An Inspector Calls

         An Inspector Calls by J B Priestly is an interesting play which thrills the reader in several different ways. Written in 1912, this play is a mixture of social criticism, religious idealism and family drama.
        The play opens in Mr. Birling's dining room where the family is hosting a dinner. Present in the room are Mr. Birling, Mrs. Sybil Birling, Miss. Sheila Birling (their daughter), Mr. Eric Birling (their son) and Mr. Gerald Kroft, who might marry Sheila. Mr. Kroft is to inherit his father's industry which has been offering tough competition to Mr. Birling's.
        As soon as Gerald gives a ring to Sheila as a sign of engagement, an inspector called Mr. Goole calls and the plot begins to thicken.
        Eva Smith, a young working class lady, has committed suicide. Mr. Birling admits that he had to dismiss the lady, even though she was a good worker, when she asked for a pay rise. He dismisses her from a photograph shown by Mr. Goole. He confesses that it was an unfair thing but he believes that he was left with no option. 
        Sheila who walks in also gets to see the photo and recognizes her as the girl she forced a ready-made shop to fire from service. This was the girl's second job. When she brought a dress to Sheila she first held it close to her body and it looked great on her. When Sheila tried it, it looked ridiculous on her. She noticed the girl smiling at another salesgirl. Infuriated with jealousy, Sheila forced the shop to dismiss her, using her father's position as an major industrialist and a politician.
        Now Gerald is also shown the photograph and he confessed that he also met her at a bar and gave her some money and a place to stay in. In other words, he kept her as his mistress. She had changed her name. During that time, he did not come to meet Sheila and his excuse was that he was too busy with his work. Sheila immediately returns his ring though she acknowledges his honesty.
         Now it is Mrs. Sybil Briling's turn. As the head of the charity committee she also wounded Eva when she approached her as Mrs. Briling. She was put of by the fact that the  fake name Eva used was her own. She asked the committee not to help her though the girl was pregnant. She also refused to believe the girl's story that the man who impregnated her had offered her some compensation but since it was stolen cash, she did not take it so as not to make the man a thief. Mrs. Briling asks whether a girl of her standing could afford to be so conscientious. Sheila tells her not to play into the inspector's hand by being so innocent as he might tear her to pieces. However, against Sheila's protest, Mrs. Briling says that the young man should be properly punished.
         The last one to fall in is Mr. Eric Briling. He admits that he was the one who impregnated the girl and stole the money from his father's office to pay the girl. In a way the girl didn't lie about her name this time. She considered herself as the wife of Mr. Eric Briling. So she introduced herself as Mrs. Briling.
         Eric and Sheila confess their guilt but their parents and Gerald sticks to the idea that it was the girl who should be blamed. The inspector walks out telling them that such uncivil practices will be met with fire, blood and anguish.
         After the inspector leaves, Gerald manages to find out that there is no inspector by that name in the entire police force. They also find that no girl had committed suicide that night. This makes the inspector and impostor and all except Sheila and Eric consider themselves exonerated. They vehemently argue their way out of it, though they admit that he was of a strange nature and behaviour. He knew everything even before they opened their mouths. 
         The play ends when they get a phone call informing them that a girl has committed suicide and that a police inspector is on his way to meet all of them.
          The real identity of the inspector is left to the reader's speculation. So is the question whether he was showing them the photographs of different girls. We also hear the parents and Mr. Gerald passing a poor opinion about some of the great writers of the time.
          If we take the play as a symbolic representation, it can be observed that Eva represents the woman folk from the working classes about whom the rich people has no regard. They exploit them in different ways. They are either workers, or sleeping partners for them. 
          The inspector's words 'fire, blood and anguish' refers to suffering in hell or at the hands of the revolutionaries or a stern legal system in future. We see that Sheila and Eric are willing to learn a lesson but the others refuse to do so. Everyone's real nature is brought out by the inspector. 

          Whether they all wronged the same girl or different one is not an important question. It is only as insignificant as the parents' and Gerald's question whether the inspector was real or fake. See holistically, this is what working class women suffer at the hands of the rich everywhere in the world, then and now. This is how the rich see their own mistakes, then and now. This is the lesson that many refuse to learn, then and now. In other words, this is a theme that goes beyond time and place. The writer is able to present it in such a way that it has several layers of meaning and all of them are more blatant and not subtler than the other. 

