Episode Highlights

What to listen for...

...in “The Seafarer”:
The poet’s ambivalent attitude toward the sea.

...in the selection from Beowulf:
How the repetition of consonant sounds holds each line together, and how the poet mixes Christian imagery with a violent, pagan tale about a monster.

Question to Consider

Apart from the language, what makes these poems seem strange or foreign? What makes them seem modern or relevant?

What to listen for...

...in the description of the Pardoner:
The concrete details through which Chaucer paints a word picture of his character.

...in “The Pardoner’s Tale”:
The contrast between the tale’s theme and the Pardoner’s reasons for telling it.

Question to Consider

1. Why doesn’t Chaucer give his characters names—either in the prologue or in “The Pardoner’s Tale”?
2. What do you think the old man in the tale represents? 

What to listen for...

...in “They flee from me”:
The tension between innocence and eroticism.

...in Tichborne’s elegy:
How Tichborne uses paradoxes and antitheses to create a mood.

...in “The Lie”:
How Raleigh’s repeated use of imperative verbs gives the poem a sense of urgency and immediacy.

...in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”:
How Marlowe uses images from nature to elicit emotions.

Question to Consider

1. In “To Mistress Margaret Hussey,” why does Skelton repeatedly describe his mistress as a falcon and a hawk?
2. Both Wyatt’s “They flee from me” and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 focus on physical desire. How do the two poets approach the topic differently?

What to listen for...

...in the opening chorus from Henry V:
How Shakespeare refers to specific sights and sounds to spark the audience’s imagination, while simultaneously acknowledging the limitations of the stage.

...in the selection from King Lear:
Lear’s dawning self-knowledge in the midst of his confusion, and his daughter’s reactions to it.

...in the selection from Antony and Cleopatra:
The numerous details Shakespeare creates in order to depict Enobarbus’s awe and contempt.

Question to Consider

1. What makes these selections of dialogue poetic?
2. How do the poetic techniques used in the song from Cymbeline differ from those used in Hamlet’s soliloquy or Prospero’s speech?

What to listen for...

...in “The Flea”:
How Donne uses religious language and imagery in a poem that’s obviously not about religion.

...in “The Good-Morrow”:
How geography— both literal and metaphorical—informs Donne’s depiction of a perfect love.

...in “To His Coy Mistress”:
How the mood of the poem changes from stanza to stanza.

Question to Consider

1. Why is the term “metaphysical” applied to many of the poems in this episode?
2. Why do many couples today choose “The Good-Morrow” as part of their wedding ceremony? Do you think it’s appropriate?

What to listen for...

...in “On His Deceased Wife”:
How Milton’s imagery becomes more celestial and abstract, until the last line.

...in Satan’s speech from Paradise Lost, Book I:
The length and complexity of Milton’s sentences.

Question to Consider

1. What does Satan’s speech reveal about his character?
2. In the final selection read in this episode (from Paradise Lost, Book IV), how does Milton convey the majesty of the combat and its warriors?

What to listen for...

...in Dryden’s “MacFlecknoe”:
The bouncy rhythm, tight rhymes, and topsy-turvy values.

...in Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”:
How Swift uses parenthetical dialogue to mock both himself and his “female friends.”

...in Pope’s The Dunciad:
The classical allusions and personification of abstract qualities.

Question to Consider

1. Several poems in this episode use humor to make their points. Which one do you find the funniest, and why?
2. Introducing the selection from Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel, Gielgud calls it “public poetry.” What does he mean by that phrase? How would you distinguish between public poetry and other types?

What to listen for...

...in Blake’s “The Tyger”:
The musical repetition of words and questions.

...in the selection from Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”:
The irregular line lengths and lack of rhyme.

...in the selection from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”:
The consonance (repetition of consonant sounds) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) in each line.

Question to Consider

1. Introducing these poems, Gielgud says, “In a sense, we are still Romantics.” What does he mean? What qualities of mind or sensibility do 21st-century Americans share with these writers from 200 years ago?
2. How does Blake’s word picture of the tiger compare to his etching of the animal? What do you make of the similarities or differences between the poem and its illustration?
3. In writing about his cat, Christopher Smart seems to ignore consistent rhythm and rhyme. What makes this selection a poem?

