18th Century Literature

Answer: (a). A heroic couplet is a rhymed pair of iambic pentameter lines, and Pope's line shows all its marks: ten syllables in rising iambic rhythm, the end-rhyme human/divine, a firm medial caesura (the semicolon), and the Neo-Classical love of balanced antithesis — err/forgive, human/divine. (b) is wrong because the lines rhyme; (c) misnames the metre; (d) mistakes two pentameters for one alexandrine.

Answer: (a). Cowper suffered lifelong bouts of melancholia and the settled conviction that he was damned beyond grace. At Olney he found in the Evangelical clergyman John Newton a friend and spiritual guide; together they wrote the Olney Hymns (1779), and 'Light Shining out of Darkness' is Cowper's own testimony that God can pierce such darkness. Johnson never reviewed Cowper, the pension came late, and the Homer translation belongs to his later years.

Answer: (a). In his letter of December 1817 Keats wrote that the poet needs 'negative capability' — the capacity to stay with uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without irritably reaching after fact and reason, as Shakespeare did. (b) reverses Keats's creed of intense feeling; (c) confuses self-effacement with imitation; (d) invents a hierarchy of forms Keats never drew. Keats named Shakespeare as the supreme example of the quality, and Coleridge — who could not leave a mystery alone — as its opposite.

Answer: (a). In the Lives of the Poets Johnson praised Addison's prose as 'the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not grovelling' — familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious. It is the conversational ease of 'Meditations in Westminster Abbey.' (b) and (d) contradict his lucidity; (c) mistakes the middle style for the sublime.

Answer: (a). Vitthal (Vithoba), the standing-on-a-brick form of Krishna, is the presiding deity of Pandharpur on the Bhima in Maharashtra — the goal of the great Varkari pilgrimage and the centre of the bhakti world Tukaram inhabited. The other three are Shiva's, Meenakshi's and Jagannath's seats, unconnected with the Varkari tradition. For Tukaram, Vitthal is not a distant god but the intimate companion addressed in every abhang — the standing figure on the brick at Pandharpur, arms akimbo, waiting for His devotees.

Answer: lament. The elegy began as a formal song of mourning and lament for a particular dead person (from elegos, a mournful song). Gray keeps the lament but widens its object: his 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' mourns not one man but the whole unremembered village dead, and through them every obscure life. That widening is what makes it a churchyard elegy rather than a merely personal one.

Answer: illuminated. Blake called his relief-etching process 'illuminated printing': he engraved words and pictures together on copper plates, printed them on his own press and hand-coloured every copy. So each Songs of Innocence and of Experience is both poem and picture-book, made entirely by the poet's own hands — the perfect medium for a poet who trusted vision over the printing trade.

Answer: Hebrew Melodies. In 1814–15 Byron wrote lyrics for the composer Isaac Nathan, who set them to traditional Jewish tunes; the collection appeared as Hebrew Melodies (1815). 'She Walks in Beauty,' inspired by Byron's cousin in a black mourning dress glittering with spangles, is the most famous of them — a portrait of perfect harmony between outward beauty and inward goodness.

Answer: Isaac Bickerstaff. Steele's Tatler (1709–11) appeared under the invented name Isaac Bickerstaff, borrowed from Swift's satirical astrologer. It was the trial run for the Spectator: short essays on manners, morals and town life, issued from coffee-houses. When the Tatler closed, Steele and Addison carried its formula into the daily Spectator (1711). The name stuck: readers wrote letters to 'Bickerstaff' as if he were real, and the fiction of the observing essayist — the ancestor of Addison's Mr Spectator — was born.

Answer: anger (Sanskrit akrodha). After opening the daivi-sampad list with fearlessness in XVI.1, Krishna continues in XVI.2: non-violence, truth, freedom from anger, renunciation, serenity, compassion and the rest. The list is a portrait of the godlike mind — every quality the demonic endowment of XVI.4 inverts. These are not mere virtues but the marks by which Krishna says the godlike man may be known — the inner equipment for liberation, set against the bondage of XVI.4.

The Graveyard poets were mid-eighteenth-century poets who made death, night and the tomb their subject and their mood: gloom, meditation and moral reflection instead of Neo-Classical wit. Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–45), a long blank-verse meditation begun after bereavement, and Robert Blair's The Grave (1743), a sombre descriptive poem on death and burial, are the two landmarks.

