Ode to Autumn

Ode to  Autumn

Analysis

  "To Autumn" is one of the last poems written by Keats. His method of developing the poem is to heap up imagery typical of autumn. His autumn is early autumn, when all the products of nature have reached a state of perfect maturity. Autumn is personified and is perceived in a state of activity. In the first stanza, autumn is a friendly conspirator working with the sun to bring fruits to a state of perfect fullness and ripeness. In the second stanza, autumn is a thresher sitting on a granary floor, a reaper asleep in a grain field, a gleaner crossing a brook, and, lastly, a cider maker. In the final stanza, autumn is seen as a musician, and the music which autumn produces is as pleasant as the music of spring — the sounds of gnats, lambs, crickets, robins and swallows.

    In the first stanza, Keats concentrates on the sights of autumn, ripening grapes and apples, swelling gourds and hazel nuts, and blooming flowers. In the second stanza, the emphasis is on the characteristic activities of autumn, threshing, reaping, gleaning, and cider making. In the concluding stanza, the poet puts the emphasis on the sounds of autumn, produced by insects, animals, and birds. To his ears, this music is just as sweet as the music of spring.

    The ending of the poem is artistically made to correspond with the ending of a day: "And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." In the evening, swallows gather in flocks preparatory to returning to their nests for the night.

   "To Autumn" is sometimes called an ode, but Keats does not call it one. However, its structure and rhyme scheme are similar to those of his odes of the spring of 1819, and, like those odes, it is remarkable for its richness of imagery. It is a feast of sights and sounds

Ode on a g Grecian Urn

  Ode on a g Grecian Urn

 In the first stanza, the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time. It is the “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” He also describes the urn as a “historian” that can tell a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pursuing a group of women and wonders what their story could be: “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”

     In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees. The speaker says that the piper’s “unheard” melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve, because her beauty will never fade. 

   In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed their leaves. He is happy for the piper because his songs will be “for ever new,” and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses into “breathing human passion” and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a “burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

   In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will “for evermore” be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, “doth tease us out of thought.” He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know

Ode to psyche

  Ode to psyche

  Keats’s speaker opens the poem with an address to the goddess Psyche, urging her to hear his words, and asking that she forgive him for singing to her her own secrets. He says that while wandering through the forest that very day, he stumbled upon “two fair creatures” lying side by side in the grass, beneath a “whisp’ring roof” of leaves, surrounded by flowers. They embraced one another with both their arms and wings, and though their lips did not touch, they were close to one another and ready “past kisses to outnumber.” The speaker says he knew the winged boy, but asks who the girl was. He answers his own question: She was Psyche.

     In the second stanza, the speaker addresses Psyche again, describing her as the youngest and most beautiful of all the Olympian gods and goddesses. He believes this, he says, despite the fact that, unlike other divinities, Psyche has none of the trappings of worship: She has no temples, no altars, no choir to sing for her, and so on. 

   In the third stanza, the speaker attributes this lack to Psyche’s youth; she has come into the world too late for “antique vows” and the “fond believing lyre.” But the speaker says that even in the fallen days of his own time, he would like to pay homage to Psyche and become her choir, her music, and her oracle. 

   In the fourth stanza, he continues with these declarations, saying he will become Psyche’s priest and build her a temple in an “untrodden region” of his own mind, a region surrounded by thought that resemble the beauty of nature and tended by “the gardener Fancy,” or imagination. He promises Psyche “all soft delight” and says that the window of her new abode will be left open at night, so that her winged boy ”the warm Love”can come in.

"The Flea”

"The Flea”

Summary

The speaker tells his beloved to look at the flea before them and to note “how little” is that thing that she denies him. For the flea, he says, has sucked first his blood, then her blood, so that now, inside the flea, they are mingled; and that mingling cannot be called “sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead.” The flea has joined them together in a way that, “alas, is more than we would do.”

As his beloved moves to kill the flea, the speaker stays her hand, asking her to spare the three lives in the flea: his life, her life, and the flea’s own life. In the flea, he says, where their blood is mingled, they are almost married—no, more than married—and the flea is their marriage bed and marriage temple mixed into one. Though their parents grudge their romance and though she will not make love to him, they are nevertheless united and cloistered in the living walls of the flea. She is apt to kill him, he says, but he asks that she not kill herself by killing the flea that contains her blood; he says that to kill the flea would be sacrilege, “three sins in killing three.”

“Cruel and sudden,” the speaker calls his lover, who has now killed the flea, “purpling” her fingernail with the “blood of innocence.” The speaker asks his lover what the flea’s sin was, other than having sucked from each of them a drop of blood. He says that his lover replies that neither of them is less noble for having killed the flea. It is true, he says, and it is this very fact that proves that her fears are false: If she were to sleep with him , she would lose no more honor than she lost when she killed the flea.

