Approaches to Literature(week14)

Approaches to Literature(week14)

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

"To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" is a poem written by English Cavalier poet Robert Herrick in the 17th century. The poem is in the genre of carpe diem, Latin for seize the day. It goes as follows:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he's a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And, while ye may, go marry:

For having lost but once your prime,

You may forever tarry.

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May is an oil painting on canvas created in 1909 by British Pre-Raphaelite artist, John William Waterhouse. It was the second of two paintings inspired by the 17th century poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" by Robert Herrick which begins:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

The artwork was valued at $1.75-2.5 million by Sotheby's prior to auction in April 2007, although the painting went unsold.

Lost for nearly a century, this painting was in an old Canadian farmhouse bought by a couple who requested the painting stay with the house because "It looked nice on the wall." They had no idea of its worth. When they took it to an art dealer to be appraised nearly 30 years later, he "nearly fell off his chair." Nobody knows how the painting ended up in the Canadian farmhouse

We ain't getting any younger
You got the whole wide world
They got it from you
You can talk about it all you want
But what you gonna do
Time's your oyster
The grave is always getting closer
We ain't gettin' any younger
We ain't gettin' any younger
We ain't gettin' any younger
We ain't gettin' any younger

Looked to roam
Went too far
There at the edge of the world
Things went south
Down and out
There at the edge of the world
Seasons changed
Time got strange
There at the edge of the world
We got close to the source
For better or worse
There at the edge of the world

You got the whole wide world
Laid out in front of you
You can talk about it all you want
But what the fuck you're gonna do
Time's your oyster
The grave is always getting closer
We ain't gettin' any younger
We ain't gettin' any younger
We ain't gettin' any younger
We ain't gettin' any younger

And you take it for granted
Until its taken away
We're all pressed out the same mold
The story's already been told
This world is war and blood
When it could have been love
When it could have been love
And all you learn to forget
That this never happened
And when the new world start again

Peace ripped into pieces
Peace ripped into pieces
Peace ripped into pieces
Peace ripped into pieces

We gotta put it back together again
(Peace ripped into pieces)
Put it back together again
(Peace ripped into pieces)
We gotta put it back together again
(Peace ripped into pieces)
Put it back together again
(Peace ripped into pieces)

Dover Beach

"Dover Beach" is a lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849. The most likely date is 1851.

The title, locale and subject of the poem's descriptive opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of Dover, Kent, facing Calais, France, at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part (21 miles) of the English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.

>>Analysis

In Stefan Collini's opinion, "Dover Beach" is a difficult poem to analyse, and some of its passages and metaphors have become so well known that they are hard to see with "fresh eyes". Arnold begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the beach at Dover in which auditory imagery plays a significant role ("Listen! you hear the grating roar"). The beach, however, is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that "gleams and is gone".Reflecting the traditional notion that the poem was written during Arnold's honeymoon (see composition section), one critic notes that "the speaker might be talking to his bride".

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; —on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Arnold looks at two aspects of this scene, its soundscape (in the first and second stanzas) and the retreating action of the tide (in the third stanza). He hears the sound of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness". Sophocles, a 5th-century BC Greek playwright who wrote tragedies on fate and the will of the gods, also heard this sound as he stood upon the shore of the Aegean Sea. Critics differ widely on how to interpret this image of the Greek classical age. One sees a difference between Sophocles interpreting the "note of sadness" humanistically, while Arnold, in the industrial nineteenth century, hears in this sound the retreat of religion and faith. A more recent critic connects the two as artists, Sophocles the tragedian, Arnold the lyric poet, each attempting to transform this note of sadness into "a higher order of experience".

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age, once again expressed in an auditory image ("But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar"). This fourth stanza begins with an image not of sadness, but of "joyous fulness" similar in beauty to the image with which the poem opens.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous ending metaphor. Critics have varied in their interpretation of the first two lines; one calls them a "perfunctory gesture ... swallowed up by the poem's powerfully dark picture",while another sees in them "a stand against a world of broken faith".Midway between these is one of Arnold's biographers, who describes being "true / To one another" as "a precarious notion" in a world that has become "a maze of confusion".

