16th and 17th Century Literature

A sonnet is a poem of exactly fourteen lines. In English it is usually iambic pentameter, and the end-words follow a locked rhyme. Abrams and Harpham, the glossary named for this paper’s literary terms, refuse the loose sense “any short love poem.” The letters a, b, c mark which last words rhyme; they are not algebra. The sums 8+6 and 4+4+4+2 only count groups of lines; they add up to fourteen. The English couplet is two rhyming lines, not a Hindi doha of 13+11 matras.

Three skeletons live in Abrams. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet is 8+6: an octave, often abbaabba, then a sestet, often cdecde. Near line 9 the thought turns; that turn is the volta. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 works in that spirit. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is 4+4+4+2, rhyme abab cdcd efef gg. This paper sets no Shakespeare sonnet; the name is the glossary’s main English pattern, not a speech from Macbeth. The Spenserian sonnet keeps 4+4+4+2 but chains the quatrains: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

The set poem, Spenser’s Amoretti 75, is this Spenserian type. End-words run strand / away / hand / prey / assay / immortalize / decay / likewise / devise / fame / eternize / name / subdue / renew. The lover writes her name on the sand; waves wipe it; she says mortal things cannot last; he answers that verse will eternize her name and that love will renew later life. An eight-mark note names fourteen lines, the three types, the volta or couplet-turn, and Amoretti 75. Without the set sonnet the term remains a diagram.

Unit 1 names one stretch, Elizabethan to Jacobean, 1558–1625, because the literary air is continuous even though the crown changes. Elizabethan years run from Elizabeth I’s accession in 1558 to her death in 1603. Jacobean years run from James I (Latin Jacobus) in 1603 to his death in 1625. The Norton Anthology and Drabble’s Oxford Companion keep these reign-dates; this paper prints the same frame.

What they share is the English Renaissance on the public page: humanism, print, the professional playhouse, blank-verse tragedy, and the sonnet. Spenser’s Amoretti and Marlowe’s mighty line belong to the Elizabethan book and stage. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is Jacobean, yet still Renaissance tragedy in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Bacon’s essays are Jacobean civic prose. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama treats the playhouse as one institution across both reigns.

The change of weather should still be named. Elizabethan writing in the set lyrics still trusts ornament and the poet’s power to immortalize a name, as Amoretti 75 claims. Jacobean writing, in Macbeth and in Donne’s holy argument, is darker, more inward, more willing to put death, witchcraft, and conscience on the stage or in the sonnet. An answer that says only “Elizabethan is happy and Jacobean is sad” is too coarse. The right sentence is: same Renaissance tools, a graver Jacobean use of them, inside 1558–1625.

Reference. These are the opening lines of Edmund Spenser’s sonnet 75 in Amoretti, the lyric prescribed in Unit 2 and carried in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Dustoor’s Poet’s Pen, and the Norton Anthology (Greenblatt, volume 1). The poem is a Spenserian sonnet: fourteen iambic pentameters, rhyme abab bcbc cdcd ee. The speaker is the lover; in the sequence the beloved is Elizabeth Boyle.

Context. The first quatrain is a physical scene on the sandy shore. He writes her name; the waves wash it; he writes again; the tide makes his pains its prey. Time, as sea, wins the first round. In the second quatrain she answers: “Vain man,” you try to immortalize a mortal thing; I myself shall decay like that writing. The chained rhyme (prey / assay / decay) sews her speech to his act.

Explanation. The two lines give the picture and open the problem the rest of the sonnet must solve: can anything mortal last? His answer is Elizabethan faith in verse. Let baser things die in dust; she shall live by fame; his verse will eternize her virtues and write her name in the heavens. The couplet closes: when Death subdues the whole world, “Our love shall live, and later life renew.” The volta is this turn from her doubt to his boast for poetry. Do not drag Donne’s falling star or Macbeth’s witches onto this shore.

Reference. These are the first two lines of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10, the sacred lyric set in Unit 2 beside the falling-star song. Palgrave, Dustoor, and Norton print it among the Holy Sonnets. It is a fourteen-line argument, closer in spirit to the Petrarchan turn than to Spenser’s sand-and-fame story. Death is personified and addressed as “thee.”

