CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF IMPORTANT POEMS

6. CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF IMPORTANT POEMS
33. Critically evaluate the following. 
(i) When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away!
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there
The spent and maim'd among;
God grant you find one face there
You loved when all was young!

(Charles Kingsley) 

(ii) Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on --on--and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless;
The singing will never be done.

(Siegfried Sassoon) 

34. Critically evaluate the following. 
(i) Never seek to tell they love
Love that never told can be
For the gentle wind does move
Silently invisibly
I told my love I told my love
I told her all my heart
Trembling cold in ghastly fears
Ah she doth depart
Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently invisibly
O was no deny

(William Blake) 

(ii) I will drain
Long draughts of quiet
As a purgation
Remember
Twice daily
Who I am;
Will lie o'nights
In the bony arms
Of Reality and be comforted.

(Elizabeth Sewell) 

35. Critically evaluate the following.
(i) 'Nature' is what we see --
The Hill -- the Afternoon --
Squirrel -- Eclipse -- the Bumble bee --
Nay -- Nature is Heaven --
Nature is what we hear --
The Bobolink -- the Sea --
Thunder -- the Cricket --
Nay -- Nature is Harmony --
Nature is what we know --
Yet have no art to say --
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

(Emily Dickinson) 

(ii) Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known.
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

(Robert Frost)

36. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide and made my pains his prey.

Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay

A mortal thing so to immortalise;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise.

Not so (quod I); let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;

My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.

(Edmund Spenser)

(ii) Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

But they eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(William Shakespeare)

37. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours:

We have given our hears away, a sordid boon!

The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. --- Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

(William Wordsworth)

(ii) Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,

The linner and thrush say, 'I love and I love!'

In the winter they're silent -- the wind is so strong;

What is says, I don't know, but it sings a loud song.

But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,

And singing, and loving -- all come back together.

But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,

The green fields below him, the blue sky above,

The he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he -

'I love my Love, and my Love loves me!'

(S.T. Coleridge)

38. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) There be none of Beauty's daughters

With a magic like thee;

And like music on the waters

Is they sweet voice to me:

When, as if its sound were causing

The charmed ocean's pausing,

The waves lie still and gleaming,

And the lull'd winds seem dreaming:

And the midnight moon is weaving

Her bright chain o'er the deep,

Whose breast is gently heaving

As an infant's asleep:

So the spirit bows before thee

To listen and adore thee;

With a full but soft emotion,

Like the swell of summer's ocean.

(Lord Byron)

(ii) BRIGHT star! Would I were steadfast as thou art --

Not in love splendour hung aloft the night,

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priest-like task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or grazing on the new soft fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors --

No --- yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever --- or else swoon to death.

(John Keats)

39. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night

To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, --

Out of the night, two cocks together crow,

Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:

And bright before my eyes with trumpeters stand,

Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,

Each facing each as in a coat of arms:

The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.

(Edward Thomas)

(ii) Twelve o'clock

Along the reaches of the street

Held in a lunar synthesis,

Whispering lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory

And all its clear relations,

Its divisions and precisions,

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

(T.S. Eliot)

40. Critically evaluate the following.

(i) Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Easter tide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

(A.E. Houseman)

(ii) At school I loved one picture's heavy greenness -

Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.

The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness

Still more in place when mirrored in canals.

I can't remember not ever having known

The immanent hydraulics of a land

Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.

My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry

Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.

Me waiting until I was nearly fifty

To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans

The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,

Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

(Seamus Heaney)

Notes Prepared By: Prof. Shahbaz Asghar