Preludes by T S Eliot: an introduction

        Most of us understand, appreciate and enjoy some poems though not all kinds of poems. When we are taught poetry, we learn it as if it is yet another page in the physics text book. The teacher knows the answer and we don’t.

       We learn poetry by analyzing it before we enjoy it. But to write a critical appreciation one needs to enjoy and appreciate a poem. When we do so we should be open and not compare. We should deal with poems the way we (should) deal with kids. Each one is great in its own way.

Poets are great because of their honesty. A dishonest poet is in no way great even if he agrees with great people and their thoughts. So, when we discuss a poem we only have to look at how well the poet has brought it all out on paper and conveyed to us even though he is far away and long ago from us.

         T S Eliot's great work is The Waste Land. It changed overnight the way poets wrote poems or discussed about the old ones. Echoes of this wonderful work of art can be heard in The Preludes too. One may disagree with Eliot’s view of life and literature. He was a great scholar and spoke several languages including Latin and Greek. Later in his life he changed his sect of religion from Protestantism to Catholicism. We may wonder how such a great poet could insist on changing from one sect of a religion to another and that too officially and ceremoniously. We may even wonder how a great person could have several spoiled and spoiling relationships. But we have to remind ourselves that we are judging the poetry of a poet and not the propaganda of a citizen.

             During the time when Eliot was writing his main poems, the First World War was on the anvil. The quick gun leaders of Industrialization had gone in for legal looting. Religion no more held sway. People didn’t know what to look forward to or where to go to find peace of mind. They all waited.

            We do like some poems because the thoughts expressed agree with our own. But at times we like them even though we dislike what they tell us. The reason is their beauty. Sometimes this beauty is the result of the images in the poem. When we say beauty of the images we don’t mean that they are all pretty to look at. We mean that they are effective in reaching out to our mind, without bothering our brain much. In fact, poems taste better when they go around our brains and enter our mind directly.

So when we read Eliot, we should not see his images or lines as codified statements. Poets don’t do that.

            If you need a method, imagine that you have failed in an exam which was very crucial to you. You want to see some people who are as hopeless as you are. Now read the poem. Without thinking about the images, see them in your mind. You will find the poem highly communicative.

           The poem talks about everything disgusting. Before Eliot’s time the poets were disgusted with what they saw around them and wrote about things which were far away and long ago. People took it up and they too began to feel disgusted of what was around them. However, this is like running away from reality. Eliot is only expressing how the squalor, depression, loneliness and other feelings of desolation have worked their way into people too. Those are seen in people’s manners and ways of life as well as in their thoughts and thoughtlessness. 

The Cockroach : An Analysis

The Cockroach
Kevin Halligan

       The poem The Cockroach provides an interesting view of human life as compared to that of a cockroach . It is about a cockroach which is a dirty and repulsive little insect foreshadows the author’s projection of himself. At first glance it may appear to be boring and seems like he’s just talking about a cockroach pacing around the room, but there is more to it. At the very end of the poem, the last line works as a mirror which reflects the rest of the poem in a new light. From a mere observation of a cockroach, the poem rises to the level of a true reflection on life in a highly philosophical way.

The poet observes every movement of a cockroach. Each of the movements matches with our own stages of life. We get stuck at some point in our lives in which we want better things or we rush into things not knowing what we really want.  

“At first he seemed quite satisfied to trace

        A path between the wainscot and the door.”

These lines tell us about how the cockroach is satisfied with his current situation, but then it quickly gets bored of it and begins to crave for something more, something new and fresh.

“But soon he turned to jog in crooked rings.”

This tells us, he was moving around with bigger ambitions. After he reaches this ambition he comes up in life and doesn't know what to do from there.

“After a while, he climbed an open shelf

                   And stopped. He looked uncertain where to go.”

He becomes restless and then finally finds something exciting new in the “open shelf”. His actions match with those of humans at a late stage in life, when we suddenly get greedy and want more, instead of realising to be happy with what we’ve got.  

“A former life had led to? I don’t know.”

These are moments of hesitation and uncertainty.  Is the risk worth it? And finally the poet ends is by saying

“Except I thought I recognised myself.”

This line acts as a interpreter for the whole poem.  The poet sees all the similarities between the cockroach and himself as he rushes through life frantically, not wanting to experience life as it is, but by rushing into things without no true goal or purpose. We are constantly looking for choices but then we realise we don’t even know what we truly want.