Context. The octave prosecutes Death. Those whom Death thinks he overthrows do not die in the Christian sense; the soul is not ended. Rest and sleep are pictures of Death and give pleasure, so Death’s stroke should give more rest, not less. The volta comes when Death is called slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, and is said to dwell with poison, war and sickness. Poppy or charms can make us sleep as well as Death, and better.

Explanation. The extract names the poem’s method: apostrophe, personification, and the denial of Death’s reputation. The last couplet completes the conceit of faith: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” If dying is only sleep, waking into eternity kills Death. Place the poem in the Metaphysical school of Unit 1. Do not import “The Flea” or the compass, which this paper does not set.

Francis Bacon’s “Of Studies” is the first prose text of Unit 3, in Michael Kiernan’s Harvard edition of The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1985). The essay moves by short balanced sentences — aphorism. Studies serve three uses. Delight is private pleasure in retirement. Ornament is the grace of conversation. Ability is judgement in business and affairs. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: natural wit is a plant that must be pruned by study; study itself must be bounded by experience, or it becomes a scholar’s dream. Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, wise men use them.

How to read is the second movement. One should not read to contradict the author, nor to believe blindly, nor to find talk, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, some few chewed and digested. Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man. Histories make men wise; poets witty; mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Each study also repairs a defect of mind, as bodily exercises repair the body.

The essay is a civil handbook: books exist to make a person fit for the world, not to hide from it. Place it beside “Of Travel” and beside Montaigne. Bacon is civic, useful, English. Montaigne’s “Of Friendship” is inward and personal. Both are Renaissance essays; they are not the same temper. An eight-mark note that only copies “tasted, swallowed, digested” without the three uses and the warning about experience has the proverb and not the argument.

Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Friendship,” in Donald M. Frame’s Stanford translation (1958), is the French Renaissance essay set in Unit 3 beside Bacon. It is a meditation on one perfect friendship, not a civic handbook on useful companions. Common companionship, father and son, brothers, and marriage all have uses and limits. Perfect friendship, for Montaigne, is not utility, kinship, or the marriage bond. It is a fusion of wills. He writes of his dead friend Étienne de La Boétie. The famous reason is not a list of qualities: it was because it was he, because it was I.

Such a friendship cannot be multiplied. Two such souls are rare; a third would crowd them. The friend is another self. After La Boétie’s death the essay becomes an elegy: half of Montaigne’s being is gone. The tone is inward, personal, sceptical of finding a second such friend. Frame’s English keeps that intimacy; the syllabus names Frame so that this version is quoted.

Beside Bacon’s “Of Studies” and “Of Travel,” the contrast of temper is the point of setting both essayists. Bacon tells you how to use books and travel for ability. Montaigne tells you what one human bond was, and that it cannot be replaced. Both are Renaissance prose; they are not the same voice. Do not drag Bunyan’s Faithful into this French friendship: Faithful is an allegory of faith on the road, not La Boétie.

Reference. These are the opening lines of Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy in Act II, before the murder of Duncan, in the Norton text edited by Greenblatt (2016). The play is Jacobean tragedy, about 1606, almost wholly in blank verse. A soliloquy, as Unit 1 defines it, is a speech by a character alone on the stage so that the audience hears the mind working. Macbeth is about to go to Duncan’s chamber in Inverness. Lady Macbeth has already driven him past the hesitation of “If it were done when ’tis done.”

Context. He sees a dagger in the air, the handle toward his hand, and asks whether it is a true dagger or a dagger of the mind, a false creation proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain. He tries to clutch it and cannot. On the blade he sees drops of blood which were not there before. The murder itself is offstage; this speech is the mind visible. After the deed he cannot say amen. A knocking begins, and the Porter imagines he is porter of hell-gate.

Explanation. The extract holds hamartia at the moment of choice. Ambition has leapt; the hand has not yet struck; the airy dagger is the will made visible and also the horror of the will. It is not a simile (“like a dagger”); the question is whether the dagger is there. Keep Duncan, Inverness, and the Porter’s hell. Do not import the “Tomorrow” speech into this night. The dagger is before the blood; “Tomorrow” is after the queen’s death.

