React to the following texts with TRUE, FALSE or CAN'T TELL and justify your answer.
A. Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day; that was against the rule.
It made the children laugh and play to see a lamb at school.
1. Mary's lamb had white fleece.
2. Mary went to school regularly.
3. The lamb followed Mary everywhere she went.
4. The lamb had a ribbon around its neck.
5. Mary was a boy.
6. Mary was a woman.
7. Maybe Mary liked to go to school.
8. Maybe Mary didn't have a lamb.
In judging a "maybe" statement, do the following: (1) read the statement without the "maybe"; (2) judge the statement without the "maybe." If the statement without the "maybe" is "can't tell" or if it is true, then the "maybe" statement is true. If the statement without the "maybe" is false, then the "maybe" statement is false.
B. Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother was ill, and Red decided to take her a basket of goodies to help her get well. The big bad wolf saw Red walking through the woods on her way to the grandmother's house, and he ran ahead to the grandmother's house and ate the grandmother. Although Red didn't recognize the wolf when she arrived at her grandmother's house, she screamed in time to be rescued by a nearby woodsman.
1. Red's grandmother is alive when the story starts.
2. Red's mother fixed the basket of goodies for Red to take.
3. Red recognized the wolf in time to be rescued.
.
4. Red was taking the goodies to her grandmother's house when the wolf saw her in the woods.
5. The wolf was bad.
6. Maybe Red saw the wolf in the woods at the same time the wolf saw her.
7. Red didn't like her grandmother.
8. Red ran all the way from her house to her grandmother's house.
10. Maybe Red's grandmother wasn't really ill but was testing Red to see what Red would do.
11. Red noticed immediately that the wolf was not the grandmother.
12. Red couldn't have been in a big hurry to get to her grandmother's house, or she would have been running, not walking, through the woods.
13. Red was rescued by a passing woodsman.
C. An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress ....
1. How many meanings of ‘paltry’ do you know? Which of them fits into this context? Justify your answer.
2. The word ‘thing’(l.1) refers to an object. Which object does it refer to?
3. The word ‘but’ is important because it enhances what the speaker suggests about aged man.
a) True b) False c) Can’t tell.
Justify your answer.
4. How are ‘paltry’ (l.1), and ‘tatter’ (l.4) related? ‘Tatter’ is used in two parts of speech’. What are they and how do they enhance the idea of age in the poem?
5. What structural difference do you notice between the first line and ‘…unless/ Soul clap … louder sing’? Do you notice any grammatical difference in the use of verbs in those two sentences? How do they affect the senses?
6. What is ‘mortal dress’? (l.4) What relationship is established between ‘tattered coat’ and ‘mortal dress’? How are they similar or dissimilar? If tears are implied by tatter/tattered, in what sense is the mortal dress torn?
7. Establish a relationship between ‘tattered coat’, ‘stick’ and old age.
8. Is the voice personal or impersonal? Is there respect or disrespect, or pity for old age in the poem? Which words suggest the speaker’s attitude to old age and how?
D. Blessed be God that I have wedded five,
Of whiche I have piked out the beste,
Bothe of hir nether purs and of hir cheste.
Diverse scoles maken parfit clerkes,
And diverse practikes in sondry werkes
Maken the werkman parfit sikerly:
Of five housbondes scoleying am I.
Welcome the sixte whan that evere he shal!
1. Note all the differences that you notice between modern English and the English of the text. What peculiarities do you find about spelling?
2. How do they affect your reading?
3. Find out all the modern substitutes for the words in the text.
4. Which word(s) have long since lost the meaning used in the text?
5. What is the dominant grammatical pattern in the poem? Explain the effect of the shift of grammatical pattern from perfect to indefinite in the poem.
6.
7. What is a bawdy word? Do you find any bawdy expression in the poem?
8. Summarize the speaker's argument.
11 comments:
I'm telling the 3h students about LANGUAGE FOR LITERATURE WORKSHEET? Do you need any more? You don't look it. I've got no feedback,queries from your end. I take it you don't need any more. Should I stop posting them? Please let me know. Always identify yourself by name and roll#. Thanks.