         

                                                        

Ode to a Grecian Urn

O my dear Urn,
Lemme see how I can greet you properly.
You, the unspoiled bride of Quietness, the adopted child of Silence and slow-moving Time, history written as beautiful paintings (and so can express a beautiful story more beautifully than my poems).
I know I’ve already messed up. Hate talking about me and my poems.
I wonder what stories found in old dog-eared, torn and tattered books, can be found on your surface. Are these stories of goddesses, of men and women, or of all? Are these stories from old cities or from remote valleys? Who are these men or gods painted on your surface? Who are these women who are ever so reluctant to compromise? What are they chasing and why? What are they struggling to escape from and why? Why are they beating their timbrels and blowing their pipes? Why is their happiness so intense and wild?
The songs we have heard are all so sweet, but surely there must be better ones which we can imagine. The unheard ones ought to be sweeter since they exist only in our imagination and imagination can make anything cho chweet. So, I imagine the pipes I see on this urn as playing on. I can’t hear their music but I imagine it to be sweeter than what I have ever heard. When they play, they are not playing to my real ears, for sure, but more to my soul (love it!) and the songs have no particular tone.
Hey, I see a young man under this tree. Painted figures, they all are. See, this young man can’t stop singing. The trees around him will never shed their leaves. In this picture it is always spring. Nothing changes and everything stays fresh. Simply awesome.
I also see a bold lover, trying to kiss his beautiful girl. Bold and beautiful. But he can only try. And she can only be expecting (no pun intended). They will never kiss. They are painted in that position on the surface of this urn. They are close to winning their goal or reaching their aim. But the real act of kissing won’t happen. This should not worry them. She is not going to run away. Though the young man cannot enjoy the bliss of a kiss, his girl is going to be there for him anytime and he can love her eternally. Moreover, she will always be this fair and lovable forever and ever.
I see some trees that can bring happiness to the scene. They can never shed their leaves and look ugly. It will be always spring for them. Caught and arrested as images, they cannot change like the rest of the world. There is a man playing on a flute. He is happy and so are his songs. He will never get tired. He will be playing on that pipe beautiful music forever and ever. The songs will never get old and stale (unlike last year’s chart-busters). His songs aren’t heard and so will never be too familiar or old.
I see a lot of love pictured on this urn. Such love will be warm forever and enjoyed eternally. It is far above the love of human beings like us. It is above any passion that we all have. Our passions often leave us sad. Either he loses interest or she loses interest or they both get fed up. Our passions always end in frustration and leave us with a fever or a headache, and a bitter taste in the mouth. The pain gives us a parching tongue as if we are really sick. But this love pictured here is above all that. It is totally unlike ordinary love since it is ever lasting. Never changes or fades. Never loses its colour.
I wonder who these people pictured here are. They seem to be going to attend an animal sacrifice in some unknown forest under the guidance of some mysterious priest. Where is he leading the young calf to? It is lowing at the skies. Its sides, silver in colour, are decorated with garlands. These people have left some little town by a river or a sea shore. Or even a hillside with a small fort. They have left that place deserted on this pious morning. Pious, because, obviously, it is some kind of a holy ceremonious day for these people. The streets of that town they have left are not pictured on this urn. But I can imagine that there is such a street in some town. It will remain silent till these people have gone back and (OMG!) they won’t and can’t go back. Not even a single man can return to that place and tell us why all the people have left the town. It will always remain a mystery even in our imagination!
My dear Urn, what wonderful shape you have and what ambiance you spread around! You are covered all over with decorations and images of men and women in marble; with branches of trees found in forests and weeds that have been stepped on by wayfarers.
By being silently enigmatic and parrying our questions, you sting us out of our commonplace worries (thoughts). This is exactly what eternity does for us. We are taken out of our daily worries and left to awe and wonder at the bigger picture, something far beyond us, bigger than all of us.
You are a piece of frozen countryside. Decades and centuries later, when this generation grows old and becomes insignificant (wasted) you shall remain as you are. Being a work of art, you will remain as such in the midst of the sorrows, (of course, different sorrows of a different generation) but still a friend to man. That is what a piece of art does. It pleases us generation after generation. (Just like this poem.) You will keep preaching to us the importance of beauty, the only good thing we need to know on this earth. Beauty is the truth about things or the truth about things is what beauty is all about. This is all we know and all that we need to know and remember.
Beauty takes us beyond our petty concerns. It exhilarates us and stills our thoughts. This is why we are speechless when we encounter something beautiful. It is in that moment that we stop worrying. It is the only moment that we fully live in. At all other times we are dying or waiting to die.