Reference. These lines open Macbeth’s soliloquy after the cry of women in Act V, when the queen is dead, in Greenblatt’s Norton Macbeth. The play is still blank-verse Jacobean tragedy. A soliloquy lets the audience hear the mind alone. This speech is not the dagger vision of Act II; it comes after the rise and the blood, when time itself feels empty.

Context. Lady Macbeth has walked in her sleep, rubbing the spot she said a little water would wash. Her death is reported, not shown. Malcolm’s army is cutting Birnam wood. Macbeth hears that the queen is dead and speaks “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” Life is called a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Explanation. “Walking shadow” and “poor player” are metaphors: life is the shadow and the player; there is no like or as. Similes elsewhere include the innocent flower and pity like a naked new-born babe. The speech empties kingship and time after hamartia has run its course. Do not label the poor player a simile. Keep this extract in Act V, after the queen’s death, not beside the airy dagger.

Unit 5 sets two songs of Meera from V. K. Subramanian, Mystic Songs of Meera (Abhinav, 2005), songs 2 and 6 only. Both are sagun Krishna-bhakti: the Lord has a name, Giridhar, and a story. They share inwardness and the vernacular with Kabir’s nirgun poems, but they fill the song with a person of God. Do not mix in Kabir’s temple-and-mosque refusal as if it were Meera’s.

Song 2 is the pad of the mol. Meera has taken Govind at a price. People talk: some say cheap, some say too high. She does not argue with the market. The cost she names is herself: eyes, body, mind, wealth, laid down so that Giridhar Nagar is hers. The meeting is sahaj once the price is love. This is sagun bridal speech: the devotee is the buyer-bride. A Rajput woman singing that she has purchased God offends family honour; the pad keeps the bargain anyway.

Song 6 is a prayer-pad: Hari, take away the suffering of your people. It recalls sagun rescues: Draupadi’s honour, the man-lion, the elephant drawn from the water, Meera’s chains. The devotee cries; the named God acts in a body and a story. Song 2 is the bargain of the bride; song 6 is the dasi’s cry for the whole jan. Keep both songs, Subramanian’s numbering, and the word sagun.

Unit 5 names Tiruvalluvar, Tirukkural, Chapter 11 On Gratitude and Chapter 36 On True Knowledge, in V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar’s translation. These are kurals 101–110 and 351–360. The rest of the Kural is not set. The chapters are Tamil ethical verse, not a bhakti pad. They sit under Voices from India beside Meera and Kabir, but they are not sagun Krishna-song and not nirgun Kabir-song.

Chapter 11: help given with no return in mind cannot be repaid by earth or heaven (101). A small help in time is greater than the world (102). Help without weighing profit is vaster than the sea (103). The wise treat a millet-small kindness as a palmyra fruit (104). Do not forget those who stood by you in sorrow (106). It is not good to forget a benefit; it is good to forget an injury at once (108). There is no redemption for ingratitude (110).

Chapter 36: taking the unreal for the real breeds the cycle of births (351). Pure vision leads from darkness to light (352). Those who have learnt the truth do not enter this world again (356). Wisdom is to see the real so that the folly called birth ends (358). Wipe out lust, anger and delusion, and the disease of rebirth is wiped out (360). Beside Meera’s Giridhar and Kabir’s One, this is Tamil clarity: knowledge is seeing what is. Stay inside chapters 11 and 36.

The word Renaissance comes from the French for rebirth. In literary history it names the revival of Greek and Roman learning that began in Italy in the fourteenth century and reached England later, under the Tudors and the first Stuarts. This paper’s Unit 1 places the English flowering inside 1558–1625 and still colours the Caroline decades. Humanism studies the human being as a centre of value without throwing God away. Printing multiplied books. The Reformation split the Western Church. Abrams and Harpham’s Glossary, the Norton Anthology (Greenblatt, volume 1), and Drabble’s Oxford Companion treat these as the conditions of the English Renaissance, not as decoration around the poems. A slogan that says only “rebirth of art” is too thin. The term is a European event with English results on this syllabus: the sonnet, blank-verse tragedy, and the essay.

