Tag Archives: English Literature

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge [w/ Audio]

Posted on by
Reply 
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
     A stately pleasure-dome decree:
 Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
 Through caverns measureless to man
     Down to a sunless sea.
 So twice five miles of fertile ground
 With walls and tower were girdled round:
 And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
 Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree;
 And here were forests ancient as the hills,
 Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
 Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
 A savage place! as holy and enchanted
 As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
 By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
 And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
 As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
 A mighty fountain momently was forced;
 Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 
 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
 Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
 And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
 It flung up momently the sacred river.
 Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
 Then reach'd the caverns measureless to man,
 And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
 And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from afar
 Ancestral voices prophesying war!

     The shadow of the dome of pleasure
     Floated midway on the waves;
     Where was heard the mingled measure
     From the fountain and the caves.
 It was a miracle of rare device,
 A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

     A damsel with a dulcimer
     In a vision once I saw:
     It was an Abyssinian maid,
     And on her dulcimer she play'd,
     Singing of Mount Abora.
     Could I revive within me,
     Her symphony and song,
     To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
 That with music loud and long,
 I would build that dome in air,
 That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
 And all who heard should see them there,
 And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
 His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
 Weave a circle round him thrice,
 And close your eyes with holy dread,
 For he on honey-dew hath fed,
 And drunk the milk of Paradise.

The Daffodils by William Wordsworth [w/ Audio]

Posted on by
1
Source: Wikipedia [Pub Dom Image]
I wandered lonely as a cloud
   That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
 When all at once I saw a crowd,
   A host, of golden daffodils;
 Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
   Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
   And twinkle on the milky way,
 They stretched in never-ending line
   Along the margin of a bay:
 Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
   Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
   Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
 A poet could not but be gay,
   In such a jocund company:
 I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
   What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
   In vacant or in pensive mood,
 They flash upon that inward eye
   Which is the bliss of solitude;
 And then my heart with pleasure fills,
   And dances with the daffodils.

The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats [w/ Audio]

Posted on by
1 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
   The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
   Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
   Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
   When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
 Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
   A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
   Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
 Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
   The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
   Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
   Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

BOOKS: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Posted on by
4
The Importance of Being EarnestThe Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

This play is an amusing cautionary tale on the dangers of “Bunburying” and / or leading a double life. “Bunburying,” a term coined by Wilde in this play, is the act of concocting meetings with a fictitious friend to get out of tedious familial (and other social) obligations. Don’t want to go to Aunt Bessie’s potluck? Tell her that your friend with a plausibly absurd name (e.g. Bunbury) has ruptured a disc in his back and desperately needs your assistance. Bunburying is the specialty of one of the two bachelor characters this story is built around, a man named Algernon. The other, Jack, goes by the name Ernest when he is in London, and has to invent the story that he has a brother when his town and country dichotomy of personalities starts to be seen through by those other than Algernon.

This humorous tale revolves around both Algernon and Jack finding desirable fiancés while being tangled in the web of their own duplicity. Much of the humor comes from the interactions of Algernon and Jack, two men who are quite alike, though Jack thinks himself more respectable. Algernon is more at ease with his own scamp-like nature and plays a role similar to that played by Lord Henry in Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. That is, Algernon offers many a quotable line that at least has the appearance of wisdom — if, often, a kind of nihilistic wisdom.

This play is definitely worth reading.

View all my reviews

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley [w/ Audio]

Posted on by
Reply 
I met a traveller from an antique land
   Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
 Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
   Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
   Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
 Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
   The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
 And on the pedestal these words appear:
   "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
 Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
   Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
 Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
   The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare [w/ Audio]

Posted on by
Reply 
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 thy 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.

BOOKS: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Posted on by
1
The Picture of Dorian GrayThe Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

This is a book about what happens when you hollow out a person of all the complexity of the human condition and idealize them. At the beginning of the story, Dorian Gray is young, attractive, and preternaturally likable in a naïvely innocent kind of way. Almost to the novel’s end, through the magic of a wish made upon a portrait, Gray is still young and beautiful, though that naive innocence cracks under the strain of the impossible bifurcation of man and his soul. The artist, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry (a man who will become a mutual friend of Gray and Hallward) cannot see Gray as a fully formed human being, but rather see him as an emblem of youth and beauty. But this unnatural ideal cannot hold, and a string of tragic deaths will be left in its wake.

The book is full of clever witticisms, albeit often of a nihilistic nature. These are almost all spoken by Lord Henry, who is the Polonius of the story – but a hipper kind of Polonius than Hamlet‘s. That said, it’s telling that toward the end of the book Gray does some of this epigrammatic philosophizing. (e.g. Such as when Gray tells Hallward, “Each of us has heaven and hell in him…”) One might dismiss this as Gray parroting Lord Henry, but I think that life has defrocked him of his naïveté, and he begins to think in ways that were impossible in his [true] youth.

This is a must-read. It’s interesting, thought-provoking, and well worth the time.

View all my reviews