Yours

John Keats 

The City Planners: an Analysis

The City Planners by Margaret Atwood is a poem about the changing cityscapes. It conveys the poet’s thoughts feelings and ideas as she passes through a suburban residential area. She takes the reader along with her on the ride with a very common word- ‘these’. This word is followed by the strange phrase ‘residential Sundays’ which suggests routine and boredom. It talks of a group of people who live in their houses and stay away from work only on Sundays which were actually days of mirth and merriment in olden times. When we read ‘dry August sunlight’ the picture is fairly clear. The poet’s sensitivity has been offended by something she saw. She says it is the sanities.

                                      ‘the houses in pedantic rows, the planted

                                        sanitary trees…’

The urban landscapes keep expanding into the suburbs and changes take place overnight. Instead of the wild and chaotic growth of wilderness, the city grows in artificial rows. In the name of security and sanity at the expense of wild beauty, an uncanny order is brought into the cityscapes. She is amused and saddened in a way at the area’s orderliness, perfection and uniformity.  

The trees which were not planted for the sake of beauty but for sanitary purposes assert the mindset of the people. It is all pragmatic and unaesthetic. We hear echoes of Dylan Thomas’s poem ‘The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ and Robert Frost’s Mending Wall when Margaret Atwood talks about the invisible power against which human aggression seems to have no chance.

The poet is almost feeling intimidated by the perfection of the place. She thinks the levelness of the surfaces is sneering at a dent on her car door, an aberration which she thinks may not be accepted in a place like this. She describes the deafening silence there.

‘No shouting here, or

shattering of glass’

The only sound welcomed here is the mechanical whirring of the motor of a lawn mower which is cutting off the already ‘discouraged grass’ which suggests the insensitive nature of the place. The fact that the place is very quiet adds to its already ‘boring’ atmosphere. Words like rational ’, ‘straight swath and ‘levelness of surface’ suggest an eternally boring place. The silence of the area almost seems to kill the poet. It is too overpowering and unnerving. Shouting is not welcome nor is the sound of a sheet of glass breaking into pieces, however musical that sound may be. Glass is an artificial object but people don’t want to hear it being broken or destroyed while they are happy about a power lawn insensitively mowing down the tender leaves of grass. Even this is done for the sake of leveling and uniformity. This imagery, along with the earlier one of ‘the planted sanitary trees,’ shows man’s futile but dogged attempt to control nature.

The drive ways avoid the wild hysteria of nature by being even and the roofs are all slanted in the same way as if they are unwilling to face the sky directly. However, there are certain things which still keep the wildness of life: the smell of spilt oil, a faint sickness lingering in the garages, a splash of paint on bricks which looks like a bleeding bruise, a plastic hose coiled like the viciousness of a venomous snake.

even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to

the landscape behind or under

the future cracks in the plaster

Mortar and cement have been thrown lavishly over nature and its beauty and the poet foresees that the past will come out one day in future. Through the cracks in the plaster, the poet sees what has been submerged and is waiting to show its head. She foresees that all these houses which are against chaos which is the golden rule of nature will one day collapse and like a ship sinking tilt to its side and disappear into the earth. 

Like the movement of glaciers, the change is slow and steady and hard to see. This idea is something that sprouted from the annoyance and frustration that is lingering in her mind. She predicts the destruction of perfection in the streets at the hands of the powerful forces of nature such as the earth, seas and glaciers. This destruction will come as a consequence of having dared to control nature and not allowing nature to grow wild. Restricted and controlled, nature strikes back. Natures anger brims up and at a certain point will just burst , throwing wildly its unrestrained forces of displeasure and annoyance which is shared by the poet in the first stanza. The image of the ship slanting and sinking obliquely into the clay sea reminds us of Titanic which also was a man made wonder and was famed as the unsinkable.  

The poet says that this is what brings in the City Planners, the urbanizers. They have the insane face of political conspirators.