The metaphor with which the poem ends is most likely an allusion to a passage in Thucydides's account of the Peloponnesian War (Book 7, 44). He describes an ancient battle that occurred on a similar beach during the Athenian invasion of Sicily. The battle took place at night; the attacking army became disoriented while fighting in the darkness and many of their soldiers inadvertently killed each other. This final image has also been variously interpreted by the critics. Culler calls the "darkling plain" Arnold's "central statement" of the human condition.Pratt sees the final line as "only metaphor" and thus susceptible to the "uncertainty" of poetic language.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

"The poem's discourse", Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present—and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker resolves to love—and exigencies of history and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues. That lovers may be 'true / To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a post-medieval society reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light the world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith."^[

Critics have questioned the unity of the poem, noting that the sea of the opening stanza does not appear in the final stanza, while the "darkling plain" of the final line is not apparent in the opening. Various solutions to this problem have been proffered. One critic saw the "darkling plain" with which the poem ends as comparable to the "naked shingles of the world"."Shingles" here means flat beach cobbles, characteristic of some wave-swept coasts. Another found the poem "emotionally convincing" even if its logic may be questionable. The same critic notes that "the poem upends our expectations of metaphor" and sees in this the central power of the poem. The poem's historicism creates another complicating dynamic. Beginning in the present it shifts to the classical age of Greece, then (with its concerns for the sea of faith) it turns to Medieval Europe, before finally returning to the present. The form of the poem itself has drawn considerable comment. Critics have noted the careful diction in the opening description, the overall, spell-binding rhythm and cadence of the poem and its dramatic character.^] One commentator sees the strophe-antistrophe of the ode at work in the poem, with an ending that contains something of the "cata-strophe" of tragedy. Finally, one critic sees the complexity of the poem's structure resulting in "the first major 'free-verse' poem in the language".

>>Composition

According to Tinker and Lowry, "a draft of the first twenty-eight lines of the poem" was written in pencil "on the back of a folded sheet of paper containing notes on the career of Empedocles". Allott concludes that the notes are probably from around 1849–50."Empedocles on Etna", again according to Allott, was probably written 1849–52; the notes on Empedocles are likely to be contemporary with the writing of that poem.

The final line of this draft is:

And naked shingles of the world. Ah love &c

Tinker and Lowry conclude that this "seem[s] to indicate that the last nine lines of the poem as we know it were already in existence when the portion regarding the ebb and flow of the sea at Dover was composed." This would make the manuscript "a prelude to the concluding paragraph" of the poem in which "there is no reference to the sea or tides".

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Arnold's visits to Dover may also provide some clue to the date of composition. Allott has Arnold in Dover in June 1851 and again in October of that year "on his return from his delayed continental honeymoon". To critics who conclude that ll. 1–28 were written at Dover and ll. 29–37 "were rescued from some discarded poem" Allott suggests the contrary, i.e., that the final lines "were written at Dover in late June," while "ll. 29–37 were written in London shortly afterwards".

Danaë

In Greek mythology, Danaë (/ˈdæn.i.iː/ or /ˈdæn.ə.iː/ dan-ə-ee, as personal name also /dəˈnaɪ/ də-ny, Greek:Δανάη Ancient: [daˈna.ɛː] Modern: [ðaˈna.i]) was the daughter, and only child of King Acrisius of Argos and his wife Queen Eurydice. She was the mother of the hero Perseus by Zeus. She was credited with founding the city ofArdea in Latium during the Bronze Age.

