Passages from Poems Previous Year UGC-NET English

Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature – this transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied forms. It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its representation of that sense, that soul fact is true, verse being only one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may be thought, being the special art of the modern world, that imaginative prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world results from two important facts about the latter: first the chaotic variety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue. The really master currents of the present time incalculable- a condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse form, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century has been lawless verse, and secondly, an all pervading naturalism, a curiosity about everything whatever, as it really is involving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the less ambitious form of literature. And prose thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will be however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest experience – an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive. Fervid.

SMOKE

Light – winged smoke! Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight:
Lark without song, and the messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest:
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight, vision gathering up thy skirts:
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun:
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame,

‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room he stayed
The whole time he was at the bodies, till
They moved him,’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill.
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no book
Behind the door, no room for books or bags—
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton, wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy,
I know his habits——what time he came down’
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways——
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.

Are You There?

My father and I shove back the furniture
to the four walls of the sitting room
then lie on the carpet wearing blindfolds,
his left hand holding my left hand
Are you there, Moriarty? he enquires, before tightening (I imagine) the grip on his rolled-up copy of yesterday’s Times. There is only one possible answer to that.
I give it while rolling away to the side but still clasping his hand, still in range, and sure enough he manages a direct hit. Now it is my turn, but the moment I lift my weapon I realise there is no reason to continue I can tell from his stillness, and the chill and stiffness of his fingers, he has been dead for a good while already.

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far, An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Poetry in its use of language continually distorts and denies the structure of reality to exalt the structure of the self. By means of rhyme, assonance or alliteration it couples together words which have no rational connection, that is, no nexus through the world of external reality. It breaks the word up into lines of arbitrary length, cutting across their logical construction. It breaks down their associations, derived from the world of external reality, by means of inversion and every variety of artificial stressing and counterpoint. Thus the world of external reality recedes and the world of instinct, the affective emotional linkage behind the words, becomes the world of reality… In the novel, too, the subjective elements are valued for themselves, and rise to view, but in a different way. The novel blots out external reality by substituting a more or less consistent mock reality which has sufficient ‘stuff’ to stand between the reader and reality. This means that in the novel the emotional associations attach not to words but to the moving current of mock reality symbolised by the words. This is why rhythm, ‘preciousness’, and style are alien to the novel; why the novel translates so well; why novels are not composed of words. They are composed of scenes, actions, stuff, people, just as plays are.

Most near, most dear, most loved and most far. Under the window where I often found her Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand. Irresistible as Rabelais, but most tender for The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her,- She is a procession no one can follow after But be like a little dog following a brass band. She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar, But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain Whom only faith can move, and so I send O all my faith, and all my love to tell her That she will move from mourning into mourning.

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out. Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes; Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade: Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia and the distracted cellulose; Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies The hopeful bodies of the young: exhort, Pray, pull long faces, be earnest, be all but overcome, be photographed: Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize Bacteria harmful to human tissue, Put death on the market: Breed, crowd, encroach, expand, expunge yourself, die out, Homo called sapiens.

Emergent in the wake of industrialization, studies of everyday life endeavor to bring into visibility and somehow make sense of our humble, taken-for-granted, seemingly unremarkable experience of the quotidian. The project has meant subjecting modern Western individuals to the kind of anthropological scrutiny more often reserved for non-Western peoples. The goal has been to explore patterns of behavior not because they are foreign but because they are so familiar as to fall beneath our notice. Artists as well as social theorists in this tradition set out to register and evaluate the neglected minutiae of our daily lives: the ways we sleep and ambulate, ingest and eliminate, work and recreate, care for ourselves and others, slip in and out of self-awareness, and interact with people, objects, and our surroundings. Generally speaking, everyday life studies is a science of the “small.” Though usually framed in relation to larger social structures, the objects of attention are micro-moments and micro-actions – turning a street corner, stirring a pot, feeding an infant. They are actions that take place without rising to the status of “event.” They are moments in time that leave no historical mark (at least as “history” has traditionally been understood). As these examples suggest, such practices are “everyday” not only because they are “ordinary” but also because they typically occur every day, perhaps even every few hours. Whether tied to bodily rhythms or the rigors of wage work, the non-events of everyday life are almost always characterized by patterns of repetition. Theorists of the everyday, focusing on the effects of modernity, have taken various stances on the political implications of our daily routines. Some have tied their repetitive nature to the mechanization and alienation of labor in a capitalist society. For Michel Foucault, domination is not restricted to the factory floor; the workings of power are more diffuse and insidious than this, operating in the very interstices of our seemingly private lives. For Michel de Certeau, the quotidian is a site not of forcible conformity but of micro-opportunities to defy the dominant order.

Some sort of parallel may be found in the way logical connectives are usually unnecessary and often misleading, because too simple. Omitting an adjective one would need ‘therefore’ stressing the adjective ‘although’; both logical connections are implied if the sentences are just put after another. In the same way, people are accustomed to judge automatically the forces that hold together a variety of ideas; they feel they know about the forces, if they have analysed the ideas; many forces, indeed, are covertly included within ideas; and so of the two elements, each of which defines the other, it is much easier to find words for the ideas than for the forces. Most of the ambiguities I have considered here seem to me beautiful; I consider, then, that I have shown by example, in showing the nature of the ambiguity, the nature of the forces which are adequate to hold it together. It would seem very artificial to do it the other way round, and very tedious to do it both ways at once. I wish only, then, to say here that such vaguely imagined ‘forces’ are essential to the totality of a poem and they cannot be discussed in terms of ambiguity, because they are complementary to it. But by discussing ‘ambiguity’, a great deal may be made clear about them. In particular, if there is contradiction, the greater the tension; in some way other than by the contradiction, the tension must be conveyed, and must be sustained.