‘…scattered over unsurveyed

territories, concealed from each other,

each in his own private blizzard;

When one world collapses they barge in to build another one right there. They guess directions and make plans which are rigid and stern. Uncompassionate (as wooden borders) plans (transitory lines) for humanity’s future are envisioned by them. The present vanishes like a cloud into thin air. The insane planners bank on the panic of a suburb which has lost its roots. They ring in (order in) the future as maddening sketches on sheets of white paper.

Thus, the poem extols the power of nature to take care of itself and build anew. It mocks at man’s sense of superiority. This is where the poet rises to the level of the great poets of nature who worshiped nature more as a power than as a sensual experience.

Continuum: an Analysis

                  Continuum by Allen Curnow is a deeply spiritual poem though it is written in a candid and casual style. Reading between the lines, we find the poet guiding the reader through his abstract thoughts. 
                 'Continuum' means the transition from one to another, or a seamless conjunction of two entities. This is a popular word in modern physics where time and space are considered as two entities which can change into each other and usually exist as a couple, with one flowing into the other. The poet has structured his poem in such a way that the stanzas, except for the introductory one, flow into one another and do not stand as individual, stand aloof pieces. The transition happens in language as well as in the thoughts that the language expresses.

                   In the first stanza the poet calls our attention to a common misconception. The moon looks like,

                  “(it) rolls over the roof and falls behind

                    my house, and the moon does neither of these things,

                    I am talking about myself.

                So, the poet cites a cliché commonly found in poetry, and unmasks it to tell us that when we say things which are not true, we in fact reveal ourselves. We see things the way we are and not the way they are. The poet warns us that everything that he has written is only his own perception.

                These first lines frame the poem and serve as an introduction. When read in this light, the poem is more about creation, the poet’s and God’s. In the second stanza, the poet tells us we are absolutely programmed in our behavior and that we are not blessed with free will. We can’t think thoughts. They are spontaneous. We can’t even change the subject of our thought or go to sleep when we wish to. It is all predestined for us.

                Having nothing better to do the poet goes out on barefoot in the darkness. He leans from the porch across the hedges in his front courtyard over to where it is darker and nothing is distinguishable (washed-out creation). In the dark sky he spies two bright clouds, with moon’s dust on them. He inserts the word query in brackets to ask whether it is not just another beautiful phrase at the expense of reality. He likes one of the clouds for some personal reasons.

                                                                        “one’s mine

                      the other is an adversary,”

                Which is which will depend on how it is shaped by the wind and other things.

                Time moves slowly for him. In a very cryptic expression he quips,

               “A long moment stretches, the next one is not

                on time.”

              This may sound absurd since moments refer to time and time is never fast slow. Time has a set pace. However, we are reminded of the new idea in physics that time is relative, presumably a fact known to poets for long!

               Being barefooted the poet feels the chill of the cold floor not only on his feet but right up to his throat. Suddenly the night sky pours down as rain or fog or even as darkness. The poet has no choice but to go in. He turns on his heel and goes in closing the door behind him. The door is closed on the real author, God, who created all this. God is such a good craftsman who picks up his tools and his litter when he  is done. God urges the poet quietly back to bed.

                Overall, Continuum is a spiritual poem which makes no distinction between fact and fiction. It also shows the seamless merging of perception and observation. Insomnia or sleeplessness is something that happens to most writers. Usually writers write something to get out of it. Here a greater author, God Himself, urges the writer to go back to bed. Ironically, the writer manages to write a poem out of this experience. The artist and God are also seamlessly connected. They are both creative. God keeps his workshop clean, his tools ready and he keeps creating.

                “the author, cringing demiurge, who picks up

                  his litter and his tools…”

 The poet, on the other hand, feels frustration and sleeplessness and they motivate him to write poems.

Telephone Conversation

Wole Soyinka

In Telephone Conversation, Wole Soyinka uses the format of a telephone conversation to express his thoughts and feeling about racial discrimination. The telephone is supposed to overcome distances, but ironically the telephone conversation here brings out the distance between people.

The speaker, an African is having a conversation with a British lady. He wants to take a house on rent and he has found one. He thinks the price is reasonable and the location is indifferent. The two words reasonable and indifferent are significant. Even such an abstract thing as price could be reasonable while some people are not. The location is indifferent. The location is not bothered who lives there but the people are. They could be indifferent to the point of being insensitive.