The first English fruit this paper sets is the sonnet. Spenser’s Amoretti 75 is a Spenserian sonnet: fourteen iambic pentameters, chained rhyme abab bcbc cdcd ee. The lover writes a name upon the strand; the tide wipes it; verse, he claims, will write the virtues in the heavens. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 uses the same fourteen-line lock for argument: Death is told not to be proud, compared to sleep, and finally promised that after a short sleep Death shall die. Abrams’s three types — Petrarchan 8+6 with a volta, Shakespearean 4+4+4+2, Spenserian chained quatrains — are Renaissance form-knowledge. This paper sets no Shakespeare sonnet; the English type is still named because the glossary names it.

The second fruit is blank-verse tragedy. Marlowe’s Helen speech — “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” — is unrhymed iambic pentameter, the mighty line of the public stage. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the whole play of Unit 4, is Jacobean tragedy in the same metre: soliloquy, the supernatural, the fall of a high man through hamartia. The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama describes the professional playhouse as the institution that made this verse audible. Comic relief, as in the Porter scene, belongs to that English stage. Blank verse is not empty poetry; it is unrhymed five-beat speech.

The third fruit is the essay. Bacon’s “Of Studies” and “Of Travel,” in Kiernan’s Harvard edition (1985), treat reading and travel as tools of civil life. Studies serve delight, ornament and ability; some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, some few chewed and digested. Montaigne’s “Of Friendship,” in Frame’s Stanford translation (1958), is the French model: one perfect friendship, La Boétie, a fusion of wills. Bacon is civic and useful; Montaigne is inward and personal. Bunyan’s later allegory is Puritan narrative, yet it still uses personification and the journey.

Renaissance, then, includes humanism, the classics, print, the Reformation, the professional stage, and these English results. Puritanism and the Metaphysical school grow beside it; they do not cancel it. A full answer names the European meaning, the English dates 1558–1625, and ties Spenser, Marlowe or Macbeth, and Bacon or Montaigne to the definition. Refuse extra names this syllabus does not set — Milton, Cavalier lyrics, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Julius Caesar. Keep the three fruits and the long answer will stand.

John Donne is the head of the Metaphysical school named in Unit 1. The word, in Dryden’s slight, in Johnson’s life of Cowley, and in Abrams’s glossary, does not mean a university textbook of metaphysics. It means a seventeenth-century lyric manner whose mark is the conceit: an extended, often surprising comparison that argues. The voice is colloquial, not Spenser’s honeyed line. This paper sets two Donne lyrics, in Palgrave and in Norton volume 1: the song “Go and catch a falling star” and Holy Sonnet 10, “Death, be not proud.” A twenty-mark essay must work from these two, not from “The Flea,” the compass, or a biography of Donne’s marriages.

“Go and catch a falling star” is a cynical lyric in three stanzas of nine lines, not a sonnet. The speaker stacks impossibilities: catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root, tell where past years are, hear mermaids. Finding a woman both true and fair is treated as one more impossibility. Stanza two stretches the search across ten thousand days and nights. Stanza three turns: by the time the letter arrives she will have been false to two or three. Beside Spenser’s Amoretti 75, which trusts verse to hold a name, this song trusts no duration. The Metaphysical mark is the argument: experience is treated as evidence. The set song is anti-romantic on purpose.

Holy Sonnet 10 turns the same arguing mind toward death. Death is spoken to as a person: “Death, be not proud.” Those whom Death thinks he overthrows do not die in the Christian sense. Rest and sleep are Death’s pictures. The volta humiliates Death: slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men; companion of poison, war and sickness. The last couplet is the conceit of faith: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” Personification, metaphor, and conceit all sit in these fourteen lines. The same blunt “thou” as the falling-star song is now used in belief.

Taken together, the two poems show why Unit 1 lists the Metaphysical school beside Renaissance and Puritanism. Donne’s wit is Renaissance humanist argument. His holy sonnet is Protestant last things, yet still a sonnet, a Renaissance lock. Herbert’s “The Pulley,” also set, is the same school in a quieter key: God keeps rest back so that weariness will toss man to God’s breast. Dryden’s St Cecilia ode is public harmony after 1687 and should not be forced into this school. Marlowe’s Helen speech is blank-verse tragedy, not a conceit-lyric.

