1.

Lake poet, any of the English poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert
Commented [W1]:
Southey, who lived in the English Lake District of Cumberland and Westmorland (now Cumbria) at the
Dulce Et Decorum Est
beginning of the 19th century. They were first described derogatorily as the Lake school by Francis In October 1917 Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from
(afterward Lord) Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review in August 1817, and the description Lakers was also Craiglockhart, "Here is a gas poem, done yesterday..the famous
Latin tag (from Horace, Odes) means of course it is sweet and meet
used in a similar spirit by the poet Lord Byron. These names confusingly group Wordsworth and to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!"
While the earliest surviving draft is dated 8th October 1917, a few
Coleridge together with Southey, who did not subscribe in his views or work to their theories of poetry. months later, at Scarborough or Ripon, he revised it.
The title is ironic. The intention was not so much to induce pity as to
2. Wilfred Owen, (born March 18, 1893, Oswestry, Shropshire, Englandkilled in action November 4, shock, especially civilians at home who believed war was noble and
glorious.
1918, France) English poet noted for his anger at the cruelty and waste of war and his pity for its victims. It comprises four unequal stanzas, the first two in sonnet form, the
last two looser in structure.
He also is significant for his technical experiments in assonance, which were particularly influential in the Stanza 1 sets the scene. The soldiers are limping back from the
1930s. Front, an appalling picture expressed through simile and metaphor.
Such is the men's wretched condition that they can be compared to
old beggars, hags (ugly old women). Yet they were young! Barely
Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and matriculated at the University of London; after an awake from lack of sleep, their once smart uniforms resembling
sacks, they cannot walk straight as their blood-caked feet try to
illness in 1913 he lived in France. He had already begun to write and, while working as a tutor near negotiate the mud. "Blood-shod" seems a dehumanising image- we
think of horses shod not men. Physically and mentally they are
Bordeaux, was preparing a book of Minor Poemsin Minor Keysby a Minor, which was never crushed. Owen uses words that set up ripples of meaning beyond the
published. These early poems are consciously modeled on those of John Keats; often ambitious, they literal and exploit ambiguity. "Distant rest" - what kind of rest? For
some the permanent kind? "Coughing" finds an echo later in the
show enjoyment of poetry as a craft. poem, while gas shells dropping softly suggests a menace stealthy
and devilish. Note how in line 8 the rhythm slackens as a
particularly dramatic moment approaches.
In 1915 Owen enlisted in the British army. The experience of trench warfare brought him to rapid In Stanza 2, the action focuses on one man who couldn't get his gas
maturity; the poems written after January 1917 are full of anger at wars brutality, an elegiac pity for helmet on in time. Following the officer's command in line 9,
"ecstasy" (of fumbling) seems a strange word until we realise that
those who die as cattle, and a rare descriptive power. In June 1917 he was wounded and sent home. medically it means a morbid state of nerves in which the mind is
occupied solely with one idea. Lines 12-14 consist of a powerful
While in a hospital near Edinburgh he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the underwater metaphor, with succumbing to poison gas being
war and who became interested in his work. Reading Sassoons poems and discussing his work with compared to drowning. "Floundering" is what they're already doing
(in the mud) but here it takes on more gruesome implications as
Sassoon revolutionized Owens style and his conception of poetry. Despite the plans of well-wishers to Owen introduces himself into the action through witnessing his
comrade dying in agony. ...
find him a staff job, he returned to France in August 1918 as a company commander. He was awarded
Commented [W2]: "But I was dead": Sassoon and Graves on
the Military Cross in October and was killed a week before Armistice Day. life after death.
Link/Page Citation
ON 20 July 1916, Captain Robert Graves--four days shy of his
Published posthumously by Sassoon, Owens single volume of poems contains the most poignant English twenty-first birthday but already a published poet--was severely
poetry of the war. His collected poems, edited by C. Day-Lewis, were published in 1964; his collected wounded during fighting at Bazentin-le-Petit on the Somme. With a
shell fragment having pierced his right lung and eight wounds in
letters, edited by his younger brother Harold Owen and John Bell, were published in 1967. total (Seymour-Smith 49), the battalion doctor declared that he had
no chance of surviving. Thus, after the unconscious Graves was
transported to the nearest aid station, his commanding officer in the