>>Mythology

Disappointed by his lack of male heirs, King Acrisius asked the oracle of Delphi if this would change. The oracle announced to him that he would never have a son, but his daughter would, and that he would be killed by his daughter's son. At the time, Danae was childless and, meaning to keep her so, King Acrisius shut her up in a bronze chamber to be constructed under the court of his palace (other versions say she was imprisoned in a tall brass tower with a single richly adorned chamber, but with no doors or windows, just a sky-light as the source of light and air). She was buried in this tomb, never to see the light again. However, Zeus, the king of the gods, desired her, and came to her in the form of golden rain which streamed in through the roof of the subterranean chamber and down into her womb. Soon after, their child Perseus was born.

Unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods or the Furies by killing his offspring and grandchild, King Acrisius cast Danaë and Perseus into the sea in a wooden chest. The sea was calmed by Poseidon and, at the request of Zeus, the pair survived. They were washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where they were taken in by Dictys – the brother of King Polydectes – who raised Perseus to manhood. The King was charmed by Danaë, but she had no interest in him. Consequently, he agreed not to marry her only if her son would bring him the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Using Athena's shield, Hermes's winged sandals and Hades' helmet of invisibility, Perseus was able to evade Medusa's gaze and decapitate her.

Later, after Perseus brought back Medusa's head and rescued Andromeda, the oracle's prophecy came true. He started for Argos, but learning of the prophecy, instead went to Larissa, where athletic games were being held. By chance, an aging Acrisius was there and Perseus accidentally struck him on the head with hisjavelin (or discus), fulfilling the prophecy.

Cerberus

In Greek mythology, Cerberus (/ˈsɜːrbərəs/; Greek: Κέρβερος Kerberos [ˈkerberos]), often called the "hound of Hades", is the monstrous multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld to prevent the dead from leaving. Cerberus was the offspring of the monsters Echidna and Typhon, and usually is described as having three heads, a serpent for a tail, and snakes protruding from parts of his body. Cerberus is primarily known for his capture by Heracles, one of Heracles' twelve labours.

>>The Twelve Labour of Heracles

As early as Homer we learn that Heracles was sent by Eurystheus, the king of Tiryns, to bring back Cerberus from Hadesthe king of the underworld. According to Apollodorus, this was the twelfth and final labour imposed on Heracles. In a fragment from a lost play Pirithous, (attributed to either Euripides or Critias) Heracles says that, although Eurystheus commanded him to bring back Cerberus, it was not from any desire to see Cerberus, but only because Eurystheus thought that the task was impossible.

Heracles was aided in his mission by his being an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Euripides has his initiation being "lucky" for Heracles in capturing Cerberus. And both Diodorus Siculus and Apollodorus say that Heracles was initiated into the Mysteries, in preparation for his descent into the underworld. According to Diodorus, Heracles went to Athens, whereMusaeus, the son of Orpheus, was in charge of the initiation rites, while according to Apollodorus, he went to Eumolpusat Eleusis.

Heracles also had the help of Hermes, the usual guide of the underworld, as well as Athena. In the Odyssey, Homer has Hermes and Athena as his guides. And Hermes and Athena are often shown with Heracles on vase paintings depicting Cerberus' capture. By most accounts, Heracles made his descent into the underworld through an entrance at Tainaron, the most famous of the various Greek entrances to the underworld. The place is first mentioned in connection with the Cerberus story in the rationalized account ofHecataeus of Miletus (fl. 500–494 BC), and Euripides, Seneca, and Apolodorus, all have Heracles descend into the underworld there. However Xenophonreports that Heracles was said to have descended at the Acherusian Chersonese near Heraclea Pontica, on the Black Sea, a place more usually associated with Heracles' exit from the underworld (see below). Heraclea, founded c. 560 BC, perhaps took its name from the association of its site with Heracles' Cerberian exploit.