The Sun Rising

The Sun Rising

The speaker chides the rising sun, calling it a “busy old fool,” and asking why it must bother them through windows and curtains. Love is not subject to season or to time, he says, and he admonishes the sun—the “Saucy pedantic wretch”—to go and bother late schoolboys and sour apprentices, to tell the court-huntsmen that the King will ride, and to call the country ants to their harvesting.

Why should the sun think that his beams are strong? The speaker says that he could eclipse them simply by closing his eyes, except that he does not want to lose sight of his beloved for even an instant. He asks the sun—if the sun’s eyes have not been blinded by his lover’s eyes—to tell him by late tomorrow whether the treasures of India are in the same place they occupied yesterday or if they are now in bed with the speaker. He says that if the sun asks about the kings he shined on yesterday, he will learn that they all lie in bed with the speaker.

The speaker explains this claim by saying that his beloved is like every country in the world, and he is like every king; nothing else is real. Princes simply play at having countries; compared to what he has, all honor is mimicry and all wealth is alchemy. The sun, the speaker says, is half as happy as he and his lover are, for the fact that the world is contracted into their bed makes the sun’s job much easier—in its old age, it desires ease, and now all it has to do is shine on their bed and it shines on the whole world. “This bed thy centre is,” the speaker tells the sun, “these walls, thy sphere.”

The sweetest love

The sweetest love

Brief overview

  The poet tells his beloved that he is not leaving because he is tired of the relationship instead, he must go as a duty. After all, the sun departs each night but returns every morning, and he has a much shorter distance to travel. The third stanza suggests that his duty to leave is unstoppable; man’s power is so feeble that good fortune cannot lengthen his life, while bad fortune will shorten it. Indeed, fighting bad fortune only shares one’s strength with it. As the beloved sighs and cries, the lover complains that if he is really within her, she is the one letting him go because he is part of her tears and breath. He asks her not to fear any evil that may befall him while he is gone, and besides, they keep each other alive in their hearts and therefore are never truly parted, the poem is a good example of Donne’s metaphysical poetry 

The Death Be Not Proud

The Death Be Not Proud

“Death Be Not Proud” presents an argument against the power of death. Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in his power. Such power is merely an illusion, and the end Death thinks it brings to men and women is in fact a rest from world-weariness for its alleged “victims.” The poet criticizes Death as a slave to other forces: fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. Death is not in control, for a variety of other powers exercise their volition in taking lives. Even in the rest it brings, Death is inferior to drugs. Finally, the speaker predicts the end of Death itself, stating “Death, thou shalt die.”

The poet says that there is no need for any person tobe afraid of death it is generally consider to be mighty and dangerous but in reality it is neither mighty nor dangerous  .

Stopping by Woods

Stopping by Woods , Robert Frost

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is easily one of the most famous, as well as one of the most anthologized, of Robert Frost’s poems. It consists of four quatrains that have the following rhyme scheme:aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd. The poem’s central narrative is simple, and the scene is understated, even stark, bare of elaboration or detail. A traveler pauses late one snowy evening to admire the woods by which he passes. He reflects that the owner of the woods, who lives in the village, will not see him stopping to “watch his woods fill up with snow.”

The speaker interrupts his reflections by imagining that his “little horse must think it queer” to stop without a farmhouse nearby on the “darkest evening of the year.” In the third stanza, the speaker expands this conceit, suggesting that anxiety over the untoward action causes the horse to shake his harness bells “To ask if there is some mistake.” Then, by way of contrast, the speaker notes that “the only other sound’s the sweep/ Of easy wind and downy flake.”

Something about the woods compels the speaker’s interest, and by the poem’s end, as most critics note, one has the sense that there is more to these woods than meets the eye. In the last verse, the speaker acknowledges that the “woods are lovely, dark and deep.” He seems reluctant, however, to pursue this insight more deeply, since he immediately observes that he has “promises to keep,/ And miles to go before [he] sleep[s].” Nevertheless, the central focus of the poem is not the woods. Of more importance is the inward drama of the speaker as he reflects about and understands—or fails to understand—why he stops and why he finds the woods so captivating.

The poem ends, then, ambiguously. The reader learns very little about the speaker—either where he is coming from, where he is going, or why he stops. The speaker, however, does not permit himself to reflect too deeply about the occasion, either. One can only speculate, and this is perhaps the full intent of the poem’s title: “Stopping by woods” is a gratuitous action, a grace note, an imaginative possibility. The reader, like the speaker, is always “stopping” by woods, and the reader, like the speaker, can choose to make the most of them or to go on.

Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice

Analysis

Only nine lines long, this little poem is a brilliant example of Frost’s concisely ironic literary style. The poem varies between two meter lengths (either eight syllables or four syllables) and uses three sets of interwoven rhymes, based on “-ire,” “-ice,” and “-ate.”

In the first two lines of the poem, Frost creates a clear dichotomy between fire and ice and the two groups of people that believe in each element. By using the term “some” instead of “I” or “an individual,” Frost asserts that the distinction between the two elements is a universal truth, not just an idea promoted by an individual. In addition to the unavoidable contradiction between fire and ice, these first lines also outline the claim that the world will end as a direct result of one of these elements. It is unclear which element will destroy the world, but it is significant to note that fire and ice are the only options. The poem does not allow for any other possibilities in terms of the world’s fate, just as there are not any other opinions allowed in the black-and-white debate between fire and ice.

Interestingly, the two possibilities for the world’s destruction correspond directly to a common scientific debate during the time Frost wrote the poem. Some scientists believed that the world would be incinerated from its fiery core, while others were convinced that a coming ice age would destroy all living things on the earth’s surface. Instead of maintaining a strictly scientific perspective on this debate, Frost introduces a more emotional side, associating passionate desire with fire and hatred with ice. Within this metaphorical view of the two elements, the “world” can be recognized as a metaphor for a relationship. Too much fire and passion can quickly consume a relationship, while cold indifference and hate can be equally destructive.

Although the first two lines of the poem insist that there can only be a single choice between fire and ice, the narrator undercuts this requirement by acknowledging that both elements could successfully destroy the world. Moreover, the fact that he has had personal experience with both (in the form of desire and hate) reveals that fire and ice are not mutually exclusive, as the first two lines of the poem insist. In fact, though the narrator first concludes that the world will end in fire, he ultimately admits that the world could just as easily end in ice; fire and ice, it seems, are strikingly similar.

Mending Wall

Mending Wall

" Mending Wall' is loosely written in blank verse, meaning unrhymed lines consisting of five iambs in each line. Iambs are metrical feet that have two syllables, one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, as in 'belong,' or 'along,' or 'away.' As we'll see, in addition to creating an overall sound and feeling to the poem, the blank verse form also contributes to the poem's meaning.
  'Mending Wall' opens with a speaker explaining that his property is separated from his neighbor's by a stone wall that is constantly being dismantled by 'something that doesn't love a wall.' Just what this something is that disrupts the wall remains somewhat vague, but the speaker illustrates that it cannot be animals or hunters. The task of mending the wall is difficult, and because nothing in their respective properties poses a threat to the other's, the speaker tries to convince his neighbor that there is no need to continue to fix the wall.
  The neighbor, however, is unconvinced by the speaker's reasoning and in response, simply utters his father's saying that 'good fences make good neighbors.' The speaker again presses his neighbor, pointing out that rational people should know exactly what they are keeping in and keeping out when they build a wall, yet again the neighbor resists the speaker's reasoning. The poem ultimately ends symbolically with the neighbor's repetition of the adage that 'good fences make good neighbors.'

The Gift Outright

  The Gift Outright

Theme

   The poem, The Gift Outright, is a patriotic poem, and it  deals with national sentiments and pride of Americans. It presents briefly the history of colonisation in America by English  and European settlers. It tells how these settlers made this land their own by dint of their love of, and devotion to it. The sense of people’s oneness with the country of their adoption finds a fine expression in the poem. This history of America and its people may be said to form, in the form of a capsule summary, the theme of the poem. The settlers at first felt and behaved as aliens or outsiders, and so they could not truly possess or own the country.

    They became its real possessors after making a total surrender to it. The national sentiments of Americans, and their sense of their European ancestry, are both treated nicely in this poem. The Gift Outright can be better described as a poetic definition of an American state of mind, a compact psychological essay on colonisation. The theme of the poem comprises the historical and political background of America, and the national pride its people feel in their adopted land.

    Unlike most of Frost’s poems, The Gift Outright deals not only with a particular region (New England) of America, but with that vast country as a whole. The love of country is not expressed in screaming or hysterical flag-waving, but in salvation of faith, in surrender to the land.

Home Burial

 Home Burial

  "Home Burial" starts with a husband watching his wife as she walks down the stairs. She pauses to look over her shoulder at something, but won't tell him what. He figures out that she's looking at their child's grave, in the family graveyard, which she can see through the window.
   But as the husband climbs the stairs to talk to his wife, she does just about everything she can to avoid talking to her husband about their dead child. She feels trapped, and is trying to leave the house altogether. The husband tries to convince her to just talk to him, but they have major communication issues. He doesn't know how to have a conversation without angering her.
  The wife, on the other hand, is so distraught by the loss of her child that she's inconsolable. She can't understand how her husband can carry himself normally when she's been so floored by the loss. The dialogue between the two begins to develop and soon covers their differing perspectives about relationships, life, and death. Still, the conflict is far from finished by the end of the poem.