MM
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
Dramatic Monologue
This form of poetry involves a single speaker in the presence of silent listener(s) who remains silent as the speaker speaks. Clearly, here we find a binary: the eloquent speaker and the mute listener(s), producing an interesting effect—one that of listening to one keeping other(‘)s(‘) presence in mind and imagining their reaction. This makes a dramatic monologue an interactive form of poetry where the reader participates immediately to the poem in its construction of meaning.
As it is a speech, it must have a colloquial sort of style; so many punctuations and caesuras serve that purpose.
(to be continued)
Shourabh,
You're right. But to call it a binary is to forget about one thing of the binary that it has one superior term and another inferior. You could still retain the opinion if you thought that the speaker is imposing on the listener. Of course, it is possible to think so in this case as the speaker acts superior. But this can't be a rule about the dramatic monologue.
Yes. It's endemically interactive though all discourse or text is supposed to be interactive for that matter, even very personal utterances, as you find always a side reacting, even when you're soliloquizing (then you yourself are the reactant.)
Good job!
Cheers!
Shourabh,
You're right. But to call it a binary is to forget about one thing of the binary that it has one superior term and another inferior. You could still retain the opinion if you thought that the speaker is imposing on the listener. Of course, it is possible to think so in this case as the speaker acts superior. But this can't be a rule about the dramatic monologue.
Yes. It's endemically interactive though all discourse or text is supposed to be interactive for that matter, even very personal utterances, as you find always a side reacting, even when you're soliloquizing (then you yourself are the reactant.)
Good job!
Cheers!
Response to Dr. Masud Mahmood’s Comment:
Thanks sir, I overlooked the thing u said about binary; it can’t be considered as a general rule for all dramatic monologues. Yet, as u pointed out, it’s true in this particular context.
What Happened to the Duchess?:
We don’t know; no one knows. We just can speculate from the mood, the tone and above all the language of the poem. You can answer either affirmatively or negatively to this question according to the way you interpret it.
Two ‘as if’s can be found in the poem; let’s look at them carefully:
A
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive.
B
…There she stands
As if alive.
Structurally, we use ‘as if’ while talking about something IMAGINARY, not REAL. The Duke, too, might be implying that the REAL is she is not alive, and the painting forces one to IMAGINE that she is alive. This is my personal interpretation; I’m looking forward to hearing from those who disagree.
The most direct statement about the Duchess’s fate is ‘…all smiles stopped together.’ The question is why the Duke is being vague and obscure in his expression. I think, he is trying to mount up suspense in the emissary’s mind because they’re in the middle of a dowry negotiation; pressure may win a better bargain!
(to be continued)
Shourabh,
I can see your point. But when an image is photo-finished, don't we still say 'as if'? ('life-like' is another way of putting in for the putative). You consider this point. Your point is no less valid. Your surmise and mine are both possible. This deepens the ambiguity of the Duke's words. I also tend to consider the Duke as an art critic par excellence: you might consider the possibility that the Duke, for all his vituperation against the Fra, is praising the quality of the painting and the painter. If he weren't an art analyst he couldn't find out about the goings-on between the Duchess and Pandolf in their solitary session. He coolly undoes the text of the painting and its language. It seems the Duke goes the painter one better: he winkles out the lecher's leers stashed away in chromatic argot. Eureka! Eureka! The whole argument you might notice is a long list of charges with supporting exhibits. It looks as though he had been meticulously collecting a dossier on her to bring her to book.
As for the second you raise about pressure and suspense, I would say that we might mildly hint by your opinion that the Duke tries to blackmail the emissary. This would be possible when there's a bargain. He doesn't bargain: he only gives his decision and lets the envoy know about his intention clearly and unambiguously. (One function of the explanation about his deceased wife could be that she wants her to serve as an example to her future Duchess, and a tacit threat to the new wife. Should her conduct be unworthy of a duchess, she would meet with a similar fate. He's too high hierarchically to need that sort of stratagem.
Silence could mean death but it could also mean life-in-death imposed on the accused in remote islands or convent cloisters, which is not rare in under feudal systems in the Middle Ages or in Renaissance Italy. I would say that death is a possibility, But NOT the only possibility. Or the Duke (and perhaps Browining,artistically speaking) might have thought that after he had removed her from the scene, it isn't important to know much about her. Why should we be interested, anyway when she ceases to be a duchess. To hell with her! They might say.