Method on the page is what the long answer must name: direct address; a list that works like proof; a turn; an image that does theological or cynical work, not ornamental work. Count the stanzas of the song; count the fourteen lines of the sonnet; quote the falling star and “Death, thou shalt die.” Refuse extra titles. Twenty marks on this paper are won by conceit, argument, and the two prescribed texts, with Herbert named only as the quieter companion of the same school.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in the Penguin Classics text named by the syllabus, is the Puritan narrative of Unit 3. The paper sets Part I: Christian’s journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Part II, Christiana’s later road, is not set. An allegory, in Abrams and in Unit 1, is a story that makes sense as a journey and, at the same time, as a map of the soul. Christian is a man on a road; he is also the soul fleeing judgement. The burden on his back is a pack; it is also sin. Vanity Fair is a market town; it is also the world’s show. A twenty-mark answer that only lists names without walking the chain has the dictionary and not the book.

Christian lives in the City of Destruction, reads that the city will burn, feels the burden, and leaves — even wife and children — when Evangelist points to the Wicket Gate. He sinks in the Slough of Despond; Help pulls him out. Mr Worldly Wiseman sends him toward legality and Mount Sinai; Evangelist turns him back. At the Gate, Good-Will receives him. In the Interpreter’s House he sees emblem-rooms. At the Place of Deliverance, beside the Cross, the burden falls from his back. That physical drop is conversion told as story. The Puritan mark is already clear: grace, not the law; a felt burden; a plain English road instead of a court masque.

Then the road tests him. Hill Difficulty must be climbed. Palace Beautiful is rest among the faithful. In the Valley of Humiliation he fights Apollyon. The Valley of the Shadow of Death is fear of dying without hope. Vanity Fair sells everything, including faith; Faithful is killed there; Hopeful joins Christian. Giant Despair locks them in Doubting Castle; the key called Promise opens the door. They see the Delectable Mountains, cross the Enchanted Ground, rest in Beulah, and enter the River of Death. Christian almost drowns; Hopeful holds him. The Celestial City receives them. You need this chain, and that each name is a meaning.

Style is part of the allegory. Bunyan writes plain English, far from Marlowe’s mighty line and from Bacon’s packed aphorism. The names preach because a Puritan reader was trained to hear sermon in story. Theatres were shut in the Commonwealth; this narrative teaches last things without a playhouse. Unit 1’s Puritanism is inward Protestant severity, not hatred of all verse. Renaissance tools — personification, journey, named places — are still in use; the end is salvation, not civic ability as in Bacon, and not one irreplaceable friend as in Montaigne.

A full essay therefore defines allegory, walks Christian’s chain from Destruction to the City, explains four or five names (burden, Slough, Worldly Wiseman, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, River), names Part I and Penguin, and refuses Part II. Do not retell every side-character until the argument disappears. Twenty marks want the journey as theology told as travel. Keep Christian, the burden, the Fair, the key Promise, and the River, and the long answer will stand.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the whole play of Unit 4, in the Norton edition edited by Greenblatt (2016). It is Jacobean tragedy, about 1606, inside this paper’s span 1558–1625. Abrams treats tragedy as a serious dramatic action in which a high person falls through hamartia into suffering and usually death. The English stage also allows comic relief without turning the play into comedy. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare places this play among the tragedies of ambition and the supernatural. Do not import Julius Caesar or a Shakespeare sonnet.

Macbeth is Thane of Glamis, then Cawdor by Duncan’s gift, then king by murder, then an isolated butcher. His hamartia is ambition, woken by the witches’ “king hereafter” and fed by Lady Macbeth, but the choice to kill Duncan is his. He sees the horror as he does it — cannot say amen, sees a dagger, later sees Banquo’s ghost — and that inner sight is why he is a tragic hero, not a flat villain. Banquo hears the same witches and does not kill. Lady Macbeth is the stronger will at first, then the mind that breaks in sleep. Duncan’s gracious kingship measures what is destroyed; Malcolm’s return at Scone is the land’s cure.

Soliloquy makes that inner sight audible. The dagger speech — “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?” — is the mind before the blood. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” after the cry of women, empties time: life is a walking shadow, a poor player, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Those figures are metaphors: life is the shadow and the player. Similes belong elsewhere: look like the innocent flower; pity like a naked new-born babe. Blank verse carries both soliloquies; witches’ chant and Porter’s prose sound like another world.