Cronus

In Greek mythology, Cronus, or Kronos (/ˈkroʊnəs/ or /ˈkroʊnɒs/ from Greek: Κρόνος, krónos), was the leader and youngest of the first generation of Titans, the divine descendants of Uranus, the sky, and Gaia, the earth. He overthrew his father and ruled during the mythological Golden Age, until he was overthrown by his own son Zeus and imprisoned in Tartarus. According to Plato, Phorcys, Cronus and Rhea were the eldest children of Oceanus and Tethys.

Cronus was usually depicted with a harpe, scythe or a sickle, which was the instrument he used to castrate and depose Uranus, his father. In Athens, on the twelfth day of the Attic month of Hekatombaion, a festival called Kronia was held in honour of Cronus to celebrate the harvest, suggesting that, as a result of his association with the virtuous Golden Age, Cronus continued to preside as a patron of harvest. Cronus was also identified in classical antiquity with the Roman deity Saturn.

>>Cronus's Descendent

The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids
>>http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm005.html

"The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats" is a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 5. It is Aarne-Thompson type 123, 

but has a strong resemblance to The Three Little Pigs and other Aarne-Thomspson type 124 folktales, and to the variant of Little Red Riding Hood that the Grimms collected, where she is rescued.

Tangled

Tangled is a 2010 American 3D computer-animated musical fantasy-comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Loosely based on the German fairy tale "Rapunzel" in the collection of folk tales published by the Brothers Grimm, it is the 50th Disney animated feature film. Featuring the voices of Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi,the film tells the story of a lost, young princess with long magical hair who yearns to leave her secluded tower. Against her mother's wishes, she accepts the aid of a handsome intruder to take her out into the world which she has never seen.

Before the film's release, its title was changed from Rapunzel to Tangled, reportedly to market the film as gender-neutral. Tangled spent six years in production at a cost that has been estimated at $260 million, which if accurate, would make it the most expensive animated film ever made and the fifth most-expensive film of all time. The film employed a unique artistic style by blending together features of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and traditional animation while using non-photorealistic rendering to create the impression of a painting. Composer Alan Menken, who had worked on prior Disney animated features, returned to score Tangled.

Tangled premiered at the El Capitan Theatre on November 14, 2010, and went into general release on November 24. The film was well received by critics and audiences alike. The film earned $591 million in worldwide box office revenue, $200 million of which was earned in the United States and Canada. The film was nominated for a number of awards, including Best Original Song at the 83rd Academy Awards. The film was released on Blu-ray and DVD on March 29, 2011; a short film, Tangled Ever After, was released later in 2012 and a television series premiered in 2017.

Rapunzel

"Rapunzel" (/rəˈpʌnzəl/; German pronunciation: [ʁaˈpʊnt͡səl]) is a German fairy tale in the collection assembled by theBrothers Grimm, and first published in 1812 as part of Children's and Household Tales. The Grimm Brothers' story is an adaptation of the fairy tale Rapunzel by Friedrich Schulz published in 1790. The Schulz version is based onPersinette by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force originally published in 1698 which in turn was influenced by an even earlier tale, Petrosinella by Giambattista Basile, published in 1634. Its plot has been used and parodied in various media and its best known line ("Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair") is an idiom of popular culture. In volume I of the 1812 annotations (Anhang), it is listed as coming from Friedrich Schulz Kleine Romane, Book 5, pp. 269–288, published in Leipzig 1790.

In the Aarne–Thompson classification system for folktales it is type 310, "The Maiden in The Tower".

Andrew Lang included it in The Red Fairy Book. Other versions of the tale also appear in A Book of Witches by Ruth Manning-Sanders and in Paul O. Zelinsky's 1997 Caldecott Medal-winning picture book, Rapunzel and the Disney movie Tangled.

Rapunzel's story has striking similarities to the 11th-century Persian tale of Rudāba, included in the epic poemShahnameh by Ferdowsi. Rudāba offers to let down her hair from her tower so that her lover Zāl can climb up to her. Some elements of the fairy tale might also have originally been based upon the tale of Saint Barbara, who was said to have been locked in a tower by her father.