Cheers!
My Last Duchess (continued)
‘This grew…’: What Grew? Why Grew? (Part 1)
The common answer to what grew inside the Duke is jealousy. Does anyone disagree? I don’t. I’ll now analyze what are the reasons behind this jealousy.
Being a Duke is not easy a thing. Our Duke was born and brought up to be a Duke. His pedagogy has made him the man he is. He has to follow an invisible code of conduct appropriate to his office. He has to act a snob and in a royal manner. These things can’t be essential to one’s nature; these are his masks and make-ups. He can’t tear away these artificialities. He is caged up into an artificial entity without any escape. His ‘nine-hundred-years-old-name’ has been a deadweight upon him which his conscious can’t feel, his subconscious can’t bear. Jealousy forms in the subconscious, remember! The Duchess is a jolly girl of fourteen-fifteen, perhaps, without any sense of diplomacy and politics regarding her behavior. She is as spontaneous as the forest in the wind. She floats with the flood of emotion while the Duke had to build a dam to prevent it. She can be called the counter-ego of the Duke, just the opposite. She is what the Duke’s subconscious secretly wants to be, yet she is what his subconscious feels threatened with because it’s just the opposite everything the Duke is. This secret jealousy of the subconscious turns into a violent conscious resolution, enough to stop all smiles.
shourabh pothobashi
‘This grew…’: What Grew? Why Grew? (Part 2)
The duke is a damn libidinous, libido-centric. The centre of his universe is his penis (excuse my language). He allowed the frà one day’s session with the duchess to have her mural painted. When it was done, when he looked at it, he was amazed and shocked alike; amazed because it was an wonderful piece of art; shocked for it was not his presence, but the frà’s, that caused ‘The depth and passion of its earnest glance’. He went crazy thinking about what ‘called that spot of joy into the duchess’s cheek’. He feels completely in the dark, and to remove that darkness, to make out what happened that day, he is imagining things. He is imagining how the frà melted his duchess’s heart to induce such ‘pictured countenance’. The duke has even guessed what the frà might have said to the duchess:
A
…Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much.
B
…Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat.
These are no abstract imaginings, but highly concrete, so much so that they lead to the duchess’s ‘wrist’ and ‘throat’. Was I too rude on the duke when I called him a libidinous?
The duke’s status, conduct and language, all portray him to be a man of little words, who looks at people with a frown in the brow, who administrates his affairs with appropriate skill. You grow these things with age. The duke is probably a middle-aged man. And the duchess? Look, how her behavior is:
…she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
This is a sheer sign of a very young girl, perhaps of thirteen to fifteen. This gulf between their age makes the duke ever suspicious—she might be looking for someone her age. And the frà is a young apprentice and unmarried, of course. The duke would rather be his age and have a romantic affair with the duchess, but he never can. This feeling of impotence (see both meanings of the word) has made him even more jealous.
(to be continued)
shourabh pothobashi
The Duke is challenged in his virility by the young fra and he even may have a little penile complex. Sexual jealousy is mostly speculative as you've rightly pointed out. The Duke tries to reconstruct the verbal exchanges between the Duchess and the painter.This is a pure conjecture. He thinks along the libidinal line no doubt,(he focuses the erotic zones of the image -- throat, hand etc) for he suspects her to be of adulterous nature. Does he perhaps imply that she was a slapper? He obstinately tries to penetrate the penumbral area of the relationship: all sexual jealousy has this nature. But you watch the grace of his vulgarity, and all is sustained through his masterful rhetoric (his proud 'modesty' -- 'Even had you skill/ In speech -- (which I have not)...' is a blatant understatement). But I'd buy into the idea that his jealousy runs along a fine line, too dignified to be expressed in any other way than he does. You could see this poem also as a battle royal between artist and critic.
One could think along the line, because the story developed at the height of Italian Renaissance.
Reply to Despatch#3 Part-C Ques-3:
In the first line, before the word 'but', a word 'nothing' is omitted. With the help of this omission, the author emphasized or established that particuler 'universal' idea.
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