting class who do not work and live on the labor of the working people. Bees of England refer to

the working class. Shelley use simile to imply that the exploiting class has taken everything from the working class, and in the last two stanzas the poet is reprimanding[ /?reprima:nd/ .训诫，谴责] the workers who do not answer his call to fight for their freedom.

John Keats

Ode to a Nightingale

The poem contains eight stanzas, each consisting of ten lines, with nine lines in five-stress iambic meter and the eighth line in three-stress iambic meter. The poem is remarkable for its imagery and its music. They appeal to readers’ sense-tactile(触觉) gustatory（味觉）and visual and auditory.

Keats’ poetry is an escape from the real world into a world of imagination; ode to a nightingale was written in 1819 and is one of Keats’ best poems.

In the poem Keats identifies the nightingale with his Ideal Beauty and hopes that the song of the nightingale will help him to escape from the world of actually where “to think is to be full of sorrow into the world of Ideal Beauty, a place of eternal beauty.

In the second stanza, hearing the song of the nightingale, the speaker longs to flee the human world and join the bird through alcohol. In stanzas five to

seven, the music even encourages him to embrace the idea of dying, for the purpose of never to experience any further pain of disappointment. As the nightingale flies away, the intensify of his experience has left him shaken, unable to remember whether he is awake of asleep.

济慈描述了夜莺欢乐的歌声和自己如痴如醉的感受，他好像进入了一个幻境，欲随夜莺一同融入自然，忘却人生的烦恼，然而这是诗人梦幻结束，告别夜莺，重返现实，并发出黄香毕竟不是现实的感叹

夜莺的歌声象征着不朽的艺术，相比人生则是短暂的。

To Autumn (五步抑扬格)

The poem contains three stanzas, each stanza consisting of eleven lines in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ababcdecdde.

Through a series of images he presents to the reader a picture of golden autumn, which according to Keats, is no less beautiful than spring. Special attention should be paid to how the poem appeals to our visual, tactile, and aural senses.

在《秋颂》中，诗人以绚烂的笔调描写了秋天的丰硕与收获的景色。全诗共三节，分别从景色，形态和省心三个方面着手，生动的表现了秋天的丰收美景。《秋颂》一诗有情有景，情景交融，在摹写了大自然的溶蚀也淋漓尽致的表达了诗人喜悦的情感。