The land lady says ‘she lived off premises’. Even then she is bothered about who is going to reside in her house. The deal is almost settled when the man says he is an African. He wants to know whether she has a problem with that. She suddenly goes silent thus expressing her lack of good breeding. Her silence covers up her racial feeling. But it doesn’t cover it up for long.  She tries to tone it down and hide it. Her looks and habits become a mockery of her own culture. Her mind is still quite narrow.

                                                            Voice, when it came,

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled

Cigarette -pipped.

When she resumes her conversation, she does not ask him anything about his education or his job. She asks him how dark he is. She is hoping that he may not be too dark for her to tolerate. She sees people as black men and white men, but she is trying to compromise if he is not ‘too dark’. With all her good breeding she fails to see that it is not just her aversion to black people that she should cure but her basic racial view point and discrimination that she should completely do away with.

Even if she says she is tolerant to dark and not to very dark, she is still a racist. Here, the poet makes a very subtle point that he is not attacking the discrimination against his race but the discrimination shown to any race for that matter, brown, yellow or light black.

‘ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?’ Revelation came.

‘You mean – like plain or milk chocolate?’

When the speaker says black, she sees ‘red’. Red is the colour of danger and wherever she is forced to share a spot with the public, she might be feeling horrified. By ‘Red double-tiered omnibus squelching tar’, the poet means how the black community is run over by the white because they sense danger lurking in them.

Obviously, the speaker scores over the lady in breeding, culture, decency and even in language. She does not even understand what ‘sepia’ means. The speaker now feels more confident and teases her in different ways.

Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet…’

He tries to tell her how his body got that colour. He refers to his rear end and she takes offence and is about to hang her phone. After she has cut him off, he still manages to tell her to see it for herself. Thus, in every way he is able to outsmart her and make his message loud and clear. He would have lost his chance to be her tenant but he has succeeded in ‘giving it to her’.

The poet also has succeeded in destroying the myth of culture and breeding associated with the western world. He shows how discrimination rears its ugly head in subtle ways. 

An Old Woman

An Old Woman by Arun Kolatkar depicts a very commonplace scene from and the street. But in the poet’s hands it becomes a question which haunts us forever. It is written in simple English and has a very simple structure.

He describes an old woman who grabs hold of the passers-by and goes along with them begging for such a small amount as fifty paise. In return she offers to guide them to a shrine. But they have seen it already. They miss the point that ‘the help given to the poor is what takes you to God and his shrine’.  

But she has no choice but to push them to give her something.

She hobbles along any way

and tightens her grip on you

            People get irritated and they sternly say ‘no’ to her. She won’t let them go.

                                You know how old women are

                                 They stick you like a burr.

A burr is a prickly seed case of plants. It sticks to clothes. This is an exact description of this old woman. Being a woman, she is able to generate life like a seed. But being old, she is only a seed case. A burr sticks to clothes, and the old woman is so weak that she too is supported by the cloths she wears.

The old woman now tells them how difficult her life is among those wretched hills. The hills her represent the wealthy and the mighty. They don’t yield anything. Then people take a look at her and they find how devoid of hope her life is. Her eyes are sunken deep and through her eyes they ‘look at the sky.’ In her eyes they see no hope, an empty sky, with neither clouds not silver linings. Her misery encompasses them too.

            Suddenly people find how farcical the society and its institutions are. The hills hoard and do not yield, the temples offer and do not deliver, and the sky has turned empty of gods. There is nothing to help her get over her misery. There is nothing that offers hope for the poor. While everything loses their significance, the woman in her misery stands there as the only reality there is. She is able to put up with everything, unlike whatever is around her.

            The passers-by may give her some coins. Whatever she is given is what she considers them worthy of. This is a moment of choice for them. They can give her a handsome amount and be great in her eyes and in theirs. They can give her a petty amount and be petty in their eyes and in hers. Either way she is strong enough to take it (the shatterproof crone). It is the image of those who are around her that shatters ‘with a plate glass clatter’.

            Arun Klatkar successfully drives a point home. The poem opens our eyes not only to the old woman’s pitiable condition but also to how we deserve to be pitied for the poverty in our souls. Moreover, the old woman is able to see it clearly.  

                        And you are reduced

to so much small change

in her hand.