What to listen for...

...in “The Daffodils”:
The simple rhymes and the poet’s childlike wonder at nature.

...in “Upon Westminster Bridge”:
How Wordsworth uses personification and natural imagery to glorify a scene of urban life.

...in the selection from The Prelude:
The plain, straightforward language, as compared with some of the other poems in this series so far, such as Milton’s and Shakespeare’s.

Question to Consider

1. In “The Solitary Reaper,” what exactly does Wordsworth admire about the maiden’s song? Does that provide insight into his approach to poetry?
2. How does Wordsworth’s vision of the city in “Upon Westminster Bridge” compare with Blake’s in “London,” from the last episode?

What to listen for...

...in Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:
The economy with which Shelley portrays the statue and its setting.

...in Keats’s “To Autumn”:
How the images appeal to all five senses.

...in the selection from Byron’s Don Juan:
The surprising shifts in tone, from wistfulness to humor.

Question to Consider

1. How does Shelley’s attitude toward Ozymandias’s legacy differ from his attitude toward Keats’s legacy, as shown in the selection from “Adonais”?
2. Who (or what) is the subject of Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”?

What to listen for...

...in the selections from Tennyson’s In Memoriam:
The tight rhyme scheme and structure of each stanza, and Tennyson’s leaps from idea to idea in each.

...in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”:
How the speaker’s character slowly emerges through the course of the poem.

...in Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:
The rhythms that mimic the wash of the sea.

Question to Consider

1. In Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” what clues does the poem give to the speaker’s character?
2. Compare the image that opens “Dover Beach” with the one that closes it.

What to listen for...

...in Poe’s “The City in the Sea”:
The elaborate musicality in the repetition of phrases, sentence structures, consonant sounds, and vowel sounds.

...in the selection from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:
How the repetition of words and phrases works to much different effect than in Poe’s poem.

...in Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”:
How the pauses add emphasis and suspense to the lines.

Question to Consider

1. How does Poe’s vision of death in “The City in the Sea” differ from Dickinson’s in “Because I could not stop for Death”?
2. Both Herman Melville and Julia Ward Howe used religious imagery in the two war poems featured here. How are they different?

What to listen for...

...in Hardy’s “The Ruined Maid”:
The characteristics that distinguish the “ruined” maid from her country friend, and the irony of the final line.

...in Hopkins’s “The Windhover”:
The compound words and consonance in each line.

...in Kipling’s “The Story of Uriah”:
Kipling’s use of ironic adjectives and his sardonic tone.

Question to Consider

1. Why is this episode titled “Romantics & Realists”? What sensibilities do these poets share?
2. How does Hopkins’s attitude toward aging in “I wake and feel the fell of dark” compare with A.E. Housman’s in “Tell me not here, it needs not saying”?

What to listen for...

...in Yeats's “The Second Coming”:
The differences in sentence length and structure between the first and second stanzas.

...in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
The poem’s simple but tight rhyme scheme.

...in Eliot’s “A Game of Chess” from The Waste Land:
How the rhythms of the lines change over the course of the poem.

Question to Consider

1. In completely different ways, both “The Second Coming” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” hint at profound but obscure things. Why is each one so powerful and memorable?
2. By the end, Eliot’s “A Game of Chess” has almost no rhyme and a very irregular rhythm. What makes it poetic?

What to listen for...

...in Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”:
The alternating rhyme with “light” and “night” in the closing line of each stanza.

...in Lowell’s “Skunk Hour”:
The shift in attitude and tone after the first four stanzas.

...in Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox”:
How the sounds of the words, rhythms of the lines, and transitions between stanzas mimic the movements of the animal.

Question to Consider

1. How do the poems in this episode compare in themes and forms to works from earlier episodes?
2. In “The Thought-Fox,” Ted Hughes writes about composing a poem. How does his attitude toward the process compare with Shakespeare’s in Prospero’s last speech from The Tempest or to Whitman’s in the selection from “Song of Myself”—both of which, in a sense, take artistic creation as their subject?