Strange Meeting
Royal Welch Fusiliers added his name to the casualty list as having
died of wounds. When Graves's friend and fellow poet Second
Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon enquired after him, both the battalion
colonel and adjutant confirmed the sad news. Sassoon's response
was to write an elegy, "To His Dead Body."
A twenty-first birthday present, the complete poetical works of Shelley from his brothers and
sister, was to provide the title for Wilfred Owen's most problematical poem. In Shelley's "The But, of course, this was not the end of the story, for shortly after the
poem was written, Sassoon received a telegram from publisher
Revolt of Islam" we read: Gone forth whom no strange meeting did befall. Edward Marsh informing him that Graves was in fact alive and
remarkably well after being invalided to a London hospital. After an
exchange of jubilant and affectionate letters, Graves and Sassoon
STRANGE MEETING was written in the spring or early summer of 1918 and stands in the contrived to spend two weeks' leave together at Graves's cottage in...
forefront of Owen's achievements. Siegfried Sassoon called it Owen's passport to immortality. Commented [W3]: The Soldier: Rupert Brooke - Summary
On the poet's memorial in the grounds of Shrewsbury Abbey is engraved the famous quotation: I and Critical Analysis
The Soldier is a sonnet in which Brooke glorifies England during the
am the enemy you killed, my friend which words continue to re-echo down the years. First World War. He speaks in the guise of an English soldier as he
is leaving home to go to war. The poem represents the patriotic
ideals that characterized pre-war England. It portrays death for ones
country as a noble end and England as the noblest country for which
to die. ...
Inspired probably by Sassoon's "The Rear Guard" and based on an earlier draft of Owen's
"Earth's Wheels", STRANGE MEETING recounts a dramatic meeting between two dead
soldiers who had fought on opposing sides. No longer enemies they find it possible to see
beyond conflict and hatred in a shared awareness of "the truth untold" and the need for the poet
to proclaim that truth in the face of a world set to "trek from progress". In the words of Owen's
famous Preface, "All a poet can do today is warn".

The opening line beginning "It seemed that" ushers into a dream-like world in which a
meeting for the two protagonists is for us a meeting with ambiguity. "I knew we stood in hell,"
says the first speaker. A strange meeting in an even stranger meeting place for what will become
an act of grace. A strange meeting and an even stranger fate for ones who are war's innocent
victims.

Who is the first speaker? We might assume it is Owen himself, the first-person narrator, yet the
second speaker is one who delivers the message-Owen's message. There will be further
ambiguities yet.

Structurally the poem comprises 44 lines of iambic pentameter divided into three irregular
stanzas which do not correspond exactly with the poem's natural constituents. The pararhymed
couplets, as with the metre, are subject to minor variations.

In lines 1 - 3 Owen sets the scene. Holes, caverns, tunnels - these form a recurring image in his
mind and find their way into the poems. "Titanic Wars" imply not just Owen's war but conflicts
throughout history on a gigantic scale. At the outset we are made to realise that past and present
interfuse as, later in the poem, will the future also. This is Owen reaching out to an altogether
new dimension.

Lines 4 - 10. "Encumbered" by their uniform and kit but also they carry with them the burden of
suffering. "Sleepers". More ambiguity here, for although one man springs up and lifts his hands
his smile is dead while others are "fast in thought or death.." So often in this poem we find
ourselves on the edge of certainty. The two men had already shared one terrible, intimate
moment - the moment of killing. Now comes recognition. "Piteous" - not pitying of course but
calling for pity which explains why ambiguity attaches to why the distressful hands are lifted.

Lines 11 - 13. Those "thousand pains" are the legacy of war inflicted in life not after-life. In this
hell there is relief, "no blood", "no guns thumped or.made moan". War - hell. In what relation
to each other do they stand?

