Lecture notes drop box and creative corner of Dr Aswathy Aravindakshan
Reading Time: 2 minutesEmily Dickinson was an American poet who lived a quiet life and wrote short, powerful poems about death, nature, love, and the soul. Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Many things shaped Emily’s poetry. She read poems by the Metaphysical poets from England and found meaning in the ‘Book of…
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Reading Time: 3 minutes John Keats, the famous Romantic poet, wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” in 1819. In the poem, Keats listens to the song of a nightingale and wishes to escape from the pain of human life to the bird’s joyful world. In the first stanza, Keats says, My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My…
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Reading Time: 7 minutesHeaney’s poem Casualty is a powerful elegy, first included in the Field Work (1979) collection and then in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1998). In the poem, the poet describes the death of his fisherman friend, Louis O’Neill, though he does not mention his name. He was one of those British soldiers killed during a protest march. He…
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Reading Time: < 1 minute One of the aspects of the medieval revival was a renewed interest in the poetry of the old English masters, more especially Spenser and Milton. Under the inspiration of Milton’s Penseroso, a school or cult of melancholy grew, and the poets of this school are known as “the churchyard school of poets”. Gray’s Elegy,…
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Reading Time: 4 minutes EVENING IN THE CHURCHYARD As evening approaches, the gentle tolling of church bells signals night’s arrival. Exhausted ploughmen and cattle slowly return from the fields, their movements sluggish after a long day’s work. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his…
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Reading Time: 3 minutes The poem was written in 1750 and first published on February 15, 1751. It was originally titled Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church Yard. One immediate reason for its composition was the death of Gray’s friend, the poet Richard West. Gray sent the poem to Horace Walpole, who popularised it in London literary circles….
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Reading Time: 3 minutes An elegy is a poetic form that laments the loss of someone or something, often reflecting on death and life’s transient nature. Traditionally, elegies mourn a personal loss, but over time, the genre has evolved to include broader meditations on universal human experiences. Origin and Characteristics of Elegy The elegy traces its origins to…
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Reading Time: 3 minutesIn Thomas Gray’s Elegy, he writes a good deal about himself. The six stanzas in the main text and a tail-like appendix of three stanzas called the Epitaph are all self-drawn character studies of the poet. Many critics argue that the Elegy would have been greater and more artistic without these nine stanzas. This criticism deserves close examination. Nine stanzas…
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Reading Time: 3 minutes Thomas Gray’s masterpiece, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, brings to light a brilliant character study of the rude forefathers of the hamlet. In the poem, Gray weeps over the unwept and the unhonoured. Sings about the unsung. Gray becomes a historian of “the short and simple annals of the poor” by composing…
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