The witches open with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” which Macbeth echoes, “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” They give three titles and later three apparitions: beware Macduff; none of woman born; Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. The apparitions are equivocation — technical truth that hides death. Macduff was untimely ripped; the army carries the wood. Banquo’s ghost and the airy dagger belong to the same English-stage supernatural: visible temptation, not a full excuse. The Porter’s hell-gate is comic relief that still names the house.

Kingship, guilt, and appearance-and-reality complete the essay. After the murder Macbeth asks whether Neptune’s ocean will wash his hand — hyperbole of guilt. She says a little water will clear them; her “Out, damned spot” proves her wrong. Fair looks and foul acts, moving wood, “not of woman born,” borrowed clothes that do not fit a title — the play lives in Unit 1’s mix of metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and alliteration. Twenty marks want the high man’s fall, the flaw named as choice, two soliloquies, the witches’ equivocation, and Lady Macbeth’s reverse from will to spot. Keep Greenblatt, keep “So foul and fair,” keep walking shadow as metaphor, and the essay stands on this paper. Do not retell Hamlet or King Lear to define tragedy; this paper has given you Macbeth.

Bhakti means devotion: a personal bond with the divine, sung in the language people actually speak, rather than locked in temple ritual or in Sanskrit learning alone. The north Indian flowering this Unit 5 needs is strong in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — the same centuries this English paper studies in England. Saints teach that God is reached by love, by the Name, and by a true guru, not by caste pride or empty ceremony. The singer may be a weaver (Kabir) or a princess who leaves the palace in song (Meera). This course has chosen three voices: Meera (sagun), Kabir (nirgun), and Tiruvalluvar (Tamil ethical verse under Voices from India, not as a bhakti pad).

Social impact follows from who is allowed to speak of God. Verse appears in Hindi, Rajasthani, and other vernaculars, so devotion is not only a priest’s job. Women can be saints in public song. Hindu and Muslim seekers sometimes use the same hunger for one God — Kabir’s set poems refuse temple and mosque alike and refuse to ask a saint’s caste. Meera’s mol offends family honour and is sung anyway. Tirukkural’s gratitude and true knowledge, in Dikshitar, are not bhakti songs, yet they insist that conduct and seeing what is matter more than empty show.

Sagun bhakti loves God with attributes and form. Meera’s Giridhar in Subramanian’s songs 2 and 6 is sagun. Song 2: she has taken Govind at a mol; the price is herself, so that Giridhar Nagar is hers. Song 6: Hari, take away the suffering of your people; Draupadi’s honour, the man-lion, the elephant, Meera’s chains. Do not call Meera nirgun because she scorns the world’s talk; her Lord still has a name and a story. Song 2 is the bargain of the bride; song 6 is the dasi’s cry for the jan.

Nirgun bhakti loves God without form. Kabir’s four poems in Tagore’s One Hundred Poems of Kabir (Macmillan, 1915) are the set nirgun: I.13, I.16, I.101, II.56. I.13: God is beside the servant, not in temple or mosque. I.16: needless to ask a saint’s caste. I.101: within this earthen ghat are gardens and the Creator. II.56: river and wave are one water. Do not call Kabir sagun because he uses “beloved”; these four are not Krishna-lila.

Tiruvalluvar’s Chapter 11 (101–110) on gratitude and Chapter 36 (351–360) on true knowledge complete the unit. Help without thought of return cannot be repaid; there is no redemption for ingratitude. Taking the unreal for the real breeds rebirth; wipe out lust, anger, delusion. Beside Meera’s Giridhar and Kabir’s One, this is Tamil clarity: knowledge is seeing what is. A full essay does five jobs: history; social impact inside the set songs; sagun Meera 2 and 6; nirgun Kabir’s four numbers; Tirukkural 11 and 36 as ethical verse. Refuse extra pads and extra sants. Donne’s conceit is not Kabir’s ghat. Spenser’s strand is not Meera’s mol. Keep Subramanian, Tagore 1915, Dikshitar, and the unit title Voices from India. Twenty marks on this paper are won by those names and those distinctions, not by a longer list.