The Shield of Achilles

 The Shield of Achilles

W. H. Auden’s poem The Shield of Achilles is remarkable for its content, structure and beauty. Though the poem is based on Homer’s Iliad, the poet uses allusions only as a springboard for his own thoughts. It is not an interpretation of the myth or a new perspective. Whatever the poet has drawn from the epic is made to undergo a complete change to suit his purpose.

The poet names his characters only in the end, thereby suggesting that they are not as important as the situation. Thetis represents the mother of a modern day soldier. Her son Achilles represents the new generation which has degenerated an insensitive humanity which loves wars. The armor maker Hephaestos is still an artist who tells the truth as he always did.

In the beginning of the poem we see Thetis looking over Hephaestos’ shoulder with the hope of seeing the beautiful metal carving on the shield he is making. It is a shield for his son Achilles. But she fails to see what she is looking for. She expects to see the glories of a city but she sees only the spoils of a war. The armor maker, an artist, has put there only,

 An artificial wilderness

          And a sky like lead

It is just the opposite of what Homer talks about when he describes the shield of Achilles. No vines, no olive trees and no

Marble well-governed cities

And ships upon untamed seas,          

Around her, there reverberates the voice of authority, ‘in tones dry and level as the place’, using such a pure science as statistics to mislead the masses. She sees the soldiers, depressed and thoughtful, motivated by some false beliefs, marching towards the killing fields.

            She searches for images of ceremonies, rituals and customs. But the ones she sees are of a different nature. There are no priests around temples but sentries outside an army camp.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

                      Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

Instead of animal sacrifice, it is human sacrifice. Instead of pious rituals, it is a scene of insensitivity. Three people, gone pale with fear, are led out to be shot dead. The world around is ruled by a few. The majority live a shameful life,

And died as men before their bodies died.

            The mirth and merriment that Hephaestos had depicted on the shield of Achilles cannot be spotted on the shield of this modern day Achilles’ shield. All Thetis gets to see is,

                   A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

loitering about in a weed-choked field, pelting stones at birds. His first lessons were about girls getting raped and boys knifing their friends. He has not heard about values or compassion.

               ‘Of any world where promises were kept,

                Or one could weep because another wept.

As the armorer finishes his work and walks away,

Thetis of the shining breasts

                     Cried out in dismay

She is horrified at what is in store for her son. He himself is an iron-hearted killer, whom wars may please and not sadden. His own death is imminent too. 

Thus we can easily see how the poets busts the myths associated with war. He is not only criticizing the modern day war, he is also making us doubt whether the wars in epics could have been different. Using the strands gleaned from the epic Iliad, Auden has managed to weave a magical mirror in which we shamefully witness our own world finding in war a solution not only for political problems but for economic problems too. 

Character Analysis: Macbeth

Character Analysis: Macbeth

Characters in play can be assessed by studying the following aspects

• What do they say, what do they do and what do others say about them
• What are the beliefs, values and motivations
• How much do they succeed in practicing what they preach
• Who are they made to be in conflict with or how do they differ from the other in the play

When attempting a character analysis of Macbeth, bear the following points in mind:

·         His bravery

1.        Report by the sergeant

2.       Macbeth accepts Lady Macbeth’s challenge to act like a man

3.       He faces the witches and goes to confront them again

4.       He responds well to challenges and never shies away

5.       All his words show determination and dynamism

·         His ambition

1.       Obvious from his actions

2.       Lady Macbeth is aware of it.

3.       Banquo is aware of it

4.       The witches exploit it

5.       He goes blind with ambition  and commits horrible murders

6.       The price he pays for his ambition and consequent action does not deter him

·         His imagination

1.       He is able to look his circumstances and the consequences of his actions

2.       His words are highly poetic

3.       He sees a lot of apparitions and hallucination

4.       He is able to daydream about his prospects

·         His affection

1.       He loves his wife and confides in her

2.       He accepts her guidance and advice

3.       He uses terms of endearment in his conversation

4.       He insulated her against more evil news after the first few murders

·         His nobility

1.       It takes a lot of persuasion from the people around him as well as the circumstances to make him commit the crimes

2.       He aborts his plans several times

3.       Other characters comment on his good nature

·         His fear

1.       he gets scared when he sees the witches and seeks clarification from Banquo

2.       He shies away from his own evil plans

3.       He fears Banquo

4.       He is superstitious