   The poem ends with a cliffhanger. The wife has opened the door to leave, with her husband threatening to go after her and bring her back if she goes. We're left to guess whether or not she manages to get out, and what happens to the couple. 

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea

Plot Summary

   In a small fishing village in Cuba, Santiago, an old, weathered fisherman has just gone 84 days without catching a fish. On the 85th day, he is determined to catch a big, impressive fish.

    For years, Santiago has been fishing with a young boy named Manolin. Manolin started fishing with the old man when he was only 5 years old. Santiago is like Manolin's second father, and has taught the young boy everything about fishing. Manolin is extremely loyal to Santiago and makes sure that the old man is always safe, fed and healthy. Manolin's parents, however, force the boy to leave Santiago and fish on a more lucrative fishing boat.

    Manolin does not want to leave Santiago, but must honor his duty to his parents. On the new boat, Manolin catches several fish within the first few days. Santiago, meanwhile, decides to head out on the Gulf Stream alone. He feels the 85th day will be lucky for him. He sets out on his old, rickety skiff. Alone on the water, Santiago sets up his fishing lines with the utmost precision, a skill that other fisherman lack.

   Finally, he feels something heavy tugging at one of his lines. A huge Marlin has found Santiago's bait and this sets off a very long struggle between the two. The Marlin is so huge that it drags Santiago beyond all other boats and people - he can no longer see land from where the fish drags him. The struggle takes its toll on Santiago. His hands become badly cramped and he is cut and bruised from the force of the fish.

   Santiago and the Marlin become united out at sea. They are attached to each other physically, and in Santiago's case, emotionally. He respects and loves the Marlin and admires its beauty and greatness. He sees the fish as his brother. Despite this, Santiago has to kill it. He feels guilty killing a brother, but after an intense struggle in which the fish drags the skiff around in circles, Santiago harpoons the very large fish and hangs it on the side of his boat. He feels brave, like his hero Joe DiMaggio, who accomplished great feats despite obstacles, injuries or adversities.

   After enjoying a few moments of pride, a pack of sharks detects the blood in the water and follow the trail to Santiago's skiff. Santiago has to fend off each shark that goes after his prized catch. Each shark takes a huge bite out of the Marlin, but the old man fends them off, himself now bruised, but alive. He sails back to shore with the carcass of his Marlin. He is barely able to walk and slowly staggers back to his hut, where he falls into bed.

  The next morning, the boy finds his mentor and cries when he looks at Santiago's bruised hands. He promises he will reject his parents' wishes and vows to fish with Santiago again

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter

Brief overview

.Boston is a Puritan settlement, and one of its citizens, Hester Prynne, is led from the prison to the scaffold to stand in judgment before the town magistrates. In her arms, she carries her infant daughter Pearl, whose birth has sparked this inquiry. On the scaffold, Hester refuses to reveal the name of the child's father. As punishment, Hester is forced to wear the scarlet letter A that marks her as an adulteress.

·         Hester's long-lost husband, whom she believed to have been killed by the Native Americans, returns to Boston. No one but Hester recognizes him because he has taken the assumed name of Dr. Roger Chillingworth. He forces her to keep his identity a secret as he conducts an investigation into the identity of Pearl's father.

·         Hester lives with Pearl at the edge of town while Chillingworth moves in with the beloved Reverend Dimmesdale. Recognizing Dimmesdale as Hester’s one-time lover, Chillingworth torments the guilt-stricken man for years, keeping him alive out of spite.

·         Finally, Dimmesdale climbs the scaffold and reveals the letter A that he has been carving into his chest. He confesses in front of everyone, then dies of his wounds in Hester's arms. Chillingworth dies shortly thereafter, having exacted his revenge. Hester leaves Boston, only to return years later and live the rest of her days under the mark of the scarlet letter.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land

     The poem begins with a section entitled "The Burial of the Dead." In it, the narrator perhaps a representation of Eliot himself describes the seasons. Spring brings "memory and desire," and so the narrator's memory drifts back to times in Munich, to childhood sled rides, and to a possible romance with a "hyacinth girl." The memories only go so far, however. The narrator is now surrounded by a desolate land full of "stony rubbish."

       He remembers a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris who said he was "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" and that he should "fear death by water." Next he finds himself on London Bridge, surrounded by a crowd of people. He spots a friend of his from wartime, and calls out to him.

    The next section, "A Game of Chess," transports the reader abruptly from the streets of London to a gilded drawing room, in which sits a rich, jewel-bedecked lady who complains about her nerves and wonders what to do. The poem drifts again, this time to a pub at closing time in which two Cockney women gossip. Within a few stanzas, we have moved from the upper crust of society to London's low-life.