Line 14. The narrator introduces their one-sided dialogue with a paradox - "strange friend".

Lines 15 -29. Whereupon there ensues a homily on the true purpose of poetry. Whatever
hopelessness of the "undone years" it is a purpose they both share.

Whatever hope is yours Was my life also; A shared purpose. A shared identity also? Is the
doppelganger theory valid here? Yes or no the "hunting wild after the wildest beauty in the
world" corresponds to Owen's high-sounding quest for beauty and truth which in former days he
believed he had inherited from Keats and Shelley but which was really a substitute for thought
and experiences he had not yet undergone. A continuation along these lines might have achieved
something but not what was to be the core of his short life's work: The pity of war, the pity
distilled.

Distilled. The pure essence. Pity without any emotional by-products. Meanwhile the poet-
prophet faces a probable future when a world shattered by war is accepted as the norm and
endures a further regression into "this retreating world" - a frightening, and accurate, prediction
of events.

Lines 30-39. Here the two strands - the aim and rationale of poetry and the predicted course of
events come together in a movingly expressed blueprint for the cleansing of the human spirit. As
poetry's disciple Owen is able to claim the courage, mystery, wisdom, mastery to combat the
march from progress and finally when the retreat can go no further, "when much blood had
clogged their chariot wheels", to bring life-giving water from "sweet wells" and reveal "truths
that lie too deep for taint". To this end, says Owen, I would have poured my spirit without stint.

Line 40 - 44. "My friend". Such a contrast to the former bitterly ironic "my friend" of "Dulce et
decorum est". The conjunction of "enemy" and "friend" is another paradox but without a sense of
jarring. This final section brings a change of tone with nothing high-flown but plain, mostly one-
syllable language, the simplicity of fulfilment. Paradoxically again, blindness is lifted in the
tunnel's dark.

"I parried", says the man killed. "As if to bless", had said previously the man who killed him.
STRANGE MEETING brings with it many entanglements that make a final judgement
improbable, perhaps inappropriate.

Does "Let us sleep now.." suggest a work unfinished? Maybe. At least the important message
is clear, that mankind must seek reconciliation and "the truth untold" embrace pity and the
greater love

3. Coral island Omroos

The Odyssey Lord of he flies

The Mahabharta The Great Indian Novel

Jane Eyre Wide Sargasso Sea

/Jean Rhys' late, literary masterpiece "*Wide Sargasso Sea*" was

inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush,

beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive,

colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young

their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her.

Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging,

Antoinette is driven towards madness. /

/An enduringly popular classic of childrens fiction, *The Coral Island* tells the story of three boys
stranded on a seemingly idyllic desert island. Thoughtful Ralph, clever, brave Jack and mischievous
Peterkin

soon find, however, that their new home has more than a few surprises in

store! Wayne Foresters energetic reading brings this classic adventure

vividly to life. The Coral Island inspired a whole genre of adventure

literature, influencing Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island and

William Goldings Lord of the Flies./

/*The Great Indian Novel*, as author Dr. Shashi Tharoor has mentioned,

takes its title not from the author's estimate of its contents but in

deference to its primary source of inspiration, the ancient epic the

Mahabharata. In Sanskrit, Maha means great and Bharata means India./

/*Omeros* is a 1990 epic poem by Nobel Prize-winning author Derek

Walcott The epic is set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Although

its name is Omeros (Homer in Greek) it has just a minor touch of Homer's

Iliad and Odyssey. The narrative of Omeros is multilayered. Walcott

focuses on no single character; rather, many critics have taken the

"hero" of Omeros to be the island of St. Lucia itself. The narrative

draws heavily on the legacy of the Homeric epics; Book One even opens
with an invocation of the Greek poet, who is likened to the blind

character, Seven Seas. However, while many characters within the epic

derive their appellations from Homeric characters, this is the only

absolute correlation; the themes are Homeric in inspiration, but the

story does not imitatively follow the plot of either the Iliad or the

Odyssey./