Both turn poetry inward — solitude, midnight churchyards, the levelling power of death — and both mix melancholy feeling with didactic moralising. They broke the Augustan habit of satire and town manners and taught readers to find sublimity in gloom. Gray's Elegy (1751) inherits their midnight churchyard, their meditation on obscure lives and their moral tone, but refines them: Gray replaces Young's sprawling gloom with a finished, musical melancholy. That is why the Graveyard school is read as the soil from which the Elegy grew.

These are the opening lines of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). The context: at evening the speaker stands alone in a village churchyard, and before turning to the graves he paints the hour. The curfew was the evening bell of Norman England; Gray lifts a homely village sound into solemn music.

"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day": Gray puns on "knell," the bell rung for the dead, so day itself seems to die. "The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea": the long vowels and alliteration make the line itself move slowly. "The plowman homeward plods his weary way": the repeated sounds trudge with the tired labourer. "And leaves the world to darkness and to me": all depart, leaving the speaker alone with night and his thoughts.

Each line narrows the scene — from "parting day" to the herd, to one man, to the solitary "me." Sound enacts sense: the verse darkens and slows as daylight fails. The knell-pun quietly introduces the poem's great subject, death, before a single grave is named, and the stanza earns the meditative solitude on which the whole Elegy depends.

In the stanza beginning 'We look before and after, / And pine for what is not,' Shelley turns from praising the skylark to judging man. The bird sings in the present, free of memory and fear; man is crippled by time — haunted by the past ('before'), anxious for the future ('after'), pining for what is not. Hence 'Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught': even human joy is poisoned by consciousness.

The stanza is the poem's moral centre because it explains the opening question — why the bird's song is 'unpremeditated' and ours cannot be. Shelley does not envy the bird's wings but its freedom from thought. The famous close, 'Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,' admits the paradox: man's saddest songs are his sweetest precisely because suffering deepens feeling. The stanza thus converts nature-praise into self-knowledge.

By 'gusto' Hazlitt means the power a work has when the artist throws his whole being into it — energy, relish, truth to nature. The jugglers have gusto in the physical sense: perfect, effortless command of their art, as if the balls obeyed the hand.

But Hazlitt's antithesis cuts deeper: the juggler's mechanical excellence against the poet's or painter's fine art. The juggler does one difficult thing perfectly; the artist does a harder thing — inventing beauty — and risks failure. Antithesis structures the whole essay: ease against effort, hand against mind, the fives-player Cavanagh against the Indian performers, doing against being. Each pair sharpens the question: is mastery of a trick equal to mastery of an art? Hazlitt's answer is characteristically double — he admires the jugglers' gusto while insisting that fine art demands something rarer: the mind's power working through the hand.

The abhang ('unbroken') is the short Marathi devotional lyric of the Varkari tradition, meant to be sung in kirtan, not read silently. Its features shape Tukaram's set poems.

First, brevity and direct address: each poem speaks straight to Vitthal or to the reader, as in the opening plea, 'hold my hand.' Second, a simple, musical diction that carries sharp moral bite — seen in the gallery of hypocrites in poem 7. Third, repetition and refrain-like turns that make the verse memorable for congregational singing. Fourth, a personal, autobiographical voice: Tukaram confesses his own anger, pity and disgust rather than preaching from above.

The form's smallness is its force: in a dozen lines Tukaram can sketch a hypocrite, cry for help and curse the wicked. That is why the abhang survived centuries of oral singing — it is prayer, satire and diary in one unbroken song.

The picaresque novel takes its name from the Spanish picaro, a rogue or vagabond. Born in sixteenth-century Spain with Lazarillo de Tormes and naturalised in England through translations and Lesage's Gil Blas (1715), it is the novel of a low-born hero who survives by his wits and whose adventures carry him through every rank of society.

Its features are well marked. First, the hero is a rogue, not a gentleman — a foundling, a thief, an adventurer — whose morality is flexible and whose charm lies in resilience. Second, the structure is episodic: a journey, usually on foot or by coach, from inn to town to country house, each stop a self-contained adventure. Third, it offers a panoramic satire of society, because the rogue meets judges, clergymen, doctors, innkeepers and fine ladies, and exposes them all. Fourth, its realism is of low life — food, money, lodgings, beatings — rendered with comic gusto. The plot is loose; the hero's progress holds it together. Fifth, the tone is comic even when the matter is serious: the rogue's survival instinct turns hardship into farce, and the reader's laughter does the moral work that preaching could not.

Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) is the great English example. Tom, a foundling of generous impulses and uncertain birth, is expelled from Paradise Hall and takes the road to London; on the way he falls in with soldiers, innkeepers, the philosopher Square and the hypocrite Blifil, and every episode satirises a different human folly. Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) shows the darker, criminal side of the same form. Unlike the epistolary novel (Pamela), which looks inward through letters, and unlike the bildungsroman, which traces inward growth, the picaresque looks outward: it is a camera moving through society, and its rogue is the lens.

Finally, the form's moral ambiguity is its point. The rogue is neither hero nor villain; the reader laughs with him while the satire works around him. Fielding called Tom Jones a 'comic epic in prose,' and the epic ambition is real: like an epic, the picaresque surveys a whole world, but its world is the inn-yard and the high road rather than the battlefield. Smollett's Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker carried the same machinery into the mid-century, proving how durable the picaresque engine was. When the novel later turned inward, it kept the picaresque's gifts — the journey structure, the social panorama, the survivor-hero — and that is the form's lasting legacy to English fiction.

Gray's Elegy is remembered for its thought, but it persuades through its music: nearly every stage of the meditation is carried by sound. The poem opens with a bell. "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day" does three things at once — it tells the hour, it puns on "knell," the bell of the dead, so that the day itself dies, and it sets the slow, tolling rhythm that the whole poem will keep. Sound here is not ornament; it is argument.

Follow the ear through the poem. After the bell come the lowing herd winding "slowly o'er the lea" — long vowels and liquid consonants make the line walk slowly — and the plowman who "plods," a word that trudges. In the churchyard the sounds thin out: the owl complains to the moon, the beetle wheels his "droning flight," sounds that belong to desolation. Against these Gray sets the sounds of remembered life — "the blazing hearth," children lisping, the cock's "shrill clarion." The contrast is the poem's pathos in miniature: the living world was noisy and warm; the dead are silent.

The stanza form serves this music. The Elegy is written in heroic quatrains rhyming abab, the steadiest of English measures, and Gray fills them with balanced phrases and alliteration ("rude forefathers," "mattock," "storied urn"). The regularity is Neo-Classical restraint; the feeling poured into it is Romantic. Even the famous moral stanzas are built on sound-echoes: "paths of glory" against "the short and simple annals of the poor" works because the antithesis is heard before it is understood.

The epitaph that closes the poem is the final musical act. Its quiet, plain diction — "A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown" — is deliberately unadorned after so much ceremony, like speech after music. The speaker, who began listening to a bell, ends asking to be remembered in words as simple as the sounds he first described. That arc, from knell to epitaph, is why the Elegy is called musical: its meaning about mortality and obscurity is not stated and then decorated, but sounded out, line by line, from the first bell to the last stone.

Wordsworth's 'The World Is Too Much with Us' (written c. 1802) is a Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet: fourteen lines divided into an octave (eight lines) rhyming ABBAABBA and a sestet (six lines) rhyming CDECDE, with the 'volta,' or turn of thought, at line 9.

The octave states the problem. 'The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers' — the repeated commercial verbs and the long-drawn 'sordid boon' diagnose a spiritual bankruptcy: we have 'given our hearts away.' The sea baring 'her bosom to the moon' and the winds 'up-gathered now like sleeping flowers' present a Nature full of beauty and power, but 'for this, for everything, we are out of tune' — the musical metaphor completes the charge that modern man has lost harmony with the world. Note the daring of 'sordid boon': a boon is a gift, and calling our bargain with the world both sordid and a gift compresses the whole indictment into two words — the sonnet's compression at work.

Then comes the volta: 'It moves us not. — Great God! I'd rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn.' The blunt 'It moves us not' closes the indictment; the exclamation pivots the poem from complaint to longing. The turn is the sonnet's engine: eight lines of bondage, then a wrench toward release.

The sestet develops the alternative. Standing on a 'pleasant lea,' the speaker imagines 'glimpses that would make me less forlorn': 'Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.' The pagan gods — Proteus, Triton — embody a worldview in which Nature is alive and divine, the opposite of the dead commercial world of the octave.

The form thus carries the meaning. The octave's tight ABBAABBA enclosure mirrors man's trapped condition; the sestet's CDECDE loosens into vision. Finally, the choice matters historically: the sonnet had been the vehicle of love poetry, and Wordsworth, like Milton before him, turns it to moral protest. That is the quiet audacity of the poem — an old, courtly form made to carry a Romantic's anger at the modern world, and the form holds it perfectly. The final image answers the octave's music: the poem that begins 'out of tune' ends on Triton's 'wreathed horn' — the sestet literally re-tunes the poem.