     "The Fire Sermon" opens with an image of a river. The narrator sits on the banks and muses on the deplorable state of the world. As Tiresias, he sees a young "carbuncular" man hop into bed with a lonely female typist, only to aggressively make love to her and then leave without hesitation. The poem returns to the river, where maidens sing a song of lament, one of them crying over her loss of innocence to a similarly lustful man.

    "Death by Water," the fourth section of the poem, describes a dead Phoenician lying in the water -- perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom Madame Sosostris spoke. "What the Thunder Said" shifts locales from the sea to rocks and mountains. The narrator cries for rain, and it finally comes. The thunder that accompanies it ushers in the three-pronged dictum sprung from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishada, "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata": to give, to sympathize, to control. With these commandments, benediction is possible, despite the collapse of civilization that is under way  "London bridge is falling down falling down falling down."

Ode to a Nightingale

  Ode to a Nightingale

  Keats is in a state of uncomfortable drowsiness. Envy of the imagined happiness of the nightingale is not responsible for his condition; rather, it is a reaction to the happiness he has experienced through sharing in the happiness of the nightingale. The bird's happiness is conveyed in its singing.

   Keats longs for a draught of wine which would take him out of himself and allow him to join his existence with that of the bird. The wine would put him in a state in which he would no longer be himself, aware that life is full of pain, that the young die, the old suffer, and that just to think about life brings sorrow and despair. But wine is not needed to enable him to escape. His imagination will serve just as well. As soon as he realizes this, he is, in spirit, lifted up above the trees and can see the moon and the stars even though where he is physically there is only a glimmering of light. He cannot see what flowers are growing around him, but from their odor and from his knowledge of what flowers should be in bloom at the time he can guess.

    In the darkness he listens to the nightingale. Now, he feels, it would be a rich experience to die, "to cease upon the midnight with no pain" while the bird would continue to sing ecstatically. Many a time, he confesses, he has been "half in love with easeful Death." The nightingale is free from the human fate of having to die. The song of the nightingale that he is listening to was heard in ancient times by emperor and peasant. Perhaps even Ruth (whose story is told in the Old Testament) heard it.

  "Forlorn," the last word of the preceding stanza, brings Keats in the concluding stanza back to consciousness of what he is and where he is. He cannot escape even with the help of the imagination. The singing of the bird grows fainter and dies away. The experience he has had seems so strange and confusing that he is not sure whether it was a vision or a daydream. He is even uncertain whether he is asleep or awake.

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility is a novel that is best understood within the context of the era in which it was written. Austen lived in that period of English history when eighteenth century rationalism was giving way to the increasing popularity of nineteenth century romanticism, as typified by William Wordsworth and the Romantic poets. The open embrace and deliberate cultivation of sensibility deep feelings and passionate emotions were perhaps a natural reaction to the admiration of reserve and practicality that had typified the preceding decades.

The novel is about two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who embody the two qualities set forth in the title. Elinor, the elder of the two, is intelligent, loving, and wise enough to see the potential folly in failing to temper emotion with good sense. Marianne, although sharing many of these qualities, lacks her sister’s wisdom; she is, as Austen describes her, “everything but prudent.”

Marianne’s insistence on giving her emotions free rein leads her into an unhappy romance with the fortune-hunting Willoughby when she mistakes his false expressions of sentiment for love. Although Marianne’s own excessive displays of emotion spring from genuine feeling, they blind her to the realization that less fervently expressed emotions may also be heartfelt and true. Waiting patiently throughout the book is the quiet, steadfast Colonel Brandon, a man of deep but reserved feelings who loves Marianne and whose true worth she comes to recognize only after she is forced by her failed romance with Willoughby to reassess her views.

Elinor remains her sister’s mainstay throughout her unhappy first love, assisting her toward maturity with patience and tenderness. She, too, is ín love, with her selfish sister-in-law’s brother, Edward Ferrars. Both are restrained in their expressions of their feelings, Elinor out of modesty and a sense of propriety and Edward because he is secretly and unhappily engaged to another woman favored by his snobbish mother. Yet adherence to principles of rational thought and good sense does not prevent Elinor from suffering greatly when she believes that her hopes of marrying Edward are impossible. Their eventual union is as happy and full of emotion as that of any two people in love.

Although her own sympathies are perhaps most closely aligned with those of Elinor, Austen writes with affection for both sisters and her message is one of compromise. She is careful to show that a balance of both heart and intellect is necessary for a full life a blending of sense and sensibility that both Elinor and Marianne possess by the novel’s close.

