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British Romanticism: Quiz 4
Due: Thursday, December 15 IN MY BOX by 2pm (no exceptions)
NOTE: All exams must be typed and conform to MLA format.
This is a take-home quiz, so you are free to spend as much time on it as you like, though it should be possible to complete it in 1 hour or less. You are free to discuss your answers with classmates if you wish, because such discussion promotes the type of intellectual engagement that we are concerned to enact and practice in this course; and you may consult your reading and class notes. However, you may NOT perform any outside research to answer the questions of the exam, whether that be internet research or traditional research, be that at the library or your own home or anywhere. Your answers must come entirely from your own thinking (either in isolation or in dialogue) and the materials of the course. If you have ANY questions about the strictures of this exam, you are welcome to post your questions to our class listserv. You are bound by the honor code of the University of Rhode Island and your own conscience to conduct yourself honorably in every regard where this exam is concerned.
1. Please identify the tone of the following stanzas and offer at least three pieces of evidence to support your answer, explaining precisely how these pieces of evidence serve as support.
Most epic poets plunge “in medias res”
(Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road),
And then your hero tells, whene’er you please,
What went before—by way of episode,
While seated after dinner at his ease,
Beside his mistress in some soft abode,
Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern,
Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.
That is the usual method, but not mine—
—My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,
And therefore I shall open with a line
(Although it cost me half an hour in spinning)
Narrating somewhat of Don Juan’s father,
And also of his mother, if you’d rather.
2. A.) Please identify two female characters in Lord Byron’s Don Juan and provide at least one passage for each that illustrate the significance of their characters within the larger narrative of the poem. B.) Please respond to the following thesis and provide at least three pieces of textual evidence to support your claim, explaining precisely how the evidence upon which you draw supports your argument.
“Lord Byron consistently treats his female characters with compassion. Byron is a proto-feminist poet, always thinking carefully and complexly about the role of women in early-nineteenth-century European society.”
3. Is Byron’s representation of a ship wreck in Don Juan funny or horrifying? Please provide three pieces of textual evidence to support your answer, and be sure to explain precisely how these pieces of evidence support your answer.
4. Please consider the relationship between the first and fifth stanzas of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Do you discern a continuity from the one to the other, or do you discern a change? You may focus on any aspects of the stanzas that you wish, by which I mean you may focus on any characteristics of the formal properties OR the thematic preoccupations of the stanzas. Provide at least four pieces of evidence to support your answer, and be sure to explain precisely how the pieces of evidence you offer support your answer.
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both.
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady ?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
5. We have focused on the concept of nature in many of the works we have studied this semester, from the political writers (Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Godwin, Williams) to the poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley). Please formulate an argument (a thesis statement) about the status of “nature” in Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” (A few questions that might help you to formulate your answer, though you need not address these questions if they are not helpful to you: Does nature exist in the work in question? If so, how? Is it different from other treatments of nature we have read this semester?) Please offer at least three pieces of textual evidence to support your answer, and be sure to explain precisely how these pieces of evidence support your answer.
The End.
Happy holidays; congratulations on completing this term; it has been a genuine pleasure to have you in my class; I admire each one of you for taking on the study of poetry; I hope poetry enriches your intellectual life in all the ways the poets we have studied so earnestly hope it will; and finally I wish you the very best in your continuing career as a student of literature, the Humanities, and in your life generally. Peace be with you.
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