'Elia' is the pen-name under which Charles Lamb published his essays in the London Magazine from 1820, collected as Essays of Elia (1823). But Elia is more than a signature: he is a persona — a half-invented character through whom Lamb writes. The name itself was borrowed from a fellow clerk at the South Sea House — a typical Elia touch, turning a trivial office memory into a literary mask.

Elia is a clerk in the East India House, bookish, gentle, self-deprecating, fond of old books, old friends and old customs. He confesses small follies, sentimentalises, digresses, and apologises for digressing. The persona lets Lamb be intimate without being exposed: the 'I' of the essays is warmer, more whimsical and more vulnerable than a formal essayist could afford to be.

In 'Dream-Children; A Reverie' the device is worked to perfection. Elia appears as a bachelor uncle telling stories to two imagined children, Alice and John, who climb on his knees. He tells them of their 'great-grandmother Field,' of his brother John, and of Alice Winterton — behind whom readers sense Lamb's real lost love, Ann Simmons, and his real brother. The dream-frame excuses the fancy: because it is a reverie, Elia can blend memory and invention without apology.

The persona's masterstroke is the ending. When the children fade, Elia wakes to his solitary bachelor reality: 'we are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams.' The pathos lands precisely because Elia has charmed us — the mask of the genial storyteller drops, and we see the lonely man beneath. Had Lamb written this as himself, it would be mere confession; as Elia, it is art.

So Elia is Lamb's great invention: the familiar essayist as a character. Through him, humour and pathos can coexist, autobiography can wear the clothes of fiction, and the essay becomes the mind's private diary made public. Critics have noted that Elia solved the periodical essay's old problem — how to be familiar without being trivial. Steele's Mr Spectator observed society; Elia observes himself, and finds society within. The dream-children device also solves a technical problem: it lets Lamb write dialogue, narrative and reverie in a single essay, the very mixture the familiar essay needed. That is why 'Dream-Children' is anthologised wherever the personal essay is taught: it is the form's locus classicus, the piece in which the mask, the memory and the dream become indistinguishable. Every personal essayist since writes in Elia's shadow.

Surdas is the crown of the Ashtachhap, the eight poet-singers of the Pushtimarga — the 'path of grace' founded by Vallabhacharya in the sixteenth century. Pushtimarga teaches that salvation comes not by effort but by pushti, God's freely given grace, and that man's answer is seva, loving service to Krishna, offered in the intimate moods (bhavas) of Vraja — above all vatsalya, parental love. Surdas is this theology made song.

In 'Maiya mori' (1) the theology wears a child's face. Little Krishna is accused of stealing butter; with wide-eyed innocence he defends himself — 'Mother, I didn't!' — and Yashoda, half-scolding, half-melting, takes him in her arms. This is pushti in action: the infinite God lets Himself be accused, scolded and embraced. Grace descends precisely because love dares to treat God as a child, and Yashoda's motherly seva — feeding, scolding, forgiving — becomes the highest worship.

'Maiya mohe' (2) deepens the same truth through doubt. When Daau taunts Krishna that he is not really Yashoda's son, the child runs weeping to his mother, and her fierce, tender reassurance restores his world. Here grace answers the oldest human fear — 'am I truly loved?' — and seva is Yashoda's arms closing round him. The God who needs comforting is the Pushtimarga's God: grace is not distant favour but intimate belonging.

'Kat tu suman' (22) shows seva in separation. In the Bhramaragita situation Krishna sends a messenger — the bee — with words of wisdom to the gopis, and they answer with love's logic: remembrance is service. To miss Krishna, to talk to His bee, to keep His memory alive in Vraja's dust — that is seva when presence is denied.

So in all three poems Surdas proves the Pushtimarga's central claim: grace comes to those who love God intimately enough to scold Him, doubt Him and miss Him. Scholars note how deliberately Surdas inverts the usual devotional hierarchy: it is not the devotee who must become worthy of God, but God who becomes small enough to be loved — the Pushtimarga's grace made visible in a butter-smeared face. This is also why the Ashtachhap poets sang rather than preached: pushti cannot be argued, only enacted, and Surdas's padas enact it in every line. Theology becomes lullaby — and that is why Surdas endures.