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist: (Charles Dickens)

Overview

      Oliver is born in a workhouse in the first half of the nineteenth century. His mother dies during his birth, and he is sent to an orphanage, where he is poorly treated, regularly beaten and poorly fed. In a famous episode, he walks up to the stern authoritarian, Mr. Bumble, and asks for a second helping of gruel. For this impertinence, he is put out of the workhouse. He then runs away from the family who take him in. He wants to find his fortune in London, he falls in with a boy called Jack Dawkins, who is part of a child gang of thieves-run by a man called Fagin.

    He is brought into the gang and trained as a pickpocket. When he goes out on his first job, he runs away and is nearly sent to prison. However, the kindness of the person he tries to rob saves him from the terrors of the city gaol (jail) and instead he is taken into the man's home.

   He believes  that he has escaped Fagan and his gang, but Bill Sikes and Nancy, two members of the gang, force him back. Oliver is once more sent out on another job--this time assisting Sikes on a burglary. The job goes wrong and Oliver is shot and left behind. Once more he is taken in, this time by the Maylies, the family he was sent to rob, where his life changes dramatically for the better.

   But Fagin's gang comes after him again. Nancy, who is worried about Oliver, tells the Maylies what is happening. When the gang finds out about Nancy's treachery, they murder her.  Meanwhile, the Maylies reunite Oliver with the gentleman who helped him out earlier and who with the kind of coincidental plot turn typical of many Victorian novels-- turns out to be Oliver's uncle. Fagin is arrested and hanged for his crimes; and Oliver settles down to a normal life, reunited with his family.

Dr.Faustus

Dr.Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Plot Overview

     When the play opens, Faustus is seen in his study examining the various branches of knowledge he has studied in the past: logic, philosophy, medicine, law and theology. Dissatisfied with all these, he turns to the dangerous practice of necromancy, or black magic. With the help of his servant, Wagner, he summons Valdes and Cornelius and requests them to initiate him into the rudiments of magic. Faustus begins his experiments by conjuring up spirits. Mephistophilis appears before him, but Faustus is so shocked by his horrible appearance that he asks him to go away and come back again in the guise of a friar. Faustus then learns that it was not his invocation that produced Mephistopheles, but the curses he heaped on the holy trinity. Faustus asks Mephistophilis to return to the mighty Lucifer and meet him again in his study at midnight to enact the pact.

    Faustus is then subject to a spiritual conflict. The two angels arrive. The Good Angel admonishes him to leave the black arts and concentrate on “heaven and heavenly things.” The Bad Angel advises him to “think of honor and of wealth.” Faustus dreams of the power and wealth that will soon be his. Mephistophilis arrives to inform Faustus that Lucifer needs a declaration from him to be signed in blood. Faustus signs a contract by which he agrees to give his soul to Mephistophilis in return for twenty-four years of faithful service. He is, however, upset by several bad omens. To divert Faustus, the three devils arrange for some entertainment: a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins.

    The Mephistopheles takes Faustus to Rome. In the Pope’s private chamber, both of them play practical jokes on the Pope. At the court of Emperor Charles V, Faustus punishes a skeptical courtier by putting horns on his head. He then produces the apparitions of Alexander the Great and his paramour and that of Darius, King of Persia. At the court of the Duke of Vanholt, Faustus, with the help of Mephistophilis, produces grapes in January.

    The twenty-four years allotted to Faustus are now almost over, and Faustus expects the devil to come at midnight to claim him. To entertain his scholar friends, Faustus summons the spirit of Helen of Troy from the underworld. But nothing can save Faustus now. The old man witnesses Faustus’ exclusion from “the grace of heaven.” The Bad Angel warns Faustus to be ready to “taste hell’s pains perpetually.” The Good Angel tells him that “the jaws of hell are open” to receive him. Faustus has only an hour to live. He dreads the moment of damnation. Faustus begs for relief from the eternal torment in store for him and wishes that he were a beast without a soul. The clock strikes twelve. In the midst of thunder and lightning, devils come and carry Faustus away to hell.

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe

   
Summary
  Robinson Crusoe was Defoe’s first-published full narrative and his most popular, appealing to both middle-class and aristocratic readers with its combination of a believable and very human first-person narrator, realistic detail, allusions and references to actual places and people, imagery drawn from everyday life and the natural world, and an appealing, if somewhat unstructured, narrative line.
      That Robinson Crusoe is a Defoe character is evident from the moment he finds himself shipwrecked. He acts immediately in the interest of survival, salvaging such necessities as he can from the stricken ship and building a rude shelter. Yet Crusoe’s concern is not only for his physical well-being; he begins a journal in which he plans to record his spiritual progress as it is reflected in the daily activities that mark his sojourn on the island. For nearly two decades, Crusoe works to create a life for himself, building what he needs, improvising where he must, and ultimately replicating a little corner of England on the desert island. What he accomplishes is beyond basic survival; he fashions an English life that is dependent on the transformation of raw materials into the necessities of his culture. He plants grain that he bakes into bread, he domesticates goats so that he might have milk, and he turns a cave into a cozy fortified dwelling that boasts comfortable furniture. When Friday arrives, Crusoe’s little English empire is complete: The conqueror has mastered both the territory and its people.
    Having survived the shipwreck, Crusoe has become strongly aware of his vulnerability as a human being, and throughout the narrative he insists that his life is proof of the workings of divine Providence. Consequently, he often reflects on the spiritual lessons to be learned not only from his experiences on the island but also from the events in his life that led to his sojourn so far from home. This reflection is typical of Defoe’s narrators, who look on life’s experiences as a series of symbolic occurrences pointing to the connections between the spiritual and the secular.
     Defoe has created in Robinson Crusoe a man very like himself and very much a typical eighteenth century Englishman. Crusoe’s plebeian origins, his earnest industry, his tendency to see religious meaning in the mundane, and his talent for overcoming misfortune are all Defoe’s qualities. Like the average Englishman of his time, Crusoe is something of a bigot, and although he treats Friday well, the slave is never offered his freedom and must call Crusoe “Master.” Crusoe triumphs over his circumstances and environment, and indeed he manages to provide himself with a little paradise on earth; but he is English to the core, and with the first opportunity he returns to England and settles down to family life.
    Robinson Crusoe is often described as one of the major forerunners of the novel. Although written as a travel narrative, it displays many of the modern novel’s major characteristics: realism (through verisimilitude, the first-person narrator, imagery from the natural world, and copious detail), interesting and believable characters engaged in plausible adventures and activities, and an engaging story.

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost by Milton

  The story opens in hell, where Satan and his followers are recovering from defeat in a war they waged against God. They build a palace, called Pandemonium, where they hold council to determine whether or not to return to battle. Instead they decide to explore a new world prophesied to be created, where a safer course of revenge can be planned. Satan undertakes the mission alone. At the gate of hell, he meets his offspring, Sin and Death, who unbar the gates for him. He journeys across chaos till he sees the new universe floating near the larger globe which is heaven. God sees Satan flying towards this world and foretells the fall of man. His Son, who sits at his right hand, offers to sacrifice himself for man's salvation. Meanwhile, Satan enters the new universe. He flies to the sun, where he tricks an angel, Uriel, into showing him the way to man's home.

    Satan gains entrance into the Garden of Eden, where he finds Adam and Eve and becomes jealous of them. He overhears them speak of God's commandment that they should not eat the forbidden fruit. Uriel warns Gabriel and his angels, who are guarding the gate of Paradise, of Satan's presence. Satan is apprehended by them and banished from Eden. God sends Raphael to warn Adam and Eve about Satan. Raphael recounts to them how jealousy against the Son of God led a once favored angel to wage war against God in heaven, and how the Son, Messiah, cast him and his followers into hell. He relates how the world was created so mankind could one day replace the fallen angels in heaven.

   Satan returns to earth, and enters a serpent. Finding Eve alone he induces her to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree. Adam, resigned to join in her fate, eats also. Their innocence is lost and they become aware of their nakedness. In shame and despair, they become hostile to each other. The Son of God descends to earth to judge the sinners, mercifully delaying their sentence of death. Sin and Death, sensing Satan's success, build a highway to earth, their new home. Upon his return to hell, instead of a celebration of victory, Satan and his crew are turned into serpents as punishment. Adam reconciles with Eve. God sends Michael to expel the pair from Paradise, but first to reveal to Adam future events resulting from his sin. Adam is saddened by these visions, but ultimately revived by revelations of the future coming of the Savior of mankind. In sadness, mitigated with hope, Adam and Eve are sent away from the Garden of Paradise.

Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan swift

      Gulliver’s Travels, as the book is now known, first appeared anonymously. Capitalizing on the lively interest in voyages at the time, Jonathan Swift called it Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World and ascribed it to “Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.” Swift published the book anonymously partly because of the occasional scatological references but more pressingly because of the thinly veiled political satire of England’s powerful first prime minister, Whig party leader Sir Robert Walpole, whom Swift detested and whom contemporaries would have immediately recognized in the ridiculous figure of the tightrope dancer, Flimnap, the treasurer of Lilliput, in part 1.

    The first two parts of Gulliver’s Travels form a nicely balanced pair. In Lilliput, where Gulliver first is shipwrecked, he is twelve times as tall as the diminutive local inhabitants. Everything is kept to this scale except for their senseless warring and hypocrisy, which are out of all proportion to their size and therefore seem the more alarming; one, illogically perhaps, expects decent conduct from tiny people. Flimnap, however, so inflated is his ego, accuses Gulliver of having an affair with his six-inch-tall wife.

     In the second island on which Gulliver is marooned, the natives are twelve times as tall as he is. He displays all the moral blindness of the Lilliputians in his dealings with the reasonable and generous Brobdingnagians. Gulliver, from his own over-inflated notion of his six-foot self, is offended that the local women do not cover themselves when undressing in front of him. Evidently, like Flimnap in part 1, believes that he is at least their equal. After two years, Gulliver escapes to sea and returns to England.

      His third voyage, actually written by Swift after the fourth, is the most scattered in its focus. It is largely political and for this reason is usually not as well received by critics. Gulliver travels to Laputa and encounters scientists and intellectuals whose work is, for the pragmatic parish priest in Swift, altogether too far removed from real life. Attempting to distill sunlight from cucumbers is one of their projects. The Laputan Projectors, in their flying island, tyrannize the inhabitants of Balnibarbi and waste this fertile land. Visiting nearby Luggnagg, Gulliver for a moment envies the Struldbrugs, who live forever, though he quickly changes his mind when he discovers that the immortals do age in the normal way.

     In fourth voyage, to the land of the Houyhnhnms (named after the whinnying sound horses make), is the climax of Gulliver’s personal regression. That he cannot approach the level of rationality of the equine race who are in control drives him insane. His much closer resemblance to the bestial, greedy, bellicose, and irrational Yahoos, who are the other native inhabitants, depresses him severely. Viewing him as a possible subversive, the Houyhnhnms invite him to leave their rational world. Finally home again in England, he prefers the stable to his home and can no longer tolerate the company of other humans. Feeling oneself superior to the entire human race, as Gulliver does, is by most definitions a position of insane pride.

Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

       Prince Hamlet of Denmark is urged by his father’s Ghost to avenge his murder at the hands of the dead king’s brother, now King Claudius; to make matters worse, Claudius has married the widow, Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude. Denmark is under threat of invasion from young Fortinbras, who seeks to regain lands lost to Hamlet’s father by Fortinbras’s father. Claudius sends word to the King of Norway (Fortinbras’s uncle) to curb Fortinbras’s aggression. In the meantime, Hamlet feigns madness with his family and friends, including his beloved, Ophelia, sister to Laertes and daughter to Polonius. Both Polonius and Laertes warn Ophelia against Hamlet’s amorous advances. Polonius believes Hamlet’s “madness” to be love sickness. Laertes is given permission to return to his studies in Paris.

    Claudius directs Gertrude to try to learn the cause of Hamlet’s odd behavior; they suspect it is the old king’s death and their own recent marriage. Meantime, Claudius and Polonius eavesdrop on Ophelia and Hamlet, who spurns her and appears mad. The King reveals to Polonius his plan to send Hamlet to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

     Hamlet seizes the opportunity presented by a traveling troupe of players to expose the King’s guilt with a “play within a play.” Soon after, Hamlet delays killing Claudius because the King is at prayer, and Hamlet does not wish to send him to heaven instead of hell. When Gertrude meets with Hamlet as Claudius has directed, Polonius hides behind the arras in Gertrude’s room to eavesdrop on the conversation. Hamlet, suspecting the interloper is Claudius, stabs and kills Polonius.

   When Polonius’s body is discovered, Claudius summons Hamlet and tells him he must sail to England for his own safety; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accompany Hamlet, carrying letters to the English, threatening war unless they kill Hamlet. Hamlet eventually escapes, returns to Denmark, and is met by Horatio.

    Ophelia has gone insane after Hamlet’s departure and her father’s death. Laertes   returns and vows to avenge Polonius’s death. Claudius contrives a fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes, during which Hamlet is to be injured with a poisoned sword tip and poisoned with a drink, thus assuring his death. When news arrives that Ophelia has drowned herself, Laertes is grief stricken. Hamlet and Horatio happen upon the burial site and funeral cortege; Hamlet tries to fight Laertes but is restrained.

   Hamlet tells Horatio that he rewrote the papers carried by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and that the letters now call for their own deaths. Osric invites Hamlet to the duel with Laertes; Claudius has supposedly bet on Hamlet to win. Gertrude mistakenly drinks from the cup poisoned by Claudius for Hamlet, and dies; Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned sword, and then Hamlet wounds Laertes when they accidentally exchange swords. When Laertes reveals the conspiracy, Hamlet wounds the King and forces the poisoned drink upon him. Laertes and Hamlet reconcile, and Laertes dies; Hamlet prevents Horatio from drinking the poison so that he can live to tell the truth. Hamlet names as his successor young Fortinbras, who arrives and orders